CHAPTER 1.3: GOLD FARMERS AND THE WORLD OF ILLEGAL GAMING TRANSACTIONS
When it comes to video game economies affecting real-world ones, there are more than a couple of examples that do not involve gold farmers. A classic video game economy is Second Life’s complicated free market system centered around the exchange of a currency called Linden Dollars (Frankenfield 2018). According to Second Life CEO Ebbe Altberg in a conversation with Martin Bryant at The Next Web, as of 2015 the MMORPG’s in-game GDP is expected to be “around $500 million, and users cashed out a total in excess of $60 million last year” (Bryant 2015). Though it has not been seeing the type of annual growth during its peak in the mid-to-late 2000s, Second Life’s virtual economy is impressively stable and has resulted in users become millionaires in the real world as well through a combination of virtual real estate and virtual item exchange. Of course, these sort of occurrences would not have been possible in Second Life without there being a direct exchange rate between Linden Dollars and real currencies, along with other ways to connect the virtual economy to physical world ones. The difference between the virtual/physical economic interactions in Second Life with the moneymaking practices of gold farmers is in the virtual world creators’ intentions. The people at Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, wanted to make an economy separate but linked to the physical world. Gold farmers aim to do the same, though they take it upon themselves to make it happen. They are not using virtual systems that are made to handle financial interactions that also affect the physical world. That does not stop them from exploiting physical world needs to make money anyway.
This is where the technological disruption makes itself seen. A main argument against gold farmers among other players is primarily a financial one. Critics of gold farming claim that by accruing so many in-game resources, including rare items and massive amounts of the game’s currency, the game’s economy is subject to inflation. At its peak in the mid 2000's, the gold farming industry was valued at around $900 million (Bailey). It was a major virtual economic powerhouse through the exchange of goods on third-party markets. The gold farming industry reached such a productive peak that major investors from American financial companies started to get involved. In 2006, Goldman Sachs sent Steve Bannon, President Trump's former White House Chief Strategist and former investment banker, to assess the investment opportunities of Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), an online market that specialized in gold farmer transactions (Dibbell). Bannon was apparently capable of glossing over the potential exploitation involved with gold farming, especially when the practice was funneled through IGE's unequal trading practices. Like a good portion of virtual goods trading websites at the time, IGE hoarded over in-game currency and products that were acquired through the labor of gold miners. Though there have been cases of gold miners choosing their hours of work and laboring under humane conditions, there are just as many examples of cases where the practice led to outright forced labor. One such example is the case of Chinese prisoners being forced to gold farm in World of Warcraft for little to no compensation. Bannon got Goldman Sachs to invest approximately $60 million into IGE, along with relocating to Hong Kong and becoming CEO of the company.
It was here, at the crossroads between exploiting gold farmers and selling their work to Western consumers, that Bannon is quoted on having discovered that he could use the racial and socio-economic dynamics in the gold farming/gaming communities to his advantage. Bannon's experience working with the demanding players of MMORPGs shaped his content distribution strategy for the alt-right political news website Breitbart a few years later. Journalist Joshua Green learned more from Bannon about how his experience at IGE influenced his time at Breitbart:
It might first seem shocking that the political ideologies of the far right could be so intertwined with a virtual practice such as gold farming. This only seems unusual if we retain Barlow's vision for online spaces--environments that are separate from the political influences and identities of the physical world. The ties between gaming, racism, and labor exploitation are more understandable once the Internet's equity myth is discarded. Bannon was able to utilize the racism and anger of the gold farming consumer demographic because this dynamic between workers and the market is nothing new. Practices like gold farming have occurred for centuries under industrialized capitalism. Because virtual and physical spaces are intertwined, their interactions are co-dependent. Forms of racism and labor exploitation that we tend to associate with the physical reinvent themselves online. In her essay "Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game," American Studies professor Lisa Nakamura analyzes the relationship between gold farming and race. As she notes, "many (though by no means all) gold farmers are Chinese, and there is a decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against 'Chinese gold farmers'" (130). This makes the player retaliation against gold farming practices heavily racialized. Gold farmers are associated with Asian racial stereotypes, dismissed as nuisances on the virtual environment. Ironically, the same player base that hurled racial slurs at the gold farmers and dismissed them would soon be catered to by Steve Bannon, the man who helped to prolong the gold farming practices of the mid-2000s."These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power," [Bannon] said. "It was the pre-reddit [sic]. It's the same guys on Thottbot who were [later] on reddit" and 4chan--the message boards that became the birthplace of the alt-right. (146)
Another aspect of gold farmer hate stems from how the in-game labor results in strategies that contradict casual play. Their grinding process can render specific sections of the game world barren of items and enemies for periods of time. As an example, if there were a particular rare weapon that drops from an enemy when it is killed, gold farmers might go to the area of the game world where that enemy is found in the highest concentrations and kill them all. Gold farmers are not even necessarily cheating, but according to detractors, their form of methodical play to maximize profit from fallen enemies and completed missions is supposedly too disruptive for video game economies to handle. Nothing is technically malfunctioning, no cheat codes are being slipped in to gain an upper hand. And yet, gold farmers are commonly seen as the enemies by Western players who log into MMORPGs for recreation instead of work (Yee). This is why gold farmers' behavior, when seen through the eyes of Western players, can be classified as technological disruptions. There is no objective malfunction or cheating involved with gold farming, but it is still seen as an undesirable practice. Compared to video games with planned economies like Second Life, the gold farmers’ behavior bares no difference. But in a game like Second Life, the trade of in-game resources for real world money does not come with a certain population being met with aggression, isolation, and racism.
The Second Life economy, along with many other MMORPG in-game economies, is created with an intent to facilitate financial exchange with the physical and the virtual. There is an agreement being made between the creators of the virtual space and the users that financial gain and loss through selling in-game resources is acceptable. In a sense, this acceptance of financial interaction within the space becomes a part of the ideology that guides the space. As Julian Raul Kücklich points out in his essay "Virtual Worlds and Their Discontents: Precarious Sovereignty, Governmentality, and the Ideology of Play",
Kücklich speaks to how we tend to carry concepts from the physical world into the virtual. In this case, Kücklich is talking about the ways in which we think of virtual spaces. The idea of the virtual frontier and its relation to pioneering/colonization is clearest in video games, where a lot of the worlds that the player interacts with are portrayed as vast areas to explore and understand. An emphasis on this exploration, this “new land,” leads to the concept of territory following suit. If virtual space is to be explored, then that implies that there are areas that are already known. Even if that known space is simply the physical world that the player actually exists within, that is more than enough to bring along the ideas of new populations encountering a different land. If population and territory are ideas that are brought into virtual space, then so do all of the nuances and complications that we are used to dealing with in the physical world.The conceptualization of virtual worlds as a frontier draws attention to the fact that it is becoming increasingly common to apply the two central concepts that are used to determine the governmentality of nation states—population and territory—to virtual worlds. (342)