Compromise and Conceit

Further to my comments on the soullessness of World of Warcraft, the blog Terra Nova have a post about Blizzard’s recent court victory over a Gold Farming company. In their attempt to stop this Gold Farming company, Blizzard state that

WoW is a carefully balanced competitive environment where players compete against each other and the game to advance through the game’s various levels and to acquire game assets.

which sounds like the description of a perfectly operating free market. This is what Blizzard set out to create, of course, for the reasons I mentioned before, and in this court case Blizzard are just trying to protect their unique power to intervene in that market. It’s not as if this is a problem per se, and one certainly cannot criticize Blizzard for managing to mesh their commercial interests with the gamers (virtual) commercial interests.

But I contend that it is soulless. And this particular phenomenon – Gold Farming – has managed to enmesh the world of virtual gaming in the same political dynamic which has overrun the manufacturing industry. Gamers now have the good fortune to be able to choose whether or not to use sweatshop labourers in China so that they can become better equipped with discretionary consumer goods in Kalimdor (or wherever). It’s the classic metaphor of the lazy westerner using cheap labour – now we can’t even be bothered playing our own games.

One cannot fault Blizzard over the efforts to protect and build their business, of course, and obviously they (and the Gold Farmers) are providing a service a lot of people want. But I can’t think of a better example of the creeping insinuation of the everyday into a gaming experience, or a clearer statement of the role of the MMORPG business model in ensuring it, than this.

The Gold Farming model is a fascinating one, and now there is a documentary describing it.