Emergent Play & Control - Gold Farming

I was very captivated by Steinkuehlers Article "The Mangle of Play" where she depicts how chinese gold farmers destabalized the intended balance and play the designers had in mind in the MMOG Lineage II.

I think the case of gold farming and the impacts of such an industry is a good example of emergent activities and also acts of control by both the game company and the players themselves, as Steinkuehler also describes.

I remember being told about bots when I first started playing WoW. At the time, I had already been active in Guild Wars, but don't remember running in to the concept there, despite this game having many similarities to it's MMO brethren.
When I heard about bots in WoW, I found this notion both captivating but also mysterious - how did these bots look? I expected something spectacular that would make me recognize one immediatly, they were robots right, unlike the rest of us players, so they must look different!

Then one day, one was pointed out to me.
It didn't look like a robot at all, it was just a night elf hunter - a great dissapointment.
The only difference was the way the character moved, spun around on the spot and didn't react to other players interfering with it's course.
I proceeded to whisper this character which had an unusually silly name, I forget, but "Xvolkk" is a good guess. The character then stood still (bots don't stand still for long) and responded to my "Hello" with a "lol".
Hmmm, okay, I wrote back saying "what are you doing?" and got another "lol" and I was then certain this was not an english speaker and most likely a chinese gold farming player, who had checked the AI controlled hunter and then seen my message.

Gold farmers don't have as profound an impact on WoW as the one Steinkuehler described in Lineage, where a race and gender combination became the signature for a gold farmer and a whole race was made obsolete - for leisure players that is.

These are Dwarves???

The play style of the gold farmers in Lineage was also far more aggressive than I've ever experienced myself. Of course for them, it's all in the name of profit and they mean no personal offense. So while certain rules and design features can open up to emergent forms of play, likewise can they open up to new forms of monetary exploit. I wonder if issues of protecting the game against such huge potential imbalances is something game designers have to include in their design choices, besides just providing for a pleasurable game-play experience.


Diablo III has been announced to allow players to buy and sell in-game items for real currency via Battle.net. It will be interesting to see how this will work for Blizzard, the players and the gold farmers.

It makes me think of the blurred boundary between labour and play and how MMOG's have been famous for being "grindy" and work-like (raid management fx). How will Diablo III's Auction House insert itself into that history?

Is the Diablo III real money auction house a step in the direction of making gold farming an actual and legitimate job? Are game companies moving towards working with the gold farmers, instead of against them, giving up some of their control and trying to embrace this new reality?

Well, the reception of these news amongst game enthusiasts were polarized.

Some see it as a direct attempt at getting rid of gold farmers, or well.. perhaps just legalizing them and hoping the in-game market will be stable anyways.

Some players are rubbing their hands. This is their chance to really try out virtual trading big time instead of just "playing the Auction House" in fx WoW where spending all that gold meaningfully is pretty much impossible.

Some are being almost apocalyptic about it, echoing the Lineage story about imbalances and ultimately putting the (often) western player as the buyer and eastern player as the seller, instead of everyone being both, with the end result being a completely ruined game.

Never has it been so political to play an MMOG, markets arise when there's a demand and as such people are employed in China producing real currency out of the virtual currency they sell the players (who are both eastern and western as far as I know, although I suspect they earn better on the western players).

Gold Farmers at work

Do players feel as if their leisure spaces have been contaminated by real-world matters, is it a breach of the magic circle? Chinese labourers are at work in the same game where I spend my off hours playing around. Or even worse, (and this is high on the worse scale) imprisoned chinese gold farmers are working where I'm playing.... that's a very uncomfortable thought. These are the games where people sometimes log in to "take a break from 'real life'".

When people throw out the common expression "it's just a game" the next thing to say is perhaps  - "for whom?".