Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Instead of making a game that is interesting, they made a glorified Skinner box, because that's the proven formula to rake in the bucks via addiction. Like rats pressing a lever to get a pellet, the game substitutes repetitive, mindless activites for actual plot or compelling narrative.
Then they cracked down on bots. They install spyware on your machine called "Warden" and snoop what you're up to. They even nailed people using macros, programmable keyboards, and the commercial version of Wine (to play on Linux).
It's relatively easy to automate various game activities, but it's hard to make a bot that can convincingly fake being a human, especially if an admin starts asking questions or if they CAPTCHA you in some way.
Thus they try to make sure an actual human is sitting there doing the mindless activities all day long. This creates pressure to use the cheapest human labor possible to get these repetitive, mind-numbing tasks out of the way.
The sweatshop element could be eliminated by simply allowing scripting. Of course that wouldn't fix the game's inherent design flaws -- UO, EQ, and WoW all suffer(ed) from the same ones.
I'm with you, and still I can see how it makes business sense for Blizzard to discard your suggestions:
- WoW is doing well, gold farming and all. If Blizzard can contain the problem in tolerable levels by playing whack-a-mole with the most ostensible farmers, then it's not a huge deal for them.
- Actual plot and compelling narrative aren't what Blizzard brands are made of. The more personality a world has, the harder it gets to keep it appealing for everyone. Stereotypical/generic/mildly cartoonish themes are easier to mass market.
- I believe allowing scripting would make any MMO better (long story, and this is not a game design forum; email me if you want to discuss this further), but it would favor programming savvy players, discouraging the vast majority of your audience. This would also make problems like security or game balancing harder to deal with.
I believe you could make an interesting MMOG that has mass appeal, but unfortunately it's a harder design and execution problem than if you relax the 'interestingness' constraint.
I wouldn't want to come across as cynical, though. I'd rather make something I love even if it makes less money, and I can see how smaller studios can make a niche for themselves, and even get a shot at big time eventually, by committing to outstanding game design.
But WoW? They won't mess with their cash cow, and it makes full sense.
My only problem with the Warden is that they did it without telling users it's there and what it's doing.
Any computer game can be automated if you can implement an AI that is good enough. Saying that "any game that can be automated deserves to me" seems kind of silly to me.
Calling WoW a glorified Skinner box seems like a similarly useless thing to say. At that level of lexical precision, news.yc is also a "glorified Skinner box," as is driving to work in the morning and going out for dinner at night. I don't really see the point of the analogy.
It's easy to automate "various game activities," but certainly not all game activities and not most of the ones that really matter. It would be more accurate to say that there are some specific activities that can be automated, but the expense of that versus the reliability of a human operator is not worth it. MMOG environments are too volatile, even without considering admins.
Warcraft actually allows a great deal of scripting. Coming from a game like Everquest, the level of automation Blizzard allows is mind-boggling.
Similarly, you could create a robot to watch movies for you or go on dates for you, but there'd be no point, as you'd be missing out on the enjoyment. The statement about whether something can be automated refers not to mere physical possibility, but to whether it improves your subjective human experience. Thus you can't really automate watching movies or going out on dates because you can't have someone else live life for you. The benefit you gain is all in the experience of it, not the accomplishment of it.
The mindless activities these MMOGs subject you to are all of the accomplishment variety. Those shouldn't even exist, but if they do, they deserve to be automated. Then people enjoy the experience of being able to engage in the non-mindless activities.
The amount of scripting WoW allows is trivial compared to what you can actually do.
The surest way to make a game less automatable is to link progress to social factors. It would also make the life of everyone more interesting- including sweatshop workers. If someone is making my game more interesting and meaningful through human interaction, they're legitimately earning their dough in my book.
Of course, easier said than designed.
The future seems like it's going to be a balance between freedom to entertain and moral standards. With the way movies are going, games are in danger of becoming morally questionable too (think of a Saw game or a Hostel game where your main objective is to torture someone). Time is a valuable human resource, and a game like World of Warcraft wastes a lot of it. But it does give people satisfaction. So if it's morally wrong to waste a valuable resource, is the game morally wrong?
Maybe everyone has ways of perverting everything, and we shouldn't worry about it. But it must be painful to watch your creation destroy lives like that.
Out-of-game virtual goods trading can kill meaning of progress in a game- whether there was much meaning to begin with is another debate.
This economic link between worlds breaks the "magic circle" that separates game from real life. This can hurt or kill the experience of a game, depending on how much it relies on suspension of disbelief. Then again, this also opens opportunities to explore, both in game/experience design and in business.
I suspect most of the millions of people who play Warcraft have fun and are not addicted to it.
What's sad is the hundreds of millions of Chinese people that would kill to have a standard of living as high as a city-dwelling gold farmer.
I'm with Milton Friedman in thinking that Sweatshops are a good thing, in that they provide a job for people who've got no place else to work. Remove the sweatshops and they starve.
