PETRONIVS.COM

This spring I took an anthropology course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee called “Online Games and Virtual Worlds”, taught by Dr Thomas Malaby. Fitting its subject matter, the course was taught entirely online. Since the coursework rotated around online games and related virtual worlds like Second Life, the students were also expected to experience various online games throughout the course. (Yes, a good chunk of my homework was playing games. Beat that.)
Laugh you might, but it ended up being a very interesting course. Online interaction is a continually growing way of life for many people, and anthropology is all about studying how people interact. We discussed quite a number of ways people interact, both online and off, and the readings and online discussions were quite fascinating.
The ideas which actually intrigued me most was the came up in the latter part of the course, the discussion of online economies and how these economies intersect with real world economies. Most people are familiar with, or at least have heard of, online games such as World of Warcraft. Many people are also familiar with online worlds such as Second Life, which, while not games in and of themselves, share many of the same technological characteristics and conventions. Virtually all online games and virtual worlds have some sort of own economic model, whether it be deliberate or not. Like all economic systems, these virtual worlds tend to develop a black market comprised of goods or techniques that the people or company in control of the world’s economy frown upon or try to actively outlaw.
In online games, a large part of the black market is comprised of gold farmers and other “third party gaming services”. These services are usually frowned upon by players of the games and persecuted by the companies that run the games when they are noticed. As a result, they tend to operate in a black market niche. Their operations tend to be based in developing countries where they’re hard to reach legally, but still have access to the internet, where their activity takes place. The game companies persecute these farmers when they catch them, banning accounts and taking other punitive measures, but they still persevere, employing (or exploiting, as some would argue) people in developing countries to harvest their singular, virtual crops. Many exposes have been done on this practice. Julian Dibbell published one in The New York Times Magazine in 2007 (http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/goldfarmers.html), and an associated documentary has been put together about the practices (http://chinesegoldfarmers.com/). Many players of the games demonize these practices, calling it cheating. The publishers of the games publicly take the same tact, although it might be more insulting to them that they don’t get a cut of the resulting economic pie. Many people who don’t play the games also condemn the practice, arguing that this industry is exploitative and unfair to the workers. Dibbell’s description seemed to give a rather neutral approach to the practice, portraying it more as an employment choice for those who do it than something they’re exploited by and forced into against their will.
Conveniently enough, the week before the course started discussing online economies and gold farming, Ars Technica, a noted technology magazine, published a review (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/wow-players-could-one-day-buy-fair-trade-gold-from-chinese-farms.ars) of a report by infoDev.org (http://www.infodev.org/en/Article.696.html). This report takes the concept of gold farming to, in my mind, a logical conclusion. This conclusion is very similar to a conclusion that has been reached and acted upon by people who don’t approve of the way agricultural operations are often run in developing countries. This is that the best way to deal with operations that exploit workers and pay them an amorally low wage is not to ban it, but to, instead, endorse operations that pay their workers a better wage.
This line of reasoning brings us directly to the fair trade movement. The fair trade movement is based around holding up as good examples operations that pay their workers a better wage than their competitors. I often hear the term ‘living wage’ bandied about to support this. It’s an emotionally charged term, and I’m sometimes skeptical about its appropriateness when it’s used, but the principle is pretty laudable in most people’s eyes. A good is worth more to most people when they are reassured that the people involved in producing that good weren’t horribly exploited through sweatshops, child labor, and that these workers were paid a ‘decent’ wage. The fair trade movement, and groups associated with it, provides this reassurance. As a result, people are willing to pay more for fair trade goods. In some cases, like fair trade coffee, it becomes very economically advantageous to advertise that you are selling fair trade goods. I know in Milwaukee, many coffee shops prominently advertise that they serve fair trade coffee.
Now we put the two concepts together. There is obviously a market for the services that gold farmers and related services, like power leveling, provide. These industries are going to be around for as long as people are willing to shell out cash for some gold to buy gear, or for a Chinese university student to put time into getting their characters to a good level. Just as well, many people deplore how the gold farmers are treated, and how much they get paid. So why not just put together a regulatory body to police the business that organize the gold farming, and give a seal of approval to those who pay their workers better and give them better working environments? It’s worked fabulously in other industries, like arts and crafts and agriculture.
It sounds great, doesn’t it? We could, through market pressures and a combination of shame and reward, force gold farming syndicates to pay their workers better and give them better working environments. Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t work, at least in the current socio-economic environment of online games like World of Warcraft. The very mechanisms which make the gold and items things that people want to pay real money for, and the power leveling a service that people will also pay for would probably prevent the idea from taking off. People want to have the great gear because it takes a lot of effort to get it in the game. People want to have their game character at a high level also because it takes a lot of effort in the game. The incentive to pay is to look as if you’d spent a lot of time getting these items (or got some really lucky mob drops) or gaining the experience for those levels, without actually having put in the time. People who do put in the time and effort to gain these accomplishments look upon the practice as cheating. I can only imagine the conversation that would ensue:
“D00d. Sw33t armor.”
“Ya. I bought it from a fair trade outfit.”
“u bought it? D00d. that’s cheating.”
“But it’s fair trade! They pay their workers a good wage.”
“D00d. Still cheating. I’m calling a mod and telling on u.”
I’m sure similar results would apply to trying to apply fair trade principles to any service or product that’s condemned by society or illegal/illicit. I can’t ever recall hearing anyone propose fair trade child slave trade or fair trade cocaine. While no one would certainly posit that gold farming is anywhere near as bad as those two examples (unless the gold is farmed using cocaine-addicted child slaves), the point is that buying these items and services on the side has consistently been frowned upon or outright prohibited by the companies running the games. Because it’s therefore ‘breaking the rules’, and providing a perceived unfair advantage over the other, law-abiding, players, it’s ostracized by the rest of the players as well. So the people who participate in the illicit trade could hardly get peer approval or moral high ground by pointing out that, while they’re breaking the rules, they’re doing it in a moral way.
From another perspective, though, this is rather tragic lost opportunity. The third party services provided are very real services, and there is a demand for them. For people aghast at the wages and working conditions of the workers who create value in this industry, this could be a perfect opportunity to use fair trade principles and market pressures to enhance their well being, and it could be a great opportunity for developing countries to promote wealth transfer from western nations and also promote the development of their technological and telecommunications infrastructures. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same drawbacks that any socially ostracized or illicit industry does—the people who use the products and services of the industry have much less incentive, be it moral or economic, to participate in a more moral way because they can’t brag to their peers about how moral they’re being.
On the other hand, if an entity that did have a controlling interest in how a virtual world economy worked and what was allowed in it, for example, Blizzard (the publisher of World of Warcraft), would endorse a standards body that licensed fair trade gold farming or power leveling certifications, the scenario could be rather different. The people buying the goods and services would no longer be officially cheating (though they may be somewhat looked down upon by other players), so the endorsed practice could definitely assuage the consciences of people who’d just rather buy from outfits that they know treat their workers better. It would also provide sanctioned jobs to people who are in bad need of them, and it could possibly enable the game publisher to reap side income from proceeds from the trade.
In brief, I think that the idea of fair trade gold farming and other third party gaming services is an intriguing one, and one that has a lot of potential as a social and economic tool beyond the illicit black market that currently dominates it. Unfortunately, it’s just not viable, given the way most online economies and gaming communities are structured.

