Third-World Sweatshops Producing Virtual Goods 348
prostoalex writes "MSNBC points to the court cases spawned by virtual worlds. Recently, Tom Loftus notes, a virtual island in one of the MMORPGs sold for $30,000, enough to attract commercial attention. Apparently, some businesses create third-world sweatshops, where low-wage laborers are being paid to play and accumulate enough virtual merchandise, so that an eBay sale of it makes the operation profitable. 'One such business, Blacksnow Interactive, actually sued a virtual world's creator in 2002 for attempting to crack down on the practice. The first of its kind to center on virtual goods, the case was eventually dropped,' MSNBC says." Update: 02/06 18:59 GMT by Z : We ran a story about the sale of the virtual island, and Terra Nova has a lot of commentary on the sale of virtual goods. For comparison, the economic impact of this phenomenon is roughly equal to that of Namibia or Macedonia.
meanwhile... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:5, Insightful)
BBC had a report about it recently, a dozen workers stuffed into a small, dark room with computers and only a sleeping bag may sound LAN party style to us - but we can leave the party anytime, they can't
Economics Still holds even in virtual reality (Score:1, Insightful)
Capitalism rules (Score:3, Insightful)
Ya gotta love it, where there's a dollar to be had somebody will figure out a way.
Re:Virtual Goods? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I feel soooo sorry for them (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's "Work 8-10 hours a day with a couple of breaks and an hour off for lunch, and a wage that a person can afford to live on (assuming third world country costs, this might be $5/day or so)", then yes, your sarcasm is met.
If it's "work eighteen hours with no breaks, no air conditioning and if you get carpel tunnel that's your own damned fault, and if you miss a quote you miss pay for the day (which might be just enough to buy food at $0.25/day) , and we employ the twelve year olds who's other choice is prostitution so the constant threat of 'perform or die' is hanging over their head 24/7" - then your sarcasm might not be met.
It's all in the scale.
Re:... what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:... what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its nothing about finishing the game quicker, its about not having to spend 20$ per months for ages until after doutzends of wasted hours you charactar is finally strong enough to kill stuff other than rats or rabbits....
BTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Virtual Goods? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:2, Insightful)
From my memory, I don't recall 'sweatshop' meaning 'forced labor' and the employees were free to go at anytime.
This makes it exactly like a LAN party, except those people get paid.
Re:Virtual Goods? (Score:2, Insightful)
And how is this different from the real world? (Score:5, Insightful)
Value and money doesn't exist in the physical world. It's a contrived social concept that we humans have created. It's an illusion. So if it's "virtual" in the real world, seems perfectly logical that it can be virtual in the virtual world, too.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Would they be willing to do it if they got paid 1 rupee an hour?
I guess the willingness to play for money goes away very quickly when you have to reach a certain target each day , because otherwise you would be risking losing the money that goes towards feeding you/your family.
Just because it's not physical work, doesn't mean you can't exploit people.
Re:Video game addiction is becoming an epidemic. (Score:2, Insightful)
online shopping sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweatshop labor is more of a commentary on the rest of the local economy. People don't quit, though they are "free" to, because there's no alternative labor available. That's almost always because there's no capital available to entrepreneurs, no competition among labor buyers, no real value applied to their labor. All of which is usually due to some political repression, a command economy, company towns - all the conditions we had in the US before labor organized in the 20th Century do protect our rights to work in human conditions. Which is why it sounds familiar to Slashdotters slaving away in cubefarms, wishing we could get paid to play games instead of write Java DB reporting systems.
Re:Economics Still holds even in virtual reality (Score:1, Insightful)
These guys pay people in korea and china in sweatshop conditions to do nothing but 'farm' money and items from online games. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that while they are doing this to make a profit they are:
A) Ruining the in-game economies for the players who play for fun.
B) Selling intellectual property that does not belong to them.
C) Hogging resources and areas and depriving real customers of what they paid for.
Most MMO's these days are coming with EULAs that state that it is against the terms of service to sell any ingame items or accounts. I neither buy accounts or ingame goods/money, I believe that these people are breaking the TOS of these games. Accounts should be transferrable, in my opinion, because they're what you pay for when you buy the game. Having said that, when you play the games, you agreed to the terms and conditions expressed by the owners of the games.