Incidentally, the Chinese wouldn't starve without sweatshops. They'd be peasant farmers. The reason they work in sweatshops is the same reason workers chose to work in the "satanic mills" of England in 1800: being a peasant farmer is a very hard life.
In fact the history of every country that industrializes is the same. People work on farms till jobs appear in factories, and then they move to the cities-- not because it isn't possible to work on farms anymore, but because it's such a grim life.
And incidentally, feudalism was over in England centuries before the Industrial Revolution got started in the late 18th century.
Feudalism ended in England in the 16th century, hundreds of years before the industrial revolution http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0006447.html
Sorry I don't have the books with me right now (until next week), and I didn't learn them by heart. I seem to also remember that there were machines before the "revolution" - maybe it still was a change of political circumstances that permitted the revolution (free trade between countries, possibility of ownership giving incentives for entrepreneurs etc.). Certainly several factors worked in combination, it's not like the invention of a particular machine triggered it all.
I also seem to remember that China has the fewest farmland per person of all countries in the world. I don't think anybody can simply be a farmer. I know I couldn't just be a farmer in my country.
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/6/64/375px-Index2006_EFCapita.gif
Also the gap between rich and poor has been essentially static for the past 50 years, and shrinking since the 80s http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/12/images/walton3.gif
http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=859
Yet more proof is in the Economic Freedom index. All rich countries have free economies, and all poor countries have un-free economies: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm for me that's the smoking gun that capitalism works.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060111094731/truckandbarter.com/tb_images/ef_in.gif
"Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of distributing wealth."
There are only 2 choices in economics: Capitalism, which is really just people trading freely (and seems to distribute the wealth the best) and communism/socialism, which doesn't allow anybody to trade (and has the worst distribution of wealth). The only other options are systems which are somewhere between, and evidence (from the Economic Freedom index) shows the freer the economy the better off everyone is.
Further China isn't particularly capitalist, it's still very heavily socialist: http://www.heritage.org/index/country.cfm?id=China (although that's changing year by year). So if people are starving in China it's not really capitalism's fault.
It's also a myth that capitalism causes starvation. In fact there were no famines in the 20th century in any capitalist countries. All the famines were related to Marxism (China, Russia, Ethopia, North Korea etc.)
(This has an indepth look at famines through the ages: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf)
I think the rebuttal to rms' comment that "Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few" is very simply this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_sum_fallacy
While some kinds of wealth are limited, it's generally not a zero sum game.
Startups are all about capitalism though aren't they. They are capitalism in action.
I just can't get past this feeling that there's something horribly wrong with our society... from pharmaceutical companies keeping AIDS medication locked away to an invasion of the Middle East to take their energy. This can all be explained through rational self-interest but it's pretty horrific to contemplate. Is there a better way? Will we ever achieve real Globalization?
Can and will global poverty be solved before humanity achieves a post-scarcity economy?
They live in poverty because of a lack of capitalism, not because of capitalism. You might find this hard to believe but every poor country has a lack of capitalism. Check here: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm there's not a single contradiction.
If you really care about the poor I challenge you to take a few hours to read this PDF just to hear the other side of the argument: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf
Feel free to email me at lockster 4T gmail d0t com if you feel like a friendly debate ;)
Some other discussion of options here:
http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2005/03/cross-browser-invisible-word-break-in.html
Incidentally, pages 6 and 7 makes it sound as if working in a good RMT outfit is actually fun and challenging. Apart from the exaggerated description of the time and effort it takes to reach the "maximum number of experience points," it's a very accurate description of what it's like to play Warcraft. I'd certainly rather spend 12 hours a day as part of a 40 man team solving Warcraft raid encounters than spending 12 hours a day packing sneakers or something.
People want "gold coins" or whatever.
So and so wants a job.
A middleman arranges for an exchange of "gold coins" for real money by setting up an apparatus of technology, labor, marketing, and sales to allow it. (THIS ISN'T EASY.)
Everyone is richer for it, with the possible exception of the people buying the "gold coins" who are high-class cheaters. But the guy who buys a Porsche is an extra-high-class cheater on the dating market, and I'm more worried about him any day of the week.
The important thing is: Everybody is free, and it's this freedom (and not the FSF's "freedom") that took Ling or Wang or whoever out of the rice field.
They're getting paid to play video games.
Not to mention the sheer irony of spending their lives to increment a number in a remote computer representing virtual gold pieces. Not exactly efficient.
http://video.glath.com/view/southpark.Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft
You only see this type of neuroticism where people are competing for zero-sum social status that is arbitrarily handed down from on high.
You would never see people paying Chinese to, say, write their blogs for them or do anything else where social status is derived from bottom-up respect for the intrinsic quality of one's work.
/Sold his UO account eight years ago for $620 and hasn't touched that stuff since
Warcraft is not an especially social game as far as MMOs go. You are relatively free to play it in your own little bubble of friends. Competition is largely via PvP, which is almost entirely avoidable. This is unlike UO, which forced PVP, and unlke Everquest which forced intense competition for in-game resources.
I liked this quote: 'I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the game, he said. They are playing. And we are making a living.'