When I have the time, I enjoy playing World of Warcraft. It’s fun and mindless, and on occasion can be mindless fun. Does it get any better?

One of the more interesting facets of MMORPGs is that after enough time, and with a large enough player-base, in-game assets such as money and items somehow accrue real value. It’s almost decadent. There is no practical application for World of Warcraft, and there never will be.

Practical or not, somehow the effort involved in making and maintaining the game has translated into boatloads of money for a wide range of people. It almost gets me teary-eyed, the idea that ideas can still be so powerful. Because that’s what writing fiction is about, too: creating something that possesses worth, even though physically and materially the “thing” is quite literally worthless (we did stop binding books in gold and encrusting them with gems quite a long time ago, after all, and Son and Foe has no cover to encrust in the first place).

One of the more notorious groups of people who are riding the WoW cash cow all the way to the bank are farmers.

Farming in MMORPGs is the act of doing a simple set of repetitive actions in return for (usually small) rewards that stack in a significant manner. For example, I might decide one day to become an Artisan-class skinner in WoW, so I go to an area with the appropriate types of monsters and spend three or four hours doing nothing but fighting mobs (mobs are monsters), killing them, skinning their bodies, healing myself, and then repeating those actions. As I skin more and more mobs, my skill will slowly go up. It’s slow, and tedius, and boring: it’s farming.

Gold farming in particular is done by every player, as there are certain perks such as mounts that can only be purchased, for most classes, with gold, the in-game currency of choice. However, in some foreign countries there are businesses set up wherein people are hired to do nothing but farm in-game gold to resell to players for real-world money. Not only is the business lucrative enough to support the farmers themselves, it pays well enough to secure an internet connection, equipment, office space, and the salary of the business owner and/or manager(s). Which, quite frankly, is just weird.

In any case, this generic write-up of the situation is probably very boring to people who have been exposed to the idea already. This specific write-up, however, is anything but boring:

http://www.gameguidesonline.com/guides/articles/ggoarticleoctober05_01.asp

While gold farmers have a very poor reputation in-game, the article does an excellent job of not just humanizing them, but also exposing a fallacy that is one of the major sources of much of the resentment against gold farmers (the other two big sources are old-fashioned xenophobism towards anyone that speaks a different language, and Blizzard’s understandable irritation at not getting a cut of the money involved in these exchanges). While it’s common knowledge that gold farmers increase the supply and availability of gold in-game, thus stimulating excessive inflation, the author of that article argues persuasively that they also increase the supply of coveted items in-game (the number of items existent in the game at any one time is variable, just as is the amount of gold, and there is no upper limit on either). More importantly, the nature of most gold-farming setups insures that items are disposed of in the most innefficient manner possible: i.e., cheaply in terms of in-game currency, thus causing gold farmers to ultimately act as an anti-inflationary device, much as game mechanics such as item durability, soul-binding, the vendor system, and so forth.

Gold farming, FTW!

In any case, definitely read the article. It makes several other interesting observations, and does them in a clear, easy-to-read, entertaining manner. In fact, it almost reminded me of reading an ethnography or two in my old anthro class.

Your mileage may vary.