Post by Morreion on Aug 31, 2010 9:14:32 GMT -5
15 Minutes of Fame: Cory Doctorow on gold farming (WoW.com)
You might know Doctorow from the website Boing Boing- interesting guy.
Doctorow's latest young adult novel, For the Win, pries open the seams of the shady scene behind MMO gold farming. Its young protagonists are gold farmers and gamers themselves. Doctorow has woven his own experience and sensibilities with focused research to outline a world of gold farming that sprawls far beyond the lines of cartoon-image gold farmers that most of us have painted in our heads. We chatted by phone with Doctorow for this lengthy conversation on gold farming and game economies, plus a companion piece at our sister publication Massively.com on gaming culture and his recent fiction.
I understand that you talked with a lot of gold farmers themselves during your research for the book, is that right?
That's right, yes. I was able to work with contacts I had to talk to people who owned gold farms, and some people who worked in gold farms, and then a lot of people who'd studied gold farms and had spent time in different ones all around the country. One of the things that I rapidly learned about gold farms is that if you ask five different people who have studied them or worked in them or owned them to describe how gold farms work, you'll get five different answers. I couldn't figure this out at first; it wasn't like I thought they were lying. And what I realized was that because it's not an organized industry, because it's against the rules to gold farm, nobody knows how gold farmers do it. So every gold farm sort of works out their own way of doing it. They invent their own techniques. They invent their own economics. They invent their own whatever, right?
We talk about gold farming as though it's a monolithic activity, but it's actually lots and lots and lots of fairly dissimilar activities, from what I can work out.
That's right, yes. I was able to work with contacts I had to talk to people who owned gold farms, and some people who worked in gold farms, and then a lot of people who'd studied gold farms and had spent time in different ones all around the country. One of the things that I rapidly learned about gold farms is that if you ask five different people who have studied them or worked in them or owned them to describe how gold farms work, you'll get five different answers. I couldn't figure this out at first; it wasn't like I thought they were lying. And what I realized was that because it's not an organized industry, because it's against the rules to gold farm, nobody knows how gold farmers do it. So every gold farm sort of works out their own way of doing it. They invent their own techniques. They invent their own economics. They invent their own whatever, right?
We talk about gold farming as though it's a monolithic activity, but it's actually lots and lots and lots of fairly dissimilar activities, from what I can work out.
You might know Doctorow from the website Boing Boing- interesting guy.
