If you’re a gamer, particularly one who likes massively multiplayer online fare, the figure of the “Chinese gold farmer” is most likely already part of your digital consciousness. If you’re wondering how one can “farm” gold, and what Chinese nationality has to do with that, I should explain that “gold farmers” are people who are hired to “play” games like World of Warcraft or Lineage in order to amass substantial amounts of in-game currency for resale on online markets. The customers? Ostensibly well-to-do players who for one reason or another wish to bypass the “grind” of questing, raiding, and/or repeatedly slaying virtual creatures to gain better gear, who wield their credit cards with great vigor to purchase their way to higher levels or more powerful itemization. The gold farmers? Not so well-to-do young people, primarily in China but now increasingly in Vietnam, who work full time controlling game avatars not primarily for pleasure but rather to make some kind of living (not very much by our standards).
Though there may be some enjoyment to be had in this kind of working play as opposed to other forms of labor, don’t think of gold farming as a dream job (getting paid to goof off). The gold farmers profiled by Julian Dibbell in “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer” made about 30 cents an hour, worked grueling twelve-hour day or night shifts, and got only a couple of evenings off each month. What’s more, gold farmers don’t exactly get to play games; they have to monetize them instead. Gold farmers are rarely encouraged to explore the full range of a game, because there is no profit to be had in, say, flying around admiring scenery, conversing with other players, or taking part in challenging and time-consuming progression raids that often end in failure (raids involve large groups of players who gather to try to defeat particularly difficult “bosses”). Typically, gold farmers repetitively slay more accessible monsters for small but guaranteed amounts of in-game currency, and thus it takes long hours to amass substantial quantities for sale on sites like IGE.com.
One clear takeaway is that the practice of gold farming mucks up some of the most common criteria for play: play has traditionally been defined as voluntary activity that produces no tangible results (see J. Huizinga and R. Caillois), and call me crazy, but play should be fun. Gold farming also violates the usual mapping of player-to-character identity (1 player: 1 or more avatars), replacing it with one based on maximum utility (multiple players: 1 avatar). A gold farmer’s avatar seems less like a second skin than some type of mechanical equipment–it need not rest, setting itself at the same tasks around the clock as its operators punch in and out seamlessly.
Okay, but why ramble on about gold farms when I’m interested in actual farms, or at least the virtual representations of actual farms? Do gold farms have any relation whatsoever to the recent surge of farm games in China, most prominently “Happy Farm” and “Happy Farm 2” on SNS services like Tencent’s QQ and kaixin001? Most information, though much of it is secondhand, answers in the negative. First, gold farmers and happy farmers belong to vastly different virtual communities and economies–the former group is part of a smaller, but arguably more “hard-core” population of MMO gamers (which still numbers in the millions), while the latter group is at the heart of the rapidly expanding “casual games” market, better counted in the tens of millions; in MMOGs, currency can be traded between players and is relatively difficult to acquire, while in casual games currency is almost entirely regulated by corporate middlemen and on the whole plentiful (recently, in Facebook’s version of Happy Farm, I sold three plots’ worth of carrots for over 1,000 gold coins… wow). Yes, Facebook games tend to rely on two entirely separate currencies (Faunasphere’s lux/bux, FarmVille’s farm coins/cash, Happy Farm’s gold coins/credits, FrontierVille’s coins/horseshoes, etc.) designed to get freeloaders to cough up real money for progression or pomp, but it is possible to progress without shelling out genuine money.
A second reason that makes it hard to bring gold farmers and happy farmers together is their apparent class difference. While gold farmers, as celebrated in Cory Doctorow’s recent book, For the Win, appear to be primarily young and working-class, players of games like “Happy Farm” seem to be white-collar workers who use their virtual farms to compensate for urban tedium in its many forms (this according to a variety of informal media that report on the behavior of Chinese “netizens,” such as ChinaSMACK and The People’s Daily Online).
A recent day on my “Happy Farm.”
Last but not least, I should be careful not to overstate the significance of the term “farm” being shared by two such radically different practices. As Julian Dibbell clarifies, again in reference to gold farms, “The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms.”
