10 Supplemental Strand A Reading: Understanding “Gold Farming”
10 Supplemental Strand A Reading: Understanding “Gold Farming”
About This Reading
Originally published in Information Technologies in Fall 2009, in this article, research Richard Heeks considers financial and social implications of “gold farming.”
Understanding “Gold Farming” and Real-Money Trading as the Intersection of Real and Virtual Economies
by Richard Heeks
Fall 2009
Gold farming is the production of virtual goods and services for players of online games. It consists of real-world sales of in-game currency and associated items, including “high-level” game characters. These are created by “playborers”—workers employed to play in-game—whose output is sold for real money through various Web sites in so-called “real-money trading.”
There is growing academic interest in online games, including aspects such as real-money trading and gold farming (see, for example, Terra Nova, where much of this work is reported and discussed). However, there appear to be few, if any, academic publications looking at gold farming from a developing-country angle, and development agencies seem to have completely ignored it.
That is problematic for three reasons. First, as described below, gold farming is already a significant social and economic activity in developing countries. Second, it represents the first example of a likely future development trend in outsourcing of online employment—what we might otherwise call “cybersourcing.” Third, it is one of a few emerging examples in developing countries of “liminal ICT work”—jobs associated with digital technologies that exist on the edge of, or just below the threshold of, that which is deemed socially acceptable and/or formally legal.
In basic terms, gold farming is a sizable developing-country phenomenon. The best guesses for 2008–2009 are that 400,000 gold farmers earning an average of US$145 per month produced a global market that could easily be worth more than US$1 billion (Heeks, 2008). There are probably 5–10 million global consumers of gold farming services. The main uncertainty of estimation relates to the gold-farming market in East Asia, which appears much larger than that in the U.S./EU. That uncertainty arises in part because gold farming operates at four levels: local, national, regional, and global. We should encompass all four, but the focus to date has been almost entirely on the global trade.
The “pre-history” of gold farming dates from the 1980s, and we can structure it in terms of capitalist development, starting with “subsistence” production and moving through barter, commoditization, and monetization, until we reach the type of petty commodity production found at the turn of the 21st century. Gold farming proper started in earnest in 2001– 2002, but really took off in 2003–2004. We can likewise structure this as a move from petty to capitalist commodity production involving wage labor, automation, and globalization/offshoring, particularly to Asia.
An estimated 80–85% of gold farming takes pla