The New York Times has an article (now in the IHT) that discusses the lives of China's gold farmers -- the people who build up virtual characters and collect gold and weapons for companies that resell them.
"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, me and my colleagues are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works in the makeshift factory and goes by the online code-name "Wandering."
"I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good, compared to the other jobs I've had," he said. "And I can play games all day."
He and his comrades belong to the latest global industry to use cheap Chinese labor - the fast-growing world of online gaming, which generates $3.6 billion a year, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the online gaming market.
They are workers with quotas and bosses who equip them to thrash online trolls, gnomes and ogres. In the hours these workers play, they accumulate gold coins that they can sell for real money to game players around the world, who then use the coins to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accouterments to climb levels or create more powerful characters. The Internet is filled with classified advertisements from small companies, many of them in China, auctioning off their powerful figures, called avatars, and individual gamers marketing virtual weapons and wares.
They work grueling 12-hour shifts but they sound like they are faring better than some of China's laborers. The article says there may be as many as 1,000 game farming factories in China "employing" as many as 100,000 people. As the popularity of online games like World of Warcraft grew a virtual black market also developed to support it. Blizzard and Sony have both called the trading illegal according to the article but the characters and items often appear in online auction listings and online classifieds.
