Salon (via Boing Boing) had an article about Richard Heeks' interesting economic and developmental analysis of so-called "gold farming", titled "Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games". Gold farming is the fairly common (albeit unethical and in some circumstances even illegal) practice of playing online video games for the sole purposes of collecting in-play money and valuables to sell for real-world money. Heeks claims that this has become a very lucrative activity for developing countries especially with several players involved, including individuals all over the world (often sending remittances to developing countries) and even enterprises whose primary business is gold farming.
Heeks sees this as an important issue for many fields including economics and the ICT4D (ICT for development) field. Heeks claims:
"Gold farming presents two things [for ICT4D]. First, a current model for earning money via an Internet-connected PC. Second, an example of a possible future model in which Internet-connected workers in developing countries produce a wide range of virtual goods and services. For both these reasons, the ICT4D field should be taking a keen interest in gold farming."
I certainly agree with Heeks that this is something that the ICT4D field should be aware of, but I do not see this as being something that the ICT4D field should be especially occupied with. First of all, as far as I can tell, gold farming is merely about making money and has little, if anything, to do with the types of impact the ICT4D agenda hopes to achieve in terms of the advancement of the knowledge economy, education and encouraging equal access to, and distribution of, the fruits of globalization. Tying up scarce computers in schools and telecenters in developing countries with dubious activities in online virtual worlds is something I hope that few would condone, no matter what the fiscal returns might be. Heeks does address some negative sides of this development, ex. when he compares it to the exploitation of Chinese immigrant workers in the US in the 19th century (hence the "quaint" title given to some Chinese gold farmers, "playbourers").
Posted by thay0012 at August 11, 2008 06:04 AMNot surprisingly, I'll disagree somewhat with the last para above. Arguably a key failing of ICT4D to date has been too much focus on social development and too little focus on economic development. In particular, a failure to recognise the need to find productive (i.e livelihood-creating) uses of ICT in developing countries. Most telecentres have proven unsustainable for exactly this reason.
Gold farming is not just an example of a livelihood-creating use of ICTs, it is a massive example: where else has ICT application in poor communities created tens – probably hundreds – of thousands of jobs? Unless we understand much more about gold farming; and the similar opportunities that will open up as cyber-living increases, we may miss out on a key potential for ICT4D.
Thank you very much for your reaction Dr. Heeks.
I do understand your position and can sympathise with it up to a certain point. However, as I argue in the initial post, the ICT4D agenda is (as I believe it should be) concerned with longterm goals that seek to address inequalities in the growing global society in accordance with ex. the MDGs and EFA. I fail to see how goldfarming, which seems to me to be a very opportunistic cash cow, relates to these goals. I might even suggest that goldfarming is a prime example of the endurance of the central tenets of dependency theory, which I don't think qualifies as an equitable world order in a globalised society.
That having been said, I do agree that our rapidly changing societies are presenting very novel opportunities for economic activity and that virtual worlds are some of the more interesting in this regard. But, I think that virtual worlds (for ex.) also provide opportunities that are more aligned with the ICT4D goals that I describe above and in the initial posting, for example in education which has been a point of intense interest in China and other developing areas.
Posted by: Tryggvi Thayer at August 26, 2008 12:26 PM