Chinese gold farms are thus farms only in the most abstract of senses. If we extend the analogy, it becomes clear that gold farming is not subsistence farming but capitalist agriculture–the owner of the gold farm brings relatively unskilled workers onto his “land” (his rooms or building) to “farm” (execute repetitive tasks in a fixed location) using his tools (computer terminals with broadband), paying them a minimal wage and in turn profiting from a marked-up product (gold, not crops) given his access to distribution channels and markets. As with the farming that provides most of our daily calories, we know gold farming primarily by its end products, not its process. Clearly, the gold farm model borrows heavily from the factory sweatshop and service outsourcing models, though on a smaller scale. Gaming workshops (遊戲工作室), indeed!
All of these practical differences between gold farms and happy farms aside, there is still some conceptual value to be had in placing one paradigm against the other. Gold farms highlight those aspects of farming that are often overlooked in romantic notions of a return to the land–hard manual labor, long hours, effective servitude to capital holders, and often minimal and variable reward, while “happy” farms enshrine all the qualities so prominent in pastoral genres: leisure, plenty, organic connection between human and land, all in a world apart from the concerns of the city.
Of course, “Happy Farm” notwithstanding, all is not carefree and neighborly even in such apparently idyllic settings. After beginning my research into Happy Farm, I was surprised to encounter numerous reports about “vegetable stealing” and game addiction in its newest guise, the overzealous virtual farmer (see, for instance, “Hurry! Time to ‘steal vegetables'” or “‘Happy Farms’ Game Destroys Chinese Jobs, Relationships”). If setting your alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to tend your virtual crops sounds batty, how about the conversation starter “How many vegetables have you stolen today?”, shown below:
Growing Games 
I will forever cherish being cussed out in Chinese in World of Warcraft, presumably for cutting into that person’s virtual profit margin (and thus, quite possibly, their actual livelihood). Trying to find the right friend to do the translation of naughty words was a comical exercise in itself.
-Goofee
It seems that for most gamers, gold farmers are at best a nonentity or a slight nuisance, at worst a plague upon their virtual existence. I’ve always been surprised at the amount of vitriol sometimes leveled at real or even just suspected gold farmers, and it’s clear that at least some racist hysteria lingers around the edges of all the angry complaints over gold farmers ruining games for “real” players, for example, by hogging prime locations or enabling lazy players to bypass the long hours others have put in. I’ve seen players try to assess whether or not someone is a gold farmer (telltale signs being somewhat antisocial behavior and repetitive, almost mindless killing of creatures) by confronting them in English: if the suspect doesn’t respond, or responds with poor English, the inquisitor claims victory. The gold farmer thus becomes stigmatized not only racially, but linguistically–as a foreigner, a cheat, and an incomprehensible loner.
Some irritation with gold farmers over violations of the spirit of “fair play” seems justifiable. But I hope people realize that most of our cultural stereotypes of China seem to pander to our desire to reify the superiority of American ways: democracy and political outspokenness, prodigious families and waistlines, a business- and English-takes-all mentality. I’ve lost count of the overheard conversations or quips about the poor quality of Chinese goods, complaints about outsourcing, fears and anxieties about an unchecked Chinese birth rate and turn to industrialization, etc.: “Oh no, what happens when all the Chinese try to be like us and have 1.9 cars per household? How dare they? It’s Communist brainwashing.” Does this get projected onto the gold farmer? Probably.
National Household Travel Survey
http://www.bts.gov/press_releases/2003/bts019_03/html/bts019_03.html
World Motor Vehicle Production
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_22.html
I find it interesting the difference between the uses of the term “farm” and the need for collecting some type of game currency. In that the happy farm games are about farming while on MMOs farming is a term developed by the players to describe getting money where the Chinese took the concept and created physical “farms” where they farm the in-game currency. Although these farms are against the service agreement of the game, there exists a demand for the product. As Constance Steinkuehler in his article, “The Mangle of Play,” posit, MMOGs consist of “two sets of agency in conversation with one another: designers on one hand, and players who inhabit their designs on the other” (Steinkuehler, 211). Because the players do not want to spend their time “grinding,” gold farms can inevitably exist to provide a service. The gold farm takes the labor out of the game so that the players can enjoy the “fun” parts. To the end, I don’t think that the developers intended for the players to create a need for gold farming, but since the demand exists gold farms are some what justifiable. In the end, the decision is really up to the game designers to say whether players can sell the currency. It would be interesting what legal grounds are surrounding this situation. Who legally owns the in game currency? Is gold selling punishable by law or by simply having the account cancelled? In this modern day, I feel like we would need to adapt to the situation and start changing our laws to more better define in game properties. If the developers own everything could they legally change player’s character and items just for fun? There hasn’t been many legal cases defining this sort of intellectual ownership, so shouldn’t the community be able to choose or to have some say in the game rules?
