Chinese Gold-Farming in the 2000s: Worker Empowerment and Local Development Through Video Games-Based Digital Labor

This study investigates how gold-farming contributed to worker empowerment and local development in China in the 2000s. Adopting a critical development studies perspective, I appraise the positive social impact of gold-farming but also explicate how it is constrained by the capitalist economic and a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGames and culture Vol. 18; no. 6; pp. 783 - 803
Main Author Chew, Matthew Ming-tak
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.09.2023
Subjects
critical development studies
worker empowerment
ITC4D
Chinese Internet
digital labor
gold farming
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Summary:This study investigates how gold-farming contributed to worker empowerment and local development in China in the 2000s. Adopting a critical development studies perspective, I appraise the positive social impact of gold-farming but also explicate how it is constrained by the capitalist economic and authoritarian political contexts. I find that gold-farming offered workers informational mobility and low-overhead entrepreneurship opportunities and that it created employment and enhanced social order in marginalized localities. But it provided only slightly better wages and work conditions than the average Chinese factory. A major reason was exploitation by global capitalist corporations and local officials. My primary dataset was collected between 2005 and 2008 from participant observation and interviewing in three gold farms, multiple and in-depth interviews of over 40 insiders, and online documentary sources.
ISSN:1555-4120
1555-4139
DOI:10.1177/15554120221134459