Reminder: Gold Farmers Are People, Too

The vast majority of people playing a big-deal MMO probably
view it as an escape, something to do when not clocking in on the chores of
daily life. Yeah, folks make friends and fall in love dressed
in avatar skin but most players don’t need it to survive. Some of them, however, do need to play
a game to make rent or buy food. InRealLife shows what it’s like on the other
side.

They’re in World of
Warcraft, MapleStory or any other
popular online game with a huge playerbase. The people with belief-defying
amounts of gear, loot, and HP. And the other ones, silently scurrying and
bustling in the sidelines while you go off on another raid.

How’d they get that stuff? How much does it cost, in terms
of, y’know, dignity? What are they doing when you’re offline? This new book—coming later this year from First Second—by
activist/author Cory Doctorow (he also edits Boing Boing) and Jen Wang offers up a provocative look at where the juice in your
average MMO comes from.

IRL‘s main character is Anda, a high-schooler who gets
pulled into fictional MMO Coarsegold,
as part of a recruiting effort to get more girls playing the game. Once there,
she teams up with a high-level player to learn the ropes and becomes part of an
underground economy where in-game missions churn out real-world cash. Sounds
like gold-farming, doesn’t it? Is it okay if Anda does it?

Doctorow’s married to Alice Taylor—who played Quake competitively in the ’90s and was
the only woman on the first English national team—and drew on his wife’s
experience as raw material for creating Anda. But it’s slippery slopes that
come with being part of an online community that give IRL its tensions.

The book touches on points that some people who play video
games don’t want to think about, like the social attitudes or economic politics
surrounding the delivery and maintenance of these experiences. The reluctance
happens because it’s not easy to think about these things. “I am as guilty of
this as anyone is. It doesn’t feel good to think about it. I think that life in
the modern world embodies all kinds of contradictions that are difficult to
face,” Doctorow said over e-mail. “We don’t decide to abandon our principles in
a rush—rather, they slide away in a series of incremental steps, each of which
seems like a reasonable compromise based on the LAST compromise.”

“We are most capable of detecting relative differences. Once
you’ve made a little compromise, another little compromise seems like not much,
and another, and another. No one wants to admit that the fun bit of plastic he
unboxed from Amazon this morning is awash in invisible blood, especially
because, as an individual, there’s nothing he can do about the blood, and not
buying the thing doesn’t make it any less bloody. So you draw the curtains.”

Gold farming is the kind of thing that captured the public
imagination for a while and is now accepted as par for the course in massively
online games. When asked why he’d want to re-visit the practice now, Doctorow said that “science
fiction isn’t about the future, it’s always about the present.” “When you
contemplate the microscale phenomenon of a world-in-a-bottle like an MMO and
the toy economy within it, it equips you with a graspable metaphor for
understanding the macroscale world of monetary policy. In other words: thinking
about gold farming is a gateway drug to thinking about money itself.”

The reasons you want money in a game are similar to why you
want it in real life. Artist Jen Wang says that she’s felt the pull, too. “For
me just leveling up isn’t as motivating as being able to micro-manage my
fantasy life and acquire the perfect fruit trees for my fantasy house,” she
admitted. “I thought that would provide an even bigger contrast for Anda and
the goldfarmers as well if one could purchase property and the other couldn’t.”

IRL has a beautiful
dream-like art style, one that eschews the hyper-realism fetish prevalent in so
many games. “There’s a lot of uncanny valley out there, at least in console
games. It’s so common we just kind
of accept it!” said Wang. “What’s exciting is the emergence of mobile games and
how that’s forcing designers to take a simpler, more graphical approach.”

“I’m
seeing more games like Katamari Damacy
and Journey that are completely unique. They’re not trying to look like
anything else. Just look at Superbrothers:
Sword and Sworcery. Every background in that game blows me away! That’s not
to say that something hyper-realistic like Skyrim
can’t be beautiful, but overall I think we’re better working with our
limitations than against them.”

Though part of IRL‘s
premise is that plugging into a game like Coarsegold can paint you into some
morally uncomfortable corners, Doctorow also thinks that the connected nature
of massive online games creates a powerful force for real-world change, too. “As
I write this, it’s almost the anniversary of SOPA, and that was astounding—eight
million phone calls placed to Congress, [resulting in] a law that everyone
agreed was inevitable nailed to the wall,” he offered. “We have never before
had the ability to find people who care about the same things as us, to weld
our efforts together, and to move forward in unison than we do now.”