Vanessa, there are some interesting legal precedents set in courts here and abroad regarding virtual property–see http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/03/virtual-law-b-1.html for a good summary. I have found Bobby Glushko’s article, “Tales of the (Virtual) City,” useful in the past.
As a World of Warcraft player, it is my experience that much of the ire for gold farmers comes from the fact that one of the ways that these companies obtain their gold is by “hacking” another player’s account to steal their gold/items/etc. To this end, there is also a lot of stigma on people who buy gold from these companies because it is generally understood that by buying gold, you are providing gold farmers with the means to continue “hacking” more player accounts. However, it is also rumored that a good number of gold farming websites will secretly install a “key logger” program onto your computer. For those not familiar with the term, a key logger is a program that will record everything you type into your keyboard and then send that information to someone else. What this means is that if you ever log into a game like WoW while a key logger is installed on your computer, whoever gets that information has the means to access your account. This is certainly not the only way to get one’s account compromised, but it is certainly the one that gets the most attention. I would hypothesize that if it were not for the account theft factor, gold farming would be a much less controversial issue, at least in WoW.
In respect to the casual FarmVille style games, I would argue that there is much less stigma on using real money for in-game items for two reasons.
Firstly, the option for buying items is presented to players of casual farm games from the very beginning. From what little experience I have with FarmVille, I know that I would get a pop-up advertisement for some item or another every time I loaded the game. Even after declining the offer, an icon was on the screen at all times, reminding me that I had the option of spending real money if I desired. By contrast, the option of item buying is not readily apparent to most new MMO players. It is only after some amount of time that they become informed that such services exist, even if they are outside of the developer’s regulations. After investing as much time as most MMOs require, it is understandable that some would feel cheated if they learned that they missed an opportunity to “skip ahead”.
Secondly, the “traditional” MMO experience, namely cooperative and competitive play, are both harmed by gold farming practices . In cooperative play, a group of players is tasked to perform a certain feat, such as defeating a boss. In this environment, especially at higher levels, it is assumed that every player has been playing the game for a certain amount of time and has a certain amount of experience playing their character. In other words, there is an expectation of performance. If a player has purchased gold/items/characters from outside services, it is more likely that they simply do not have the experience required to play their character effectively. Not only is this annoying for the other members of the group who now have to “play better” in order to compensate, but it also introduces an increased risk of failure for the entire group. Games such as FarmVille, to my knowledge, do not have a type of cooperative play in which one player can significantly hinder the progress of other players. Similarly, in competitive play, access to gold and items typically incurs a certain degree of advantage. This leads to a scenario in which a person with items acquired through gold farmers can defeat a player who does not have access to those items because they have “earned” them. As before, I am unaware of any sort of competitive gameplay in FarmVille style games that does not boil down to showmanship. It is easier to dismiss the advantage a player may have through bought items if it is not hampering your own experience.
Andrew, I think you raise a lot of valid points from the player perspective. I had my own WoW account hacked twice before I caved and bought an authenticator. However, I would want to see more research documenting a connection between gold farmers and account hackers–are these really the same operations? Or are we just projecting everything negative onto one group of people?
You reminded me of an anecdote a friend of mine experienced recently. He had his WoW account “hacked” by another friend unbeknownst to him. Rather than taking any of his in-game items, the “hacker” merely moved his character to slightly different locations so that he would return to the game to find his character in a different place than where he had left it. I would imagine that there are a number of “hackers” like this that do not access other player’s accounts with malicious intent, but rather for amusement and the time-honored tradition of screwing with people on the Internet.
