by Nick Yee
Given the player narratives we’ve seen so far on the challenges of managing a guild, it makes sense that some guild leaders would describe their gameplay explicitly as a second job.
After becoming a guild leader I found that I had taken on a second full time job. Creating a nice website was a pain and was time consuming. Then came trying to plan raids that the people in our guild could all attend (too much variation in levels), trying to keep people interested, recruiting new people. It was way too much work. [EverQuest II, male, 31]
The single toughest thing about running a guild is managing people. It can quickly turn into a serious job. You have to referee disputes, come up with events, loot rules, and organizational structure, recruiting. In short, running a guild is a lot of work, just like managing people in a real-life position. [World of Warcraft, male, 37]
Our society stereotypes games as places where no work gets done. And certainly, many gamers start playing just to relax after a long day’s work. They want to kill monsters. They want adventure. But for many guild leaders, their digital escape becomes the very thing they are seeking to escape. The difference, of course, is that they aren’t getting paychecks.
Being a guild leader is a bit more responsibility than I enjoy in a game. If I wanted responsibility I wouldn’t be hiding from the real world;). It may also be that I work as a PR professional and being a guild leader feels a little bit too much like I’m at work. [World of Warcraft, male, 25]
The toughest thing about being a guild leader is finding the middle ground between all the members, and being able to keep the group entertained at the same time. Being a guild leader is like being a manager at work, only without the paycheck. It’s frustrating but rewarding to lead a group and see it function and grow, but it’s a pain in the rear more often than not to get it to that point. [EverQuest II, male, 33]
Player motivations to achieve and socialize (as we saw in chapter 2) can inadvertently lead to tedious management roles. The deeper irony is that these guild leaders are paying around fifteen dollars a month for the “pleasure” of working a second job.
I’ve focused on guild leaders so far, but for a guild to function well and succeed in raids, everyone has to pitch in. In any given raid in World of Warcraft, ten or twenty-five people have all scheduled their lives to work on this one task for two to six hours every week. Since only a few pieces of usable loot drop, most of these players walk away from the raid with nothing but repair bills for their damaged armor. Given this net negative return and the social pressures of participating in raids once a player has joined a guild, many players in these situations also directly compare the game to work. The following pair of player narratives shows that this comparison holds true for players of all ages.
But by the time I was level 50, the game was too focused on the “grind” to 60—the game required 20–40 players in raids—and the elitism, and classism of the players, just made it no fun. You could not achieve anything without massive support of some player group, and if you were in such a group (guild, etc.), they expected the game to be a full-time job. It was a burnout. [World of Warcraft, male, 53]6
When we became the max level, we participated in raids and joined a high-end guild. The game became a job. It lost that feeling we originally played for the raw fun, questing and exploring new areas, advancing characters. We noticed the game wasn’t about that any more. It was only fueled by greedy intentions guild members possessed. [World of Warcraft, male, 18]
We made computers to work for us, but video games have come to demand that we work for them. Whether it is manufacturing pharmaceuticals in Star Wars Galaxies, running a corporation in EVE Online, or managing a guild in World of Warcraft, game play can become a second job. In the player narratives in this chapter, gamers have described their play with words including “grind,” “pain,” “stressful,” “burnout,” “obedience,” and “discipline.” These are hardly the words we would expect from consumers paying to be entertained in an immersive fantasy world. This is a prime demonstration of the Proteus Paradox; the offline burdens we thought we could leave behind follow us into virtual worlds.
