I don't think that's clear at all. The paragraph about gold farming is brief and vague. My impression is that he's trying to convey that many Chinese are already very familiar with an analogous system. Whereas if you haven't played mmos, bitcoin mining is an entirely alien concept.

If you take a break from thinking like a crypto-economic-engineer and look at btc mining from the pov of your average consumer, the biggest difference between btc mining and gold farming is that btc has automated the human player out of the game. From the outside, it looks a lot like farming for gold in Progress Quest.