That being said, there is certainly some evidence to the theory that gold farmers operate partly through account hacking. While personal experience may make for the strongest of arguments, there have been several occasions in WoW in which I have been sent a private message by a level 1 character advertising a gold farming service. Since trial accounts do not have the ability to send messages to other players without their consent, the easiest conclusion to reach is that the message is coming from a compromised retail account. Although, it is also certainly possible that some of these occurrences may be from legitimate players simply playing a prank.
Similarly, when Blizzard added the one hour delivery time to in-game mail, it was speculated that the reason for the change was that it gave Blizzard more time to analyze suspicious activity. It would certainly seems suspicious if a high level character were to suddenly transfer all of their gold to another character who had no apparent relationship with them. In essence, Blizzard has a one hour window in which they can easily recover a player’s stolen gold without having to track down its destination.
However, I will concede that I have only partial experience with MMOs outside of WoW. It is possible that everything I have formulated about the gold farmer/account hacker correlation is strictly specific to WoW, although I would find that unlikely. Truth be told, if it were not for the assumption that gold farming is related to account hacking, I would find myself having a very different opinion on the issue.
Shouldn’t we look at who initially told us gold farming was against the rules? The gaming companies do not like gold farming. Not because it takes away from the game, isn’t “play,” etc. It’s because the companies themselves can’t make any money off the transaction. There are games such as Eve Online that have build in features to allows players to trade in-game currency for timecards or players characters for in-game currency. The game companies would not see anything wrong with trading like this because it’s all internal. Someone else isn’t making a buck off copyrighted material the game company creates and owns. Technically, when you play a game like World of Warcraft you really don’t even own your character, if you read the user agreement you only own the “time” you put into the game. It’s the companies who have formed the players ideals about gold farming being against the rules of “play” by making the practice a ban-able offense thus shaping the players idea of what’s “acceptable” within the virtual environment.
Bryan, good question, and as you point out, not every major game company feels the same way about RMT (real-money trade) and virtual property sales. Sony balked for a long time at the idea, but then finally gave up and decided to start Station.com so they could at least profit where others were already making a fortune: http://www.soe.com/en/stationcash/. Blizzard is still clinging to its policy, but as any WoW or Starcraft player knows, it’s also finding more and more ways to squeeze money from its player base–useless pets, show mounts, apparel… you name it.
I fear, like some others, that games will increasingly become marketing spaces, following a trend already well established in movies and television. So far, games are relatively independent, but what’s to stop companies from inserting billboards for real products, say, into the next racing or open-world game like GTA? Or having your tough military commando gulp down a cold Coke before his next mission? What if, in Bioshock, instead of raiding old vending machines for generic snacks and gene-enhancing compounds, you had to choose from the latest, greatest pharmaceutical company products?
This was a thought-provoking article. I liked that it was short and to-the-point. I was particularly struck by a sentence in the second-to-last paragraph:
“Gold farms highlight those aspects of farming that are often overlooked in romantic notions of a return to the land–hard manual labor, long hours, effective servitude to capital holders, and often minimal and variable reward…” Wow! Gold farmers are actually working for money. Meanwhile, the more ‘literal’ interpretations of farms (in games like FarmVille or Happy Farm) are overly romanticized with things like “…leisure, plenty, organic connection between human and land, all in a world apart from the concerns of the city.”
I can understand the anger over gold farmers and the anger over those who buy from gold farmers. Players who refuse to pay (more) money for a game, who grind away for endless hours to get their characters more useful or powerful items, are beaten-down by somebody who bought all the most powerful items in the game (and who probably hasn’t played nearly as long). Of course, I mean “beaten-down” in a metaphorical sense. In a game like FarmVille, for example, you have the option to spend real dollars to buy special in-game money that buys you all the coolest, most useful items like certain animals or upgrades. This is an example of a bad way of monetizing the game because those items bought with the real money are almost 100% exclusively available to those with the money. In an online first-person shooter like Team Fortress 2 (TF2), there is also an option to spend real money to buy items. These items, however, can also be obtained by playing the game and finding them in “random drops”. TF2’s answer, even though it might anger some, is much better than FarmVille’s. It leave’s the player with the option to either use time or money (or some combination of both).