Dust
By Joan Frances Turner

Dust wants to be a book about zombies. It even had zombies in it, or things it calls zombies. It’s true, these zombies fit most of the zombie stereotypes, formerly dead humans who’ve come back to life through some sort of process, shamble around, and eat human flesh, but I have issues seeing them as zombies. The thing is, the sympathetic characters in this book are the zombies, and one of them is the main character and narrator. To pull this off, Turner had to give the zombies minds, and more or less human motivations. Granted, there’s the insatiable hunger for living flesh to deal with, but that’s treated fairly humanely. (These zombies can get along on animal flesh just fine, but a lot of them apparently prefer the human stuff.) Human in general also seem to have the impression that the zombies are pretty much like zombies we’re familiar with. The backstory has the undead hanging around for millenia, if not forever, in the past, so humans should really be well used to zombies being around, or at least one would think. As a result of the zombie-centric worldview, nearly all the humans appearing in the story sound horribly racist and ignorant.

So the humans aren’t sympathetic characters; are the zombies? Well, no, not really, except Jessie, the sole character with much depth at all. Even the depth that she has isn’t much. She just kind of gets along to get along, gleefully telling you all about the backstory, how zombies work, how the humans are dicks, how the rest of the zombies are dicks, and how she slowly starts figuring out that something’s going on. She doesn’t really change much, though. This isn’t a story about character development; it’s a story about how zombies and humans deal with a plague that sweeps through the world and destabilizes both populations in their own way.

Except the zombies and humans don’t really deal with this plague; the plague deals with them. Exactly how it works you’ll have to read the book to find out, but it’s one of those “upset the social balance” type of things. Zombies are the downtrodden, misunderstood who also happen to have a taste for raw, often human, flesh, and humans are the annoying, paranoid imbeciles who live in gated communities, do stupid things which they should know better than to do, and go on hunting trips to kill zombies, even the good zombies who only eat animals. (You guessed it; the Jessie is a pacifist zombie.)

The book is certainly readable, but it didn’t really impress me very much. The vast majority of the characters are pretty much paper thin, and the whole point of the book is to show off the world, or at least the small part of the world that the action takes place in, which is the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan. There’s even a nifty map inside the cover that shows important places if you’re not familiar with the area. If you’ve ever wanted to see the zombie-human conflict from a sympathetic, zombie perspective that ends up being more human than the human characters, you’ll quite enjoy the book.

Turner does a decent job of turning the genre conventions on their head and going with a racism/genocide plot instead. If the whole idea of zombies being more than beasts who eat human flesh makes you wonder what the point is, though, this book might not be for you. You also probably won’t like the book if you’re extremely turned off by graphic depictions of zombie, human and animal flesh being rent by the sharp teeth of hungry zombies, too. There’s lots of that. Don’t expect many sympathetic characters, either. Pretty much everyone turns into a monster of some sort at some point in the story, even the putatively sympathetic narrator, although she’s appropriately coy and apologetic about it.

When Penguins Attack 2–because you’ve always wanted to kill penguins, yes? (Ganked from the Woot! blog