Seriously, if you were born before 1985, you might have some problems understanding this. So let me start at the beginning.

There is a phenomenon called online gaming. Simply put, you combine computer games with the Internet, allowing you to interact with other people who are online at the same time. Many of these games are known as MMORPGs, which stands for massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games.

Some of the more popular MMORPGs include Ultima Online, EverQuest, City of Heroes, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and Runescape. They often have magical themes involving wizards and monsters.

Many of the games have hundreds of thousands of subscribed players who pay fees to use them. (Some of the games are free to play.) There are an estimated 27 million players of such games today, one third of them in South Korea.

So far, you must be thinking: what possible connection could this have to the trade union movement? Be patient -- we're getting to that.

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Originally posted by The Other Todd:
>sigh< That's beside the point.

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I know.

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:
Although I am skeptical about these sweatshops... is there really a market for that? Can North Americans be narcissistic enough to pay money for things like that on a larger scale than they are right now?

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A market for what? Valuable, power-enhancing goodies so neophyte gamers can start god-killing as soon as they get online?

Yup.

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The ultimate proof of this idea is in the game world's emerging merchant class — people who make their real-world income purely by "flipping" virtual goods. Much of their everyday jobs is conducted within the game.

One of these merchants is Robert Kiblinger, a thirty-three-year-old West Virginian. A commercial chemist by training, he worked for Febreze, the company that invented the popular cleaning agent, for which he still holds a couple of patents. ("I was basically selling perfumed water," he jokes.) But then he started playing Ultima Online, where he ran into a player who was tired of the game and wanted to sell his entire account. The player owned two houses and towers and oodles of rare items, and only wanted $500, which Kiblinger figured was a steal. He drove to Cincinnati to close the deal. "I met him in a Taco Bell parking lot and I gave him a cheque," he recalls. The next day, they met inside the game, and the seller handed over the virtual goods. Kiblinger turned around and resold the whole shebang a few days later to another player on eBay for $8,000, producing a tidy profit.

He was hooked. He began buying up items from anyone who was willing to sell, and set up a Web site — UOTreasures — to advertise his inventory. Today the site gets thirty-five thousand visitors a week. Kiblinger employs five hundred people inside the game, paying them a small stipend (in Ultima Gold and cash) to act as virtual couriers, scurrying around inside the game to deliver the goods to the players who've paid for them. A few elite customers have bought more than $20,000 of stuff from him. A couple of years ago, business was so good that Kiblinger quit his job as a research associate at Procter & Gamble to work full-time as a virtual vendor, though he won't tell me his exact income. "It's in the six figures," he says. "It's a decent living."

Kiblinger introduced me to one of his clients, Becky Ruttenbur, a thirty-seven-year-old woman in Montana. Outside the game she's a single mother; inside she is "married" to another virtual character, played by a soldier who is currently stationed in Iraq. Ruttenbur and the soldier have a joint house and property in the game, even though the soldier is married in real life. Such in-game polygamy is common; Ruttenbur has even met her cyberhusband's real-life wife, and says, "She thinks we're nuttier than you could imagine." After playing Ultima Online for five years, Ruttenbur has a huge estate of in-game property, including a set of potted plants that goes for an average of $75 in real U.S. dollars on an auction board. Her stash of on-line goods would fetch $15,000 if she sold it.

Now there's a company rich enough to buy the entire lot. Three years ago, a company called IGE, whose sole function is to buy and sell virtual goods, launched. I met one of the company's founders, Brock Pierce, at a gaming conference in New York. A fresh-faced, blond twenty-three-year-old who is based in Boca Raton, Florida, he said IGE has "thousands of suppliers" who scout the games all day long to find cut-rate goods. He has a hundred full-time staff members at an office in Hong Kong to handle customer service. On any given day, he says, they handle "several million dollars'" worth of virtual inventory.

Several million? "We're ten times the size of anyone else," Pierce bragged. Many players call IGE the Wal-Mart of virtual games. But it is more like a Morgan Stanley or a Long Term Capital Management, a company whose holdings are significant enough to singlehandedly affect the cash flow of the markets.

Of course, every booming economy has not only its white-shoe financiers but also its lowly offshore workers. A few years ago, a company called Black Snow Interactive opened up a "levelling" service for the game Dark Age of Camelot. It had a digital sweatshop in Mexico; there, ultra-low-wage workers would click away at computers, playing the characters twenty-four hours a day to level them up. Mythic, the company that runs Dark Age of Camelot, got wind of the scheme and closed down Black Snow's accounts and auctions. The operators vanished, and have not been heard of since.

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A couple of years ago, business was so good that Kiblinger quit his job as a research associate at Procter & Gamble to work full-time as a virtual vendor, though he won't tell me his exact income. "It's in the six figures," he says. "It's a decent living."

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*shaking head*

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Originally posted by catje:
Whatever happened to nerdy teenagers hanging out in their parents' basements drinking pop all day and playing dungeons and dragons?

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I grew up and started hanging out here.

But I still play D&D.

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Originally posted by The Other Todd:

And I was never nerdy.