Ive been playing wow off and on for about 4 years now and ive found that there are really only two things that the gold farmers do that annoy me. First off is the more visual of the who, the in game “spamming” and advertising in the major city’s and chat channels. The advertising is usually very repetitive and gets in the way of players trying to sell their in-game wares. The second reason is that its kinda galling that i can “work” pretty hard to make some gold or products to sell for gold to buy some sort of highly sought after item, only to have someone who hasn’t worked at all buy some gold and then go buy the item. It makes all the time and effort I put into getting said item seem totally meaningless and it also makes the item seem less worth having. I suppose its just the mentality that these company’s are out there de-valuing things in game that, while it used to be an achievement to get them its just more run of the mill and do you have the outside monetary resources available to get what you wain in game.
@Alex, and others: Much of the trouble here of course is, “What’s your time worth?” On a abstracted scale, virtual farming, gold farming, and grinding for levels/items/gold/skills is basically about time-spent and about wanting or feeling like the reward for that time spent clicking to be worthwhile. I would point out that certain activities and types of games are already judged or valued as either “casual” (so the time-spent doesn’t seem to be much of a bother) or “hardcore” or “a real game” (so the time-spent has a higher index of reward-due), which affects whether or not getting in-game reward for out of game dollars seems fair or not.
I will start off by saying that personally, I am in no way a person who plays MMO’s. I’ve sampled a few, but found them against my tastes for many reasons, mostly financial.
That being said, I am very interested in people around me who do play MMO’s. When I play a game, I am expecting a clear and definite end, and the typical MMO is structured so that there is practically no end, otherwise their cashflow from customers would decrease. I see the scheme to suck money out of players as practically transparent, yet I know so many rational people who still pay per-month for MMO’s. So, I am wondering if one could draw a connection between enjoyment and the amount of money spent on an item?
In a game such as WoW, you pay monthly to play. In Team Fortress 2, you can buy the game once and play as much as you want. Is there some fundamental difference between the fun I am having while playing TF2, and the fun I might have playing WoW? And what about Free-to-Play MMO’s? I know of a few that are free to play — up to a point. And then it becomes almost impossibly difficult to progress without investing real money for items. And there is very seldom any kind of gold farming because the market is held by the game developer instead of the community.
I might have wandered off-topic, so let me bring this back to gold farming: in actuality, what are we buying when we buy a maxed-out character in an MMO? We get to the endgame content of that game immediately. However, what is so desirable of endgame content that the rest of the game can’t provide? That another game can’t provide for a fraction of that cost? Is an item in a free-to-play MMO worth more or less than a maxed-out character in a pay-to-play?
This was a good article. I was reading some comments after the article and read something saying things about the ever-present ability to buy things on facebook and similar games. It seems that from my experiences from them (i play a few on facebook and a few MMO’s, so i got both sides) one can abuse the system to buy things from the in-game store without paying actual money.
This manifests itself in the fact that one can go to the in-game store, and there is a section underneath the items that allows one to get the in-game coin one can buy by completing tasks (admitedly i dont think ALL facebook games have this, but seems that a good portion do). One can do surveys (usually having to go through a TON of advertisements on the site that they lead you to) or complete a special that they have such as “play game X for Y points for Z”. For the surveys they usually ask for some basic info about you (depends on which site it goes to, some are easily tricked but some have to verify a couple things) They also have offers that if you do some service online through them such as getting a car insurance quote or subscribing to Blockbuster (no longer but that is an example) through the link provided.
I tested this out before and i did indeed get points by completing surveys using a e-mail account i never use. There are an increasing number of MMOs (Dungeons and Dragons online, Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, and many other MMOs) that are starting to use the micro-payment model. I play LOTRO every now and then and am about halfway to max level. There are ways in the game to earn the points which allows you to get a better weapon or to unlock the ability to put things in the auction house.
So there is a way to not pay money and still have access to things that you can buy. However this takes alot of time and probably earns other people money (through advertisements) instead of paying out of your pocket. That and also basically in-game achievements that you can spend the points to get items (and you could buy the points outright vs say killing 30-40 things for 5 points when things cost 500 points average).
