The Dark Side of Storytelling

From Cory Doctorow's Anda's Game

Killing newbies who were trying to cheat the system seemed like a good way to make a buck. But in this simulated reality, who is scamming whom?

>Do you know who these people are that you're killing?

She didn't answer, but she had an idea. She killed four more and shook out her wrists.

> They're working for less than a dollar a day. The shirts they make are traded for gold and the gold is sold on eBay. Once their avatars have leveled up, they too are sold off on eBay. They're mostly young girls supporting their families. They're the lucky ones: the unlucky ones work as prostitutes.

> The bosses used to use bots, but the game has countermeasures against them. Hiring children to click the mouse is cheaper than hiring programmers to circumvent the rules. I've been trying to unionize them because they've got a very high rate of injury. They have to play for 18-hour shifts with only one short toilet break. Some of them can't hold it in and they soil themselves where they sit.

> look
she typed, exasperated.
> it's none of my lookout, is it. the world's like that. lots of people with no money. im just a kid, theres nothing i can do about it.

> When you kill them, they don't get paid.
no porfa necesito mi plata

> When you kill them, they lose their day's wages. Do you know who is paying you to do these killings?

they're wrecking the game economy and they're providing a gold-for-cash supply that lets rich noobies buy their way in. They don't care about the game and neither do you

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In this story by Cory Doctorow who is presently working on a new young adult novel, FOR THE WIN (about union organizing in video games) the kids in the sweatshops were being exploited by grownups, a familiar and tragic reality in the world today.

Do you know there are actually virtual sweatshops? Is there any social benefit that can come out of them?

Is it wrong to "wreck the game economy", or is that just entrepreneurship?

On a related note, from the Oreilly open source conference: 25% of time spent in SL is spent creating objects and scripts. With a 140,000 hours hours per day , and an average real life software developer hours of 2000 hours/year you get 17.5 user-years/day. That is the equivalent of a team of approximately 6500 content developers. which would cost US$650 million/year.

In the article Frontier Justice: Can Virtual Worlds be Civilized? I found this quote:

"World of Warcraft diehards rail against the 'gold farmers,' basically sweatshops full of workers in Asia paid low wages to play WoW and earn gold to be sold to Western players who don't have the time or patience to work their own way up the game's levels."