Making progress in an online multiplayer game takes time. Wouldn’t it be nice if you, the busy first-world player, could pay someone in the third world to do your leveling and earn virtual gold?

The answer is “No,” you maniac. When you’re paying someone else to play your game for you, you stop playing. But people keep shelling out for the services, and according to Manchester University, it’s a $500 million industry annually.

“I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry,” said Professor Richard Heeks from the University of Manchester who wrote the report.

“In a way that is still true. It’s just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands.”

The gold they earn up goes on sale via hundreds of websites, many of which you will see advertising on Google AdSense if you do a search for “gold farming.” Selling gold is against the WoW terms of service, which states that all the little virtual items on their servers are their property and theirs alone.

“But what’s the harm?” you might say? Well, there’s plenty of good reasons to keep it legit for you, the player. For one thing, it’s an affront to gamesmanship that someone can buy their way to the top. More importantly, if the virtual stuff is declared to have real value, it gives the IRS a very real claim to a cut of every pretend coin you earn while playing, even if you don’t sell it to someone else.

The gold farming industry is now comparable to India’s entire outsourcing industry. Chew on that for a while.

80% of the industry is in China, though the paper mentions that Chinese gold farmers are now outsourcing to Vietnamese players, where costs of living are lower.

The average gold farmer earns $145 monthly. Doesn’t seem like much, but I happen to have a houseguest this week who worked in China for the Peace Corps, and her monthly salary was $136.

Nice work, if you can get it.

Popularity: 2% [?]