Zack Exley

How about a real guild for World of Warcraft in-game workers? 21 June, 2007

Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, twenty five cents an hour. Sure, you get free housing—but it’s just a space on dirty floor upstairs over the sweatshop. Those are the working conditions, described by the NYTimes’ Julien Debbell today, of Chinese “Gold Farmers,” workers who play the popular video game World of War Craft for a living.

If you haven’t heard about this phenomenon, here’s what’s going on: There are video games where players compete against each other (and team up to cooperate with each other) online. Some of these games have millions of players–with hundreds of thousands frequently playing simultaneously. The games place you in a virtual, graphic world—though its still arguable that
the world is more enhanced by the players imaginations than their computers’ graphics cards. In the game, there are things of value that players want—fighting equipment, magic powers, spells and pretty much anything else you can think of. So it wasn’t long before players started buying and selling these things for real, not virtual, money. And it wasn’t long after that sweatshops started popping up all over the world to make a business out of it.

World of Warcraft is the most popular of these “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” with something like seven million players.

In World of Warcraft, players organize themselves into “guilds” so that they can take on bigger challenges than they would be able to alone. Some guilds are a group of real life friends, and some are a mix of strangers from all over the world who only interact in the game. In fact, most of the fun in these games is the team work and socializing. Here’s a famous video (famous in the gaming world) of some game action by a guild (a whole genre, called machinima, of these kinds of videos has arisen from the gaming world).

So. Here’s my idea. Would it be possible to form a large guild of players in the game who are actually exploited workers in real life, set minimum wages and working conditions, and then—just like in the days of ancient real-life guilds—enforce membership and adherence to standards by any means necessary (in the game only!).

In other words, the members of this guild (perhaps financed by real-world trade unions) could rove around the World of Warcraft and disrupt the work of exploited players by, say, killing them. Eventually the sweatshop owners would have to factor in the standards to the cost of doing business. But it would only work if you could enforce the standards near universally.

Can any gamers tell me if this scheme might be possible? With bosses looking over their shoulders, exploited players wouldn’t be able to self-identify as sweatshop workers. But are the identities of sweatshop guilds discoverable within the game? If so, then the workers’ guild could take anonymous tips from exploited workers when they’re away from the sweatshop, or from former workers.