A new and exciting form of sweatshop:

THE room is crammed with Chinese workers stripped to the waist. Poorly
paid and exhausted from their punishing shifts, they chain-smoke and
rub their eyes, while their colleagues sleep two to a mat on the floor.

But this Shanghai sweatshop is not churning out T-shirts, trainers
or children’s toys. Its workers are known in the computer games world
as “gold farmers”. They are playing online games and winning virtual
gold, which the owners of the gold farms then sell on to cash-rich,
time-poor Westerners for real money.

Ge
Jin, a PhD student at the University of California in San Diego, has
filmed these scenes for a forthcoming documentary on the economics of
internet gaming. He believes that hundreds of thousands of people in
China are now dependent on gold farming for their income.

A good or a bad idea? Well, Ben Hoyle (or whoever fed him the story) actually had the good sense to go and talk to an economist:

Professor Edward Castronova, an American specialist in MMOG
economics, agrees that gold farmers are bad for gaming, but says they
may enjoy better conditions than other sweatshop workers.

“When some lawyer’s kid has a more powerful character than
mine just because daddy let him buy enough gold online to get him a set
of über armour, that stinks for me as a normal game player. Everything
I know about low-wage labour markets tells me that the wages they are
making equal or exceed local market wages.

“Working in a room made safe for computers is going to offer better conditions than working behind a plough in some field.”