After reading some of the posts here, I’d like to mention a different way in which gold-farming may upset players, other than the fact that they work in RMT.
I’ve had the majority of my MMO gold-farming experience in the online game Final Fantasy XI, where the cross-server atmosphere is more relaxed compared to the other games I’ve played. Despite this, there is still frustration towards the idea of “gil-farming” and enmity directed at those who are suspected of farming gil. However, with such a large Japanese player base, the upsets tend to come from a different matter–manners, which have, in turn, become a big part of the North American FFXI community as well.
Once in an open conversation with Japanese players about gil-farming (in a text-channel I was a member of,) our Japanese members stated that gil-farming itself was not regarded as poorly amongst the Japanese gamers as it was in North America. However, it was very upsetting to them when a gil-farmer would act without manners/netiquette, which would happen from time to time while playing. I had my own experience with this when I was once camping a notorious monster and claimed it after killing off placeholders for a good four hours. Some confirmed gil-farmers were in the area looking to bag the same NM, but instead of killing the placeholder mobs to spawn it, they just watched my avatar run around and do the work. The second the NM spawned I was able to grab it, but once I had the gil-farmers suddenly started to /sh (shout) insults at me, like, “FUK YOU stuppd american yankk,” and then went on to insult other things, like the American government and American women, occasionally with random Chinese symbols or sentences. It was startling, and afterward when I mentioned it to a friend of mine he said that they were probably trying to unnerve me and get my avatar to die so they could claim the mob. Though I don’t know if that’s true, it happened often in areas with a lot of gil-farmers in them. The second a player claimed an NM some suspected gil-farmers would insult and pester them until either the character or NM died.
I now find it interesting that with all the harassment gold-farmers receive in game, in the FFXI community it was also the other players who received harassment from the gil-farmers. There were other examples of gil-farmers hurting other players in mannerless acts, like when my friend Cherish was in a party with some gil-farmers. They went out into the middle of a dangerous desert zone and dropped Cherish from the party, teleporting back to a home point right afterward. At her level her character would have been killed if she hadn’t had a warp scroll. The gil-farmers didn’t even bother to use the “auto-translate tool” FFXI created for multi-language partying to let Cherish know they were disbanding. It was not even poor communication, it was a complete lack of it. These instances weren’t common, but still happened enough to become a visible trend amongst gil-farmer parties, and thus made other players not want to party with suspected gil-farmers at all, and increased hostility towards them.
It was events like the ones above that encouraged a lot of the back-and-forth anger between players and gil-farmers in FFXI, not just the fact that gil-farmers worked in RMT, which seemed to be overshadowed by their poor netiquette.
I must say that to a certain degree I am somewhat surprised at the backlash gold-farming has received, though I can understand why it has received such grief, especially in the US. In a capitalist system, we are taught that hard work is rewarded with capital which can in turn be used to provide goods and services which improve one’s standard of living. This is essentially what gold-mining is, but it also happens to infringe on the internet’s supposed ability to nullify class restrictions. I think it is this infringement which causes the backlash gold-farming gets. In a place such as WoW, or any web based game for that matter, all bets are off where the only possible limitations one has in regards to class is their internet speed or the power of their PC. But as far as a game mechanic goes, EVERYONE is put onto equal footing regardless of their real life “class”. Just as Andrew mentioned in his post, acquiring any particular level or equipment has a particular expectation of skill or aptitude which matches other of a similar level of experience. So just as you wouldn’t give a 12-year control of a semi-truck, you also wouldn’t give someone access to a character with 500 hours of “experience” to someone who only has, say, two hours.
I think we should also be aware of how our own cultural upbringing and experiences alters the way we perceive what “play” should or ought to be. Depending on your viewpoint, maybe being able to purchase a character at a high level you wouldn’t get otherwise may simply be a result of your hard work. To others, it can easily be regarded as a form of “cheating”. While I personally discourage gold-farming simply as a waste of time, (and for the buyers of this market, money) to others, it is simply another way to apply an economic system. Because of this, we have to seriously look at what we consider “play” to be? Is “play” the simple enjoyment factor of a game which is arbitrary to the player, or is “play” something which has an entirely different meaning based on the culture, class, and individuals defining any instance of where “play” can be found?