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Originally posted by catje:
so i guess you aren't the type to take it as a badge of honour. C'mon, ever since napoleon dynamite, nerdy is the new hip! or something . . .

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It's not so much about refusing the badge of honour (though there is that) but more about simply not looking like the type.

_Believe_ me. I was, and still am, far from the stereotypical D&D nerd. And I've known and seen LOTS of gamers who look exactly like that picture.

[ 24 March 2005: Message edited by: The Other Todd ]

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Originally posted by charlieM:
As the article says, this is a stretch from the sweatshops that produce toys and garments. and 5.40 an hour is pretty good in Romania for that work (if its US funds, or even CAN). I would have to say it s unethical though.

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Originally posted by catje:
actually that's still pretty good money in romania.

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I can also understand that veterans would look askance at those who would try to buy their way to levels with money instead of the ‘old-fashioned’ way of spending hours in front of a computer terminal.

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But the ‘sweatshop’ theme is certainly misplaced.

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I don't think so. While the game is purely fictitious, it does reflect a lot about the capitalist system and the market place under its dominance. The fact that the system is set up so that a privileged few begin to accumulate an inordinate amount of wealth at the expense of, and by taking advantage of, all of the other players shows this.

First, the programmers have to keep tweaking things by arbitrarily adding wealth and trade objects, dropped out of thin air, in order to keep wealth from centralizing into the hands of a privileged few, and thus collapsing the whole game, is proof of this.

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The free market made things more fluid, but also more unfair. Soon, rich players drove the price of basic goods so high that poor players became much poorer. Once again, the designers had to step in. They would "drop" objects in places where new players could easily scavenge them, giving them a chance to amass a bit of wealth. The designers also set up programs to buy the otherwise useless items generated by poor players (such as animal skins) to give them a chance to make money. In essence, they created handouts for the disadvantaged. Ultima Online had morphed into a modern welfare state, where a free market coexists uneasily with an activist government. "As a developer, I would love to leave it all as a free market," says Anthony Castoro, one of Ultima Online's first designers. "But people who are new to the game would have nothing, and the big players would have everything."

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This actually the same fundamental criticism Adam Smith made of the capitalist system in his day. Even as the new so-called "free market" system was taking over from the old mercantile form of capitalism (and the remnants of feudalism), Smith saw the growing power of the new merchant class, as well as the mercantile and old feudal elite climbing on board with the hugely unfair advantage of their hoarded wealth over everyone else.

Second, the fact that there is clearly an evolutionary progress toward socialistic economics, even though they were originally rejected by most of the players enchanted with the illusion of easy wealth and endless prosperity and, since it is a game, adventure.

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Guilds are groups of powerful characters who co-operate to defeat the deadliest monsters (which provide the richest loot)...When a guild vanquishes a monster, it divides the loot among the members. Each player's booty winds up feeling more like a piece of communal property.

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That sounds just like the primitive socialistic ventures of the guilds in the middle ages. People are obviously, over time, beginning to organize cooperatively and democratically in response to what are clear unsustainable situations created by the capitalistic structure.

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Adam Smith might smile at EverQuest's booming marketplace, but beneath the surface, Marx's bleaker vision of capital might be winning the day.

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Looks like it to me.

Now, back in the real world, my nephew works for Electronic Arts, a large video game corporation, in the lower mainland.

He gets $9 an hour playing games over and over again looking for flaws and quirks. No training; Very few advancement opportunities; Only a minimal benefit plan; no say in any aspect of the job, business and no security or any guarantee of rights, etc.

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Originally posted by Oliver Cromwell:
But the ‘sweatshop’ theme is certainly misplaced. Who is worse off after this exchange?

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I take it you mean the exchange of money for labour power?

If you really have to ask that question (and I know you're an economist), there's no point in my answering.

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Originally posted by The Other Todd:

But I still play D&D.

And I was never nerdy.

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Hey, another gamer!
I expect I was nerdy. Now I'm eccentric.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Doesn't a straight-ahead Marxist analysis of a situation like this call for someone to exclusively own the means of production?

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It doesn't have to be someONE; it's a class thing. But in the case of one of the companies involved (Gamersloot, I think), from what the company exec who's been arguing with me has been saying, it's owned almost entirely by him.

Under modern corporate capitalism, ownership is much, much more spread out than in, say, Marx's time, but the concentration of ownership is still confined to a relatively tiny minority of shareholders ie rentiers, who hire managers to do the day-to-day work of running the businesses.

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Seems to me that this isn't about the Dickensian mill owner and his impoverished employees who can provide the labour but are entirely reliant on the mill.

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The vast majority of people in the world are still in that position, even though it might not be a mill and there might be more than one owner of the means of production.

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All anyone needs, it would seem, is access to a computer and they too own the means of production, and can keep the spoils of any silly online trinket they've earned. Why stop at unionization? Why not go all the way to a worker-owned co-op? A few old computers, a hub, a connection, and a case of Jolt cola.

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Oh sure, that can happen; why not? I even (somewhat shamefacedly) came to that same conclusion in my argument with the owner and said as much.