#7: After the Gold Farm
Earlier this week I watched Second Skin, a 2008 documentary that follows several hardcore gamers who play World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs, providing a glimpse into their alternate online lives and the consequent enhancement or destruction of their inseparable primary lives. One of the film's most interesting moments is its explanation of "gold farming" in online role-playing games, the phenomenon in which virtual items that are useful within the games acquire real monetary value due to the games' popularity, thus spawning micro-industries of full-time gamers who joylessly harvest the items for a wage, often in sweatshop-like conditions outside of the United States.
On digital platforms of all kinds, from EverQuest to Facebook, being a user often means being a worker, and gold farming is an extreme case that exposes that relationship. The more powerful the platform, as measured by the sum of invested human attention and emotion, the less of a game that platform is, even when it looks like a game—and most of the internet does *look* like a game.
Technology has always promised to save labor by automating and extending human capacity, and indeed it does, but while some of us now work longer hours than ever, others exchange that (often-vanished) commitment for more subtle forms of toil. The latter is so often done for free that getting paid to farm fake gold seems insulting when we witness it.
Reads:
American farmers have to jailbreak their John Deere tractors using Ukrainian firmware just to repair them outside of "authorized" shops
Urban growth in the US has reverted to its pre-2008-crash pattern: Sprawling suburban areas in the Sun Belt are gaining population; big dense cities are slowing down
"Phone Romeos" who try to meet women by randomly dialing wrong numbers, often using multiple burner phones, and sometimes successfully!
Until next time,
Drew