Perhaps its because I’m not really an MMO player, but I find the separation between “gold farmer” and “player” tenuous at best. To me it seems as though both are attempting to gain as much gold as possible, and to level up quickly to be able to attain more gold more easily. I suppose the concept of “selling” gold would irk some players, but I don’t see gold farming as inherently disruptive to the game world (unless of course, gold farmers are being aggressive to other players or vice versa). Aside from payment and use of company-created characters, on a mechanical level, a gold farmer is doing the same things as anyone else.
I suppose the question is simply a matter of “Fun,” which is entirely subjective. I think gold farmers allow people to approach enjoyment of the game from different directions. While some might find the traditional grind of an MMO fun, others might enjoy themselves more with the ability to buy whatever armor they want from the start. While gold farmers aren’t traditionally seen as “having fun,” does that mean that they’re not enjoying themselves. I mean, just since they’re doing their job, does that mean that they can’t have fun? What does that mean for reviewers?
I think your contrast between gold farming and happy farming is really interesting. In theory, one’s a farm-worker in a “gold farm,” but a farm-owner in a “happy farm.” While they’re fundamentally both harvesting crops for cash, it’s simply a matter of ownership that divides the two.
I think that the way that games like Farmville and Happy Farm are set up is the best way to go, as it allows players to get anything in the game through hard work, but also allows players to pay for things if they don’t have the time to work for them. I used to feel differently about this, though. Back when I played free MMORPGs, I would view people who spent real money on in-game items as “losers” who were gaining an unfair advantage over “legit” players. However, as the years went by and I had less and less time to play games, I realized that more casual players sometimes needed a way to keep up with the more hardcore players. Nowadays, the way I see it is that as long as the player is spending something in order to progress through the game, whether that thing is time or money, then there is no problem. Both ways have their advantages: spending only time is free and allows the player to have more experience with the game and perhaps have more fun with the game, whereas spending money allows players with time constraints to keep up with other players. The only situation where spending money on in-game items would not be okay in my book is if there were items or abilities that were available only by purchasing them, as that would give people willing to pay a truly unfair advantage.
Relating this all to gold farming, I personally have no problem with the act of gold farming or the purchasing of gold online. Buying gold online for a game like World of Warcraft is very similar to paying for in-game items in a game like Farmville. Both purchases are done to speed up the purchaser’s progress through the game and neither gives the purchaser something that cannot be obtained through actual play. The only real difference that I see is that while spending money on Farmville currency is allowed and even integrated with the game, spending money on gold for WoW is against the Terms of Use and EULA of the game. As Bryan Hall pointed out, the reason this is the case is because while Zynga gets money through purchases of in-game items in Farmville, Blizzard gains nothing, and perhaps even loses money because of the decrease of gameplay time of the purchaser, through gold buying. Companies are always looking out for more profit, and they will support buying in-game items with real money if it makes them money and will try to prevent it if it cuts into their profits.
Thanks, everyone, for such thoughtful comments. It’s lovely to hear more than my own voice sounding out on this blog!
I want to add one factor to the discussion, and that is: difficulty. Or rather, the variable sense of reward that comes from accomplishing tasks of different difficulty levels. There is, I think, something to be said for earning something “the hard way”–how many of us have cherished some item or memento, whether real or virtual, long after it has ceased to advance our cause? (I’m looking at you, WoW priest with Benediction still tucked away somewhere in your bank vault….). Maybe it’s the Puritan / daughter-of-immigrants work ethic in me, but I don’t think I’d feel the same elation after completing my spice rack in Cafe World as I did after clearing Karazhan for the first time.
Of course, a good interaction designer will tell you that everyone has their own optimal trajectory on a “flow” diagram, plotted between the axes of player skill level and game difficulty. For the hard-core gamer, with seasoned gamer instincts, the challenge level needs to be high in order to keep her interested and rewarded. For the casual gamer less sure of her abilities, a more modest difficulty level would be ideal. Or so they say. The model’s a little too tidy–it neglects, for instance, the potential for players of high skill to sometimes opt for games of low difficulty, and barriers to entry beyond how hard a game is or how deft a button-pusher one is.