The Blurring of Work and Play
In their book Got Game, John Beck and Mitchell Wade report survey data on the provocative differences between how gamers and nongamers think. They argue that gamers are more willing to take risks than nongamers because failure and repeated attempts are acceptable and expected in games. Beck and Wade argue that corporations will have to adapt to gamers, but perhaps not as much as they think. After all, the complexity and corporate metaphors turn modern online games into corporate-mentality training grounds. In online games, players manage, discipline, and overwork each other. It bears repeating that the average player spends twenty hours a week in an online game. And especially for younger gamers, these games may give them their first taste of being a cog in a large, structured organization that slowly burns them out.7
It’s depressing to see grueling work in video games, but I wonder if we should be outright alarmed that we’re now finding games in corporate work. The kind of adaptation that Beck and Wade foresaw is already happening. Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken and Byron Reeves and Leighton Read’s Total Engagement are two recent books that champion the idea that games can improve engagement and empower workers, leading to increased autonomy and productivity. Both books also use online games as their pivot: If players can be motivated to accomplish complex tasks in World of Warcraft for free, can the same principles be applied to enhance corporate work or to improve our everyday lives?8
I have no doubt that games can be powerfully motivating, but the intentions of corporations are not always aligned with the well-being of their employees or the general public. If corporations provide a game that enhances worker loyalty and engagement, I wonder if these corporations will come to see their employees as being over-compensated. And more often than not, company policies do not benefit owners and employees equally. Health benefits are often sites of struggle. Health plans that employees prefer can cost the company more to provide, and I can imagine that companies would be interested in using games to help employees choose the “correct” health plans. Yes, games are fun, but games are also created by certain people to achieve specific goals. And in corporate settings, it is not the employees who are creating the games. For the time being, we don’t have to be worried. Just as the technology research firm Gartner has predicted that the majority of corporations will use a gamified application by 2014, it has also predicted that 80 percent of gamified applications will fail because of poor design. But eventually, some companies will get it right.9
A fascinating aspect of many contemporary online communities is that they are able to incentivize people to perform work for free. Wikipedia—the collaborative online encyclopedia—is an obvious example. But also consider how Facebook generates revenue primarily by aggregating the information you freely share and allowing advertisers to target you more accurately for their products. Sociologist Tiziana Terranova has called this phenomenon “free labor.” Games are uniquely powerful in converting paid work into free labor. Taken to its extreme, the premise of gamification is that any task, no matter how tedious, can be made engaging and motivating. And there is evidence that this premise is true. When unpaid laypeople solved the complex folding pattern of an HIV enzyme using an online game in 2011, it was heralded as a breakthrough in gamification. But this also means that game mechanisms can be used for less noble goals. Consider the possibility of a casual multiplayer word association game released by a marketing company in which the underlying goal is to generate high-impact keywords for marketing new products. Engagement and exploitation may be two sides of the same coin. When we receive these invitations to play, we must remember that fun can end up being a lot of work.10
CHAPTER 5 YI-SHAN-GUAN
The video begins with haunting electronica chords played against a black backdrop. As the lead vocals begin, the gameplay footage starts. The camera arcs around a ga
thered group of characters in a forest clearing, centered on a character named final Elf—the character recording this footage. The lead singer chants the word karma repeatedly as the video cuts to the gathered group rushing down the stairs of a stone fortress. They reach a large, open area of the fortress. finalElf approaches a female Elf from behind, pauses a second to adjust the camera angle for a better view, and then plunges a sword through her body. The female Elf slumps down on the stone floor. The lead singer shouts: “I said hallelujah.” The camera zooms in on the scene as others from the group crowd around the corpse. The group heads into another area of the fortress, slaughtering characters along the way. The lead singer continues: “Come on and tell me what you need now. Tell me what is making you bleed.” finalElf chases an elven archer through the halls. The archer suddenly stops and stands still, appearing to give up. finalElf shoots three arrows into the archer’s back before he drops to the floor.
This massacre continues for another four minutes. The video, titled “Farm the Farmers Day,” is the first in a series of five videos in which finalElf documents his group’s systematic slaughter of Lineage II players suspected of being Chinese gold farmers.1
The Grind
In chapter 3, we explored superstitions in online games. I touched on the tedium of grinding, having to kill hundreds of monsters to gain another level. Although quests in the game provide experience points, they often bring players only partway to the next level. Players need to grind to accrue the remaining required experience points. The tedium of grinding is also exacerbated, as mentioned previously, because leveling-up time increases with each level. At the same time, quests get you less of the way to each next level. The result? More and more grinding is required to reach each successive level. In many cases, the quests themselves are just grinding in disguise. For example, a gang forces a local baker to pay a protection fee and would like you to kill ten gang members, computer-controlled enemies, in addition to the gang leader.
In 2005, I worked as a summer intern at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where my colleagues had been running a data collection tool that took a census snapshot of several World of Warcraft servers every ten minutes. By the time I arrived at PARC, my colleagues had already collected several months of data. These snapshots included hundreds of thousands of characters, and the census data allowed us to calculate the average time it took for characters to reach each level. We estimated that it took the average player 372 hours to reach the maximum level in the game. To put this number into perspective, given that a normal workweek consists of 40 hours, that’s more than two full months of workdays.2
For some players, the journey of leveling up is satisfying and pleasurable. Rather than a tedious grind, they find a relaxing activity.
While there ARE things much more enriching and rewarding than mindless leveling, there’s a certain . . . feeling of zen to be found in the grind. I’ve spent hours on end in the same area, doing the same thing over and over, watching the exp bar creep slowly upwards. Just soloing, just me and the monsters. [City of Heroes, female, 22]
But it is easy to see that grinding can become a chore for most players, especially if it takes two months to reach the advanced game. This is especially true for players who already work full-time and would be hard-pressed to devote much time to grinding. And for many players who make an hourly wage, an interesting calculus comes into play. Specifically, the ability to buy off large numbers of grinding hours with one hour of real-world work can become very attractive.
Guy4Game.com is one of many companies that provide power-leveling services. For a fee, the company’s employees use the player’s game account username and password to log in and grind through a certain number of levels in the game. When the power-leveling is complete, the service alerts the player via email. A typical cost in March 2013 for leveling a new World of Warcraft character to level 90 was $199, and the leveling up would take roughly seven days to complete. For players who make at least twenty dollars an hour and want a max-level character, the ability to trade one workday for months of grinding can be an incredibly attractive and sensible option.