The sweatshop farmers work 8-10 hours doing nothing but killing mosters to collect their gold. While others in comments might say they're getting paid to play the game, they most certainly are not. If you want to see what these guys can do to a game, go and look at Lineage 2. Sweatshop farmers ruined that game. And they will ruin any other game where this type of behavior is not combatted pro-actively.
And as to how they ruin a game it goes something like this:
1. Sweat shops farm the gold, stopping players from legitimately adventuring in the areas they occupy.
2. They sell humongous amounts of gold on eBay and websites like IGN.
3. All the gold that is being farmed and not put back into gold sinks starts inflating the cost of items.
4. Something that once cost 1 gold, now sells for 100 because people have too much money.
5. New players can not afford the items they need, forcing them out of the game.
These poor little koreans who need to earn their 3 dollars a week are ruining games people PAY TO PLAY. I find it unacceptable. And so do the other players of MMOs. Whether some third world pissants get paid where they otherwise wouldn't is immaterial.
Re:Video game addiction is becoming an epidemic. (Score:3, Insightful)
People treating imaginary stuff as if it were "real" is a normal thing. Actually, our entire society is based on the fact that people do that.
Consider these simple examples just to get you started:
Laws
Borders
The concept of "owning" things
I can very well imagine a number of reasons why it can be considered sickening to trade everquest characters for that much money. For example you might argue that it is decadent. But the fact that everquest characters are not "real" is nothing special.
Re:So, why bother playing this shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have sat and watched someone spend half an hour stacking planes on an aircraft carrier deck so no one could take off (Coral sea,BF1942) before an admin joined and kicked him. What kind of mentality must a person have to waste half an hour doing something incredibly dull and repetitive (enter plane, taxi forwards, exit plane, wait for new plane to spawn, repeat) purely to piss off people he doesn't know who are trying to have fun?
It basically means only servers with admins are worth playing on. I have about five servers in my favourites list that I know have good admins and decent auto-kick settings. I occasionally play on other servers, but I always regret it.
Re:Virtual Goods? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I download an MP3, and the company that sold it for me tanks, I can still listen to it (in theory, anyways, DRM tries to prevent that), I can burn it to CD, etc.
With these goods, they exists solely as data on a server owned by another company. You can't take them with you, you can't make any use of said items outside their virtual world. If they pull the plug on the server, you're SoL - no more items.
Time has a value (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me also pre-empt the replies that will say playing a game should be about enjoying the experience and the ride, not a power-trip toward getting an uber character and the ultimate foozle power: I agree. I'd never buy something in an MMORPG. That doesn't mean time doesn't have value and that buyers are necessarily evil.
Some MMORPGs recognize that this is bad for their game and take steps to prevent it. World of Warcraft, as far as I know, will "bind" some items to whoever picks them up. Technical solutions do exist, but as long as the economic conditions described in my first paragraph exist, I expect people will have a power incentive to get around the restrictions.
Re:Virtual Goods? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Fair trade" means something here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sweatshop factory or no factory" is a false dichotomy.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're outright against all labor laws, I'm sorry, but you are a horribly misguided individual who needs to study history and see how those labor laws changed life. And, if you aren't against labor laws, you really need to revise your position.
It doesn't work both ways.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:2, Insightful)
The point that the article makes is that people are indeed put into a sweatshop environment for virtual games, thereby insinuating forced labor, minimum wage, and horrible working conditions.
Do you really think Nike would have sweatshops in Asia if they had to provide dental insurance and health care? The whole point is that they can make a greater profit if they export the work to an area where they know they only have to pay a very small amount of money.
Re:this is like something out of an SF novel (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not strange, really. Granted, most consumerism is focused around the sale of tangible goods.
The sale of virtual goods exists primarily to provide convenience to the buyer. The buyer could spend several hours each day earning enough gold points to buy that magic armour plate of hardening, but some players don't have that luxury.
This ultimately comes down to the sale of non-tangible goods for entertainment purposes, which itself is quite popular (pay-per view events, etc.)
Re:And how is this different from the real world? (Score:3, Insightful)
My bank account is represented by a bunch of 1s and 0s in some database in the sky. There's no real paper behind it. It's virtual. Now, if someone wiped out the 1s to 0s, I'd have grounds to sue.
