Supply and Demand – Sweatshops for the Cyberspace

These young men work in shifts up to 10 or 12 hours a day, with few breaks in between. They make an income comparable to a local blue collar job, the only difference is most of them enjoy their job so much they perform the same labour on their breaks and off work. After all, their job is to literally play computer games. More specifically, games that classify as a Massively Multi Player Online game aka MMO.

The whole point of MMO is to create a character in a virtual world, raise levels through experience points, and engaging in a virtual market over virtual items with virtual currency. Naturally, gamers with more disposable income, and less inclined to invest in considerable time to build up their characters or unlock rare items, look for a more direct solution: purchasing them with real money.

With Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand at work, businesses emerge around the world, employing people in developing nations to meet this demand. They call this the “virtual economy”.

'Depending on how you define "sweatshop", I guess we qualify,' says Patrick Bernard, head of one such firm based in northern California, which employ some of their workers in a Romanian apartment.

'If you mean exploiting helpless people and making them work 15 plus hours a day at repetitive tasks that they hate in appalling work conditions, that's not us.

Bernard makes an appealing case for such occupation:

'If you mean employing people that don't mind "playing" a computer game for eight to 10 hours a day at a wage that would starve a UK resident but it is a decent salary for an employed university graduate in their country then yeah, that's us. One of the things that gets me up in the morning is knowing that the people in Romania are making a decent living out of what I'm doing, and that without it some of them might have turned bad. I feel very good about that. It's a decent job, not a career perhaps, but there are far worse things they could be doing.'

So in a world where menial jobs are losing to automation, perhaps the rise of a virtual economy employing people with no better alