1.) INTRODUCTION

My talk today is about China's new virtual economies that arise from online computer games - MMORPG's (Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Games). I will focus on World of Warcraft (WoW), which is the most popular and profitable online game.

2.) TWO STORIES

• On e-Bay, for $1,800, you can buy your own WoW virtual mage warrior or you can can spend $1,800 on gold points, the in-game currency of WoW. The mage and the gold points can only be used in an online game setting and has no physical presence what so ever. But it can be traded, sold or auctioned outside of the game, such as on e-Bay.

• Just a few months ago China's Central Bank sent a warning to Tencent for the potential threat of the QQ virtual money to the country's currency. Tencent is a popular online instant messaging service with youth that also has its own in-service currency, QQ coins.

3.) BOTH OF THESE STORIES POINT TO THAT GAMES ARE NOT JUST "KIDDIE GAMES"

• In-service currencies are not just limited to the service's platform. Just like baseball cards or stamps, people trade their QQ coins or WoW gold points, auction them off or buy them with real world currencies. Trading and inflation of WoW gold points and QQ coins show the complex relationship of how online currencies collide with offline worlds.

• What we have here is not a new type of economy, but a new type of informal economy - the trading of online world currencies against offline world currencies.

• I believe that we are witnessing a new transition in capitalism, a transition to a virtual economy that transforms the medium in which capital is exchanged, labor is sold, production is organized, and value is created. But a new medium does not mean we are seeing new forms of economy, capital or labor relations. The new medium of virtual markets still reproduces the structures of labor and production of material capitalism.

• The economy of WoW is stratified, much like a complex capitalistic economy, where participants have have various stratified roles. It's still about power and money.

• And I will show this through an analysis of the global economy of WoW, using several hundred hours of video data collected by my good friend and colleague, Jin Ge - who was the first person to research and capture on video the phenomenon of Chinese Goldfarmers.

4.) WHAT IS WoW AND HOW DOES IT CAPTURE HOW THE ONLINE WORLD IS TIED TO OFFLINE SOCIAL ISSUES?

• On the micro-level, it is a popular online MMORPG that is played by gamers who play for pleasure in-game around the world. The goal is to kill as many monsters as possible, to gain more gold points and level up. The average age is 25 years old. Players can play together from any geographic location with a high-speed Internet connection, electricity, and a fast computer. Thus, this game is virtual in that players never have to meet physically to play together.

• On a macro-level, there are gamers, called goldfarmers, who play in-game for wages as a function of survival (to purchase shelter, food and basic living necessities).

• Within the group of gamers who play for pleasure lies a large number of players who buy WoW points with advanced powers, tools and points. Goldfarmers are real people who work to obtain virtual gold points to sell to gamers. Essentially, in WoW, players purchase the points of other players with real world currency. However, underlying this process is a stratified production system. The nature of the transactions and supply of gold-points for purchase is a global and economically stratified process. Gamers play for pleasure, while goldfarmers play to supply the means of expedited levels through selling their labor. Goldfarmers work in out-of-game factories by playing in-game to sell their points. They are located in low-wage countries, such as, China, and are almost always male. The goldfarmers are employed to produce WOW points to be sold on the world market, but it is not the individual goldfarmer who sells his product directly to the market. He sells his labor power to the owner of the goldfarm. The nature of the transactions and supply of gold-points for purchase is a global and economically stratified process. Jin Ge estimates that there are tens of thousands of goldfarm gaming workshops in China, employing up to half a million of workers.

5.) SOME INSIGHTS

a.) It's not just about access vs non-access, or skills vs non-skilled, it's about those with more social resources vs those with less social resources.

b.) These are not new forms of capitalism, don't romanticize it!

Informal economies are a trans-historical process and just because this is taking place in a new medium, does not mean it is a new form of capitalism. But particularly in late modern capitalism, we have to understand the role of value and why WoW's virtual economy isn't a new type of economy. At times, the discourse of virtual economies confers familiar hopes for Socialism to create new labor relations. I am going to use Moishe Postone's argument here on Socialism and extend it to virtual economies. Postone said that even though Socialism's redistributive policies were effective at changing the distribution of commodities, it did not change the actual structures of production. Socialism still used value as a measure of wealth, so value was tied to labor - so the structures of production couldn't change because they was tied to a form of abstracted labor that was always measured by its value. This same argument can be applied to virtual economies. As long as value is still the measure of wealth in society, it will be inextricably tied to labor. Therefore, relations of labor in a virtual economy will mirror what we have seen so far, which is the constant tensions of production. Any utopian visions for virtual economies to transform social structure should take into account that a change in platforms does not always mean a change in structures. The structural contradictions of production still exist because the fundamental framework has not changed. Postone’s reorientation of value reveals that “the systematic constraints imposed by capital’s global dynamic” holds true not only for industrial capitalism, but also for post-industrial digital economies. As long as value is a measure of wealth, complex virtual economies reproduce parallel conditions of labor power of material capitalist economies.

6.) WHAT ARE SOME TRENDS WE CAN FORECAST FROM THIS?

• Play is increasingly commodified in a complex global economy

• In a post-industrial economy, we see the phenomenon of skill saturation intensive labor in technology sectors. Aneesh's theory of the phenomenon of skill saturation highlights the decisive role of repetitive skills in a post-industrial information technology world. This type of labor means that every action of labor can be monitored and surveillanced.

• Governments will have a bigger role in virtual economies, for example China Central Bank's inquiry into QQ coins. And in China, how will the great internet-wall effect online global economies?

• The offline will be increasingly tied to the online and future analysis of online worlds should be tied to offline worlds.

• The poor, but not necessarily less skilled, wiil have a larger impact on the formal economy - we will see this in other areas, like the increased ownership of cellphones among migrant laborers in China and India

• • China's post-socialist dual economy is already considered to look more like a hybrid of a redistributive and market economy. We may be looking at an emerging tripartite post-socialist economy in China: redistributive, market and virtual. The question is to how they will be integrated and what type of combinations will be produced.

This talk was based off of my first paper that I wrote for my sociological theory class on Karl Marx. Being that I didn't write for many many years in any academic setting, the paper is horribly constructed, but I think the ideas are good . So now that I've given a talk on it, my goal is to rewrite it for journal submission. There you go - I've put it in writing on the internet - so that means I need to be held accountable now for my words right? :) or at least someone else will hold me accountable right? Here is the draft where the ideas were born - and in a few months I hope to have a more publishable draft.