by Elton Gahr

Created on: March 05, 2009

With the growing number of people playing Massively Multi player Online Games growing every day the idea of paying real money for in game advantages was inevitable. This is in large part a description of the entire strategy of most Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Pay a certain amount each month and you are allow to play their game and while buying money on ebay may seem like a benign practice in which the only real harm is that of breaking the End User Agreement there is much more to it than it may seem.

One of the more disturbing trends are what they call gold mills. The typical version of the gold farm are "professional" gamers who play games such as Runecraft or World of Warcraft playing the games and selling the gold. This on its surface may not seem to be a problem, it brings in money to people who would otherwise be working in a factory or a farm, but the truth is that these are really no better. These are gaming sweatshops where people play these games 7 days a week every week and 12 to 14 hours a day. They live in the gaming mills and are payed 30 or 40 dollars a month.

In China thirty or forty dollars a month is enough to survive on, but it is not enough to thrive. There is no room for advancemetn and little room for escape, maknig this a virtual reality slavery more than people playing games. These are people who are taking pills to stay awake longer and are assumed to be having fun doing it though they do the same thing every day.

It is not just people in China who are selling gold though. Cases in the United States and other place are more rare, less organized and often quite a bit more interesting. One well known case was a woman who offered to sleep with someone for 5000 gold so she could buy an epic mount. This on the surface may seem funny but it illustrates a real point. People are beginning to move more and more of their lives into these virtual playgrounds and as they improve this is only going to increase with them.

From World of Warcraft and others pure games online to more virtual world such as Second Life, the world of computers is moving slowly towards the virtual world that many of expected when the virtual boy came out for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. A world where we can be and do anything we want, but in that world we must be cautious because while it may seem a near utopia now if trends like gold mills and prostitution are allowed to thrive in these environments we will not be moving into a new world but simply entering a different version of the same world, so think carefully before you buy gold on ebay next time, and question if you want to give money to the gold mills which give cents on the dollar to their workers, or if you might not rather try to find some way to use those few extra dollars for something else. Perhaps giving them to a charity who helps those exploited in China.

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