IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 26

of gold per hour and, eventually, as much as 2 million units of
gold every 15 minutes. All told, that translated into as much
as $2400 per hour of real money: $80 per hour per character,
and Thurman had up to 30 characters at his disposal. It was
around then that he quit his day job as a software consultant.

MAP HACK: Thurman's game-playing system earned gold by making maps of
the virtual world and selling them at virtual cartography shops. He simplified
the mapmaking process with a hack that displayed buildings without their roofs.

proof countermeasure, he realized. Just in case his activity
aroused suspicion, he rigged his bank of computers to alert
him via text message or instant message to odd bursts of
activity-for example, when a person from Electronic Arts
was confronting one of his automated systems to see if it was,
in fact, a real player or just a proxy.
That happened a few times, Thurman says, and they were
close calls. One time he was traveling in Arizona when an instant
message came through on his phone. The game server had sent a
message to his client indicating that a game master, an employee
or volunteer who, in the form of a game character, roves the game
enforcing rules, was on screen. Game masters are identifiable by
a special flag their avatars carry. "GM Alert!" the message read.
Thurman had set up the machines to automatically log out his
other characters when that happened, just in case. But he left his
one character online with the GM because it'd be too suspicious
if he suddenly vanished.
Game masters try to verify that players are in front of their
monitors, often by challenging them with questions that they
presumably could answer only if they were sitting in front of
the screen. But Thurman had anticipated such a challenge, and
he had rigged his instant messaging system so that it could
send crude but useful screen shots to his laptop computer. "Are
you there?" the GM asked. "Yes," Thurman replied. "Prove it,"
the GM replied. "What color is my shirt?" No problem. "Red,"
Thurman typed after glancing at the screen shot. And the
GM went on his way.
It took Thurman nearly
two years, from February
2 0 02 to December
2003, to perfect his system.
The "labor of love," as he
describes it, paid off. Soon
he was making 45 000 units

36	 IEEE	Spectrum	|	December	2007	|	NA		

www.spectrum.ieee.org

top:	rICHArD	tHurmAN;	bottom:	SANDbox	StuDIo

W

ith "game gold" in hand, the next step is converting the virtual cash to real-world money. Dozens of
companies are happy to help gamers do that. The biggest is Hong Kong-based IGE, which Thurman compares to Wal-Mart. The company employs more than
800 people in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Founder Brock
Pierce said in a phone interview last year that the site brokers
real-money transactions, taking a piece off the top as it connects sellers of virtual gold, earned legitimately, with buyers.
He put the estimated annual earnings at $700 million. (IGE did
not respond to requests for an update.)
But the secondary market is, to put it mildly, shadowy. It
revolves to some extent around hackers who scoff at efforts by
online game companies to fight against automated software. It
also depends on hundreds of loosely organized gold farmers in
China, who game for money around the clock and then cash out
their winnings to online brokers. They may not be breaking any
rules, technically, but they are sure violating the spirit of the
games. In a sense, such people constitute a manual version of the
automated software written by the likes of Thurman.
Documentary filmmaker Ge Jin has been chronicling the gold
farms in China for a movie to be released next year. He says that
while gold farming may be an oddity-if not anathema-in the
West, it's more widely accepted abroad. "The unemployment
rate is soaring in China," he says, "so [hired gold farmers] are
happy to have a job, which pays no less than other jobs available
to them. The majority of them are game fans anyway; they are
happy that they can be paid for playing games and can enjoy
games that are expensive to subscribe to or even those not
imported into China."
According to a June report in The New York Times Magazine by
Julian Dibbell, a typical gold farmer in China works 12-hour days
for weeks on end, with only a few days of rest per month. The
farmers work at long tables strewn with computer monitors and
keyboards in small rooms crowded with dozens of people and
thick with cigarette smoke. Dibbell estimated that 100 000 such
workers are employed in what are called youxi gongzuoshi, or
gaming workshops.
Unlike Thurman, the Chinese workers actually do go out into
the "worlds" and game. But they do so in teams-which gives
them a distinct advantage in certain situations. For example,
they can gang up on giant monsters whose slaughter will be
rewarded with big piles of gold. "Gold farmers attack high-level
mothers," Thurman says, a little enviously. "They're not cooking birds."
Patrick Bernard, 31, joined a worldwide gold-farming team
after working as a product manager for a Silicon Valley dot-com
(he declines to say which one). The goldfarming work quickly became tedious, he
says. "We just pooled monsters and killed
them for dozens of hours," he says. "I could
generate $1000 in gold per hour; my
pay, at the time, was $15
per hour." Bernard now
works on the other side
of the business, running
Gamer's Loot, an online


http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum December, 2007

IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - Cover1
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - Cover2
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 1
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 2
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 3
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 4
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 5
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 6
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 7
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 8
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 9
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 10
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 11
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 12
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 13
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 14
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 15
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 16
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 17
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 18
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 19
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 20
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 21
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 22
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 23
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 24
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 25
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 26
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 27
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 28
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 29
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 30
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 31
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 32
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 33
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 34
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 35
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 36
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 37
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 38
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 39
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 40
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 41
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 42
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 43
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 44
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 45
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 46
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 47
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 48
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 49
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 50
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 51
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 52
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - Cover3
IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - Cover4
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