Other players may enjoy the leveling process but might wish to speed things up a bit. Or they would like to reduce grinding without giving up control of their character. And some players might not wish to share their game password with a third party for security reasons. For all of these players, there is virtual currency to be purchased using real money. Virtual currency allows players to buy in-game weapons and items to kill monsters more quickly and thus level up faster.
A quick search on “wow gold” (the World of Warcraft in-game currency) using Google reveals dozens of websites offering virtual gold sales. The transaction is largely identical across these sites. Players identify the game and server their character is located on, and then specify the amount of virtual currency they are interested in buying. Most sites offer specific exchange rates (for example, twelve thousand gold for twenty dollars), with discounts for larger transactions. Players list one or more character names for virtual currency delivery and then pay for the virtual currency using a credit card or PayPal. Transactions are usually completed within a few hours. The seller will first try to deliver the virtual currency within the game world by messaging and meeting the player at a specific large city location that is easy to reach. The final transaction is then conducted using the in-game trade interface. If the player is not online when the transaction is made, the seller can send the virtual currency using the game’s mail interface. The player can then retrieve the virtual currency from his or her mailbox at the next login. Because players cannot appeal these illicit purchases to the game companies in cases of fraud, the sellers’ reputation is paramount and has likely increased the market share for the best-known and longest-running websites.
The prices of power-leveling services and virtual currencies hinge on the cost of labor. After all, it takes human labor to accrue both character levels and virtual gold. Because these online games are accessible globally, the market for these services is in reality a function of global economic inequalities. It wouldn’t make much sense for a typical American player to pay another American player to accrue virtual currency because their wages are within the same order of magnitude. On the other hand, the lower cost of labor in developing countries makes such global transactions attractive. The act of collecting virtual currency is typically termed gold farming, and these players are called gold farmers. In 2007, technology journalist Julian Dibbell interviewed gold farmers working twelve-hour shifts in a fluorescent-lit office space in Nanjing, China. The game workers he interviewed in this “gaming workshop” were making 30 cents an hour and lived in dormitories adjoining the office spaces. Because of wage disparities between countries, therefore, an American player is able to trade a workday for many game grinding days. In short, these game services are a form of offshore outsourcing.3
It is difficult to get an accurate estimate of the size of this industry due to its shadowy and distributed nature. In 2008, Richard Heeks, an informatics researcher at the University of Manchester, published a report aggregating metrics from many sources. His estimates suggested an average wage for gold farmers in China of around $145 per month. Many of these gold farmers work twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, which comes to about 43 cents an hour. On the demand side, both survey and game server data show that about 22 percent of Western players purchase virtual currencies. Heeks’s best guess of the size of the gold farming industry is $500 million per year, and that it could well be more than $1 billion per year.4
The complex and repetitive nature of contemporary online games has created an entire industry in which some players are willing to pay someone else to play the game for them. And World of Warcraft has become a real place of work for these game workers. For them, playing World of Warcraft is an actual job. Or a sentence: the Guardian reported in 2011 that Chinese prisoners are being forced by prison bosses to “play” World of Warcraft at night to generate in
come, and so high-tech entertainment in the West has become a form of prison labor in China.5
Virtually Chinese
As the presence of gold farmers surged across online games in 2005 and 2006, gamers became increasingly frustrated with how these farmers behaved in the game. In particular, players have complained about three problems. First, gold farmers hog resource-rich areas, significantly increasing competition in those areas for normal players. Second, in order to drive normal players away from these resource-rich areas, gold farmers may employ hostile tactics, such as bringing monsters to attack the player or tricking unsuspecting players to engage in player-versus-player combat. Third, gold farmers are believed to ruin game economies by causing rapid inflation and increasing the supply of rare items to the point at which regular players cannot sell these rare items at a reasonable price.6
Even though gold farmers have been documented in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, and South Korea, many academics and online gamers believe that almost all gold farmers are based in China. Heeks estimates that 80 to 85 percent of gold farming takes place in China but cautions that this is a “least worst” estimate based on the proportion of media and academic reports on the subject. I would add that there may be a self-fulfilling prophecy here of assumptions encouraging journalism and study in particular areas of the world, namely China. But even if that estimate is mildly or even moderately off, certainly many gold farmers are indeed based in China.7
Many gamers have posted their frustrations with gold farmers on forums and message boards. In the gaming community, many have used “Chinese” and “gold farmer” synonymously. On the official World of Warcraft forums, there was formerly a large message thread under the heading “Chinese people make me mad.” The following post exemplifies the general sentiment in that thread: “He obviously was referring to the Chinese farmers. And I haven’t heard of any group other than the Chinese that had operations set up to farm WOW gold and sell it for real cash.”8