Your bank account is backed by the FDIC and, therefore, the US Govt. Your RPG profile is backed by nothing at all. If it gets wiped out, they may restore it, but don't hold your breath.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:4, Insightful)
Before you ask, no this isn't legal in most (if not all) of the countries where it happens, but it still happens. Often the sweatshop workers are illegal immigrants, may not speak the local language and sure as hell don't know local laws and customs that protect them from this kind of abuse. Since these shops are being run by criminals the penalty for quitting before your debt is paid tends to involve killing the worker and/or their family, not a lawsuit. These kinds of shops are flourishing all over Asia (along with their far more destructive cousins in the sex trade, which prey on the same type of desperation as the sweatshops) and can still be found in the US and Western Europe still.
I'm guessing what you're thinking of as a sweat shop is really just your standard, legal, offshored manufactoring plant in developing countries. These places are for the most part above board and subject to government oversite and yes the workers can quit when they want. But that's why they aren't sweatshops.
As far as these so-called MMPORG sweatshops are concerned, I suspect they more closely resemble offshored factories (or call centers) than actual sweatshops.
These are not sweatshops (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think the production of these virtual goods can be compared to sweatshops. The company mentioned in the article, Blacksnow Interactive, ran two sites, camelotexchange.com and aoexchange.com, since defunct, which operated as an auctionhouse for gamers for "Dark Ages of Camelot" and "Anarchy Online" to trade goods. The virtual goods sold and produced were made by gamers themselves.
The fact is, the players who can put in long hours and succeed well at these multi-player games to produce these virtual goods are those with the best gear, broadband connection, and free time. I.e., affluent middle-class teenagers from the developed world.
The concept of a third-world "sweatshop" producing these goods is ridiculous. Why would someone spend a large amount of money buying expensive gear and paying for difficult to obtain broadband connections in the 3rd world, where they'd be experiencing substantial delay lags with the servers running online games in the U.S.? He can get the same goods from idle american teenagers looking for a little extra cash who already have all the latest gear, without spending any money himself.
Saying that suburban north-american teenagers playing video-games work in a "sweatshop" does a grave injustice to the millions of underage children who are forced to work in actual sweatshops in degrading conditions for little pay. A better description of the people running these businesses is that they are virtual brokers, handling transactions between gamers.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it so much to demand that if you want that kind of service, you pay for it? Everyone likes to bitch about crappy, incomprehsible foreign support and then they go off and buy more $500 Dell crap PCs and $60 routers and everything else from Wal-mart (which they incessantly bitch about too for other reasons).
If you want competent domestic support then either you convince them to work for a third-world wage or you pay their salary. Take your pick.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where's the signup sheet for this "sweatshop"? I'm sure there's plenty of Slashdot readers that would gleefully sign up
Are you serious? Plenty of relatively affluent people tend their own gardens, too...how many do you think would want to work as farm laborers in some third-world country? Lots of people sew as a hobby...you think many of them want to head off to work in a clothing factory?
When you play these games, you do fun things, like quests, and exploring the world, and figuring out how to take on tougher and tougher monsters (and players for PvP games).
The people farming items and money for sale are not doing that. They are just sitting in one spot, killing easy things over and over and over. That's tedium, no fun.
One of the biggest criticisms of Everquest, and one of the things that most games since EQ1 have tried to fix, was that sometimes you'd have to do just that when playing. For example, to get a rare high level monster to spawn, you might have to kill placeholdes, which were low level and no challenge, for hours or even days. or to get faction to go someplace, you might have to kill 2000 trivial monsters. People hated doing this.
I Live in China... (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in Hangzhou on behalf of a small manufacturing outsourcing company [chinaforge.com]. Conditions for workers here in China are much better now than in the past, but there are still problems. Perhaps one of the biggest hardships for them is that most buildings in Hangzhou are not heated in winter, and it gets fairly cold here, dropping below freezing outside several times per month. Often even areas where the white collar workers are located have no heat, and sometimes I think they have it the worst, because at least the unskilled laborers are constantly moving instead of sitting motionless at a computer.
The point is, in a developing country some hardships can not be avoided. Unfortunately China's thirst for electricity is much more than can be supplied, thus it is not feasible to heat most buildings here in the south during winter. As it is, there are frequent scheduled blackouts in many areas to solve the problem that there is not enough electricity to go around. But they can't just all stop work and wait for spring. Sometimes I think people don't realize this when they get mad about working conditions in developing countries. Yes conditions are less than ideal in China, but they are improving, and it isn't possible for everyone to just quit working and wait for conditions to become like they are in the West. Change has to happen gradually and economic growth is the only way that it is going to happen at all.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:2, Insightful)
We don't think that they're stupid. We just want to talk to people who understand what we say and that we can understand. I worked at a call center and I TOOK calls from people who didn't speak english well. At the same time, my employer had a call center in Asia and many times people would call and be relieved that they got to speak to an American this time.
