Gold Farming and Virtual Weapons
This is one of the better articles I’ve read about gold farming:
Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG [massively multiplayer online role-playing games]. They acquire (“farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.
They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they’ve harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get “real” money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.
This is a well-established practice in China, as well as the Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere, and is another example of how people are earning real money through the use of virtual worlds. And lest anyone think that the real life effects are negligible or insignificant, people have been murdered in disputes over virtual gaming assets.
People have been getting murdered over video games since Duck Hunt was the hot new s**t. And back then, there were absolutely no real-world gains to be fought over.
One of the cooks at my work does this for a living, I just found out about it a few months back…his medium is Worlds of Warcraft and his specialty is building up powerful characters and selling them on eBay. The time/money ratio makes no sense to me — it’s hundreds of hours to build a 70th-level character and they sell for $500 to $700 tops.
But the reality is: he’s addicted to video games and he’d be doing it anyways…so monetizing his hobby is a very smart decision for him. Taking up gaming to make money is a very poor decision for anyone not living in the third world.
Perhaps you should extract some kind of interview from him. It would make a good contrast to the usual stories about this subject. Most of these activities occur in developing countries. I think one of the most innovative is paying people a cent to solve captchas, then selling them on to spammers. Brilliant, but unless you’re a captcha addict, probably not economically viable. Mind you, there’s probably a legion of old people who could be persuaded to abandon their crosswords, wordsearches and ‘logic problems’ in order to augment their pensions.