Offshore call centers may cost less money to run, but you will lose fewer customers (assuming that your target market is the USA) because of language barriers.
LK
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Prove it. The only proven vote fraud is being done by Democrats (remember "Votes for Cigarettes 2000" [freelancestar.com] for homeless people and tire slashing by Democrat-paid thugs [go.com] in 2004 in Wisconsin?).
Let's not even talk about Catherine Harris, who outright stole the election by selectively obeying the intent of the law.
Prove it. (And its spelled "Katherine". Try to keep up.)
This is now a one party dictatorship, using the law as window dressing to get anything it wants and destroy whomever it hates.
Prove it.
accepted by the Katie Courics of the news media almost immediately.
You honestly believe that Katie "... they haven't been able to confirm reports [Saddam] was taken to Tikrit, and then Mosul, and then hopefully Syria" [globalsecurity.org] Couric is right wing? ROFL!!!!
Snip remainder of Michael Moore-inspired paranoia. That by the way would be the corpulent propagandist Michael Moore:
- Who sends his own daughter to private school [guardian.co.uk].
- Who unsuccessfully pressured [salon.com] the writing staff of his 'TV Nation' not to join the Writer's Guild.
- Whose bodyguard got arrested [msn.com] for carrying an unlicensed firearm at JFK airport. A FIREARM? For the writer/author of "Bowling for Columbine"? No more tinfoil for you - you've obviously ODed on the stuff.
- Whose own hometown high school refuses [ninemsn.com.au] to induct him into its Hall of Fame.
YOU grow up and stop whining. Bush won, Kerry lost. Get over it.
Re:Sweatshop? (Score:3, Insightful)
And why does everyone do it? Why does it make the shareholders cream in their pants? Because if they ship off the support dept they can sell products cheaper, and your average consumer will buy the cheapest thing available. If people cared enough about shitty foreign support and lost jobs to stop buying those products, those shareholders wouldn't be too thrilled about the CEO shipping support to India. Those corporate profits don't just appear out of thin air - they come from the pockets of you and me.
Support does not make the product because too many people don't care.
Not Exactly Fun (Score:4, Insightful)
That is not true.
These people are being paid to, in videogame speek, "pharm" items and money. To "pharm" something is to mindlessly acquire the item(s) at the expense of any other activity (IE: fun). For example, in World of Warcraft to "pharm" gold (currency) at level 60 for most of these workers means staying in one zone and killing the same type of enemy ("mob") for hours upon hours. Imagine killing the exact same bird in a game for literally 8 hours.
Find bird.
Kill bird.
Loot bird.
Repeat for six hours.
These people are not grouping, questing, raiding, interacting with other players, or doing any of the other activities that make these games fun. They are doing the digital equivalent of screwing bolt #3572 into a car chassis on an assembly line.
Also, beyond that, I have so far seen no mention of the damage these currency sellers do to in-game economies. These companies obliterate game economies with their actions.
For example, Bob wants Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying, but Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying costs 5000 gold, and Bob only has 10 gold. So, Bob buys 10,000 gold online. Now Bob is super-rich by in-game standards and decides that he wants Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying *right now*. So, what does bob do? He offers 10,000 gold to the first person he sees with the item just because he can. The seller, along with every else, realizes he can start selling Super-Item-of-Monster-Slaying for twice the previous price and people will still pay for it.
This begins a downward spiral for the server's economy. People cannot pay the newly doubled price, so some of them pay real money for game money and pay even MORE. The price for goods rapidly increases, and the value of the currency plummets. In the end, players who want to buy anything in-game are forced to pay for fake cash or spend their own hours pharming the money for the horrifically overpriced goods.
Think this is too extreme and won't happen? Check out the Bazaar in Everquest 1; it already has happened.
The economy is already broken (Score:3, Insightful)
Ruins the game's economy? Sorry, it's already broken.
Monsters spawn continuously from an undepleteable source, and they carry gold (currency). This means new currency is being continually minted.
What happens when a government mints new money continuously? Ridiculous inflation and economic collapse.
That is exactly what happens in all of these games. The amount of currency available in-game is always increasing. These games are starting with a broken economy, and that won't change until some game designers take an economics class.
Sorry for interrupting... (Score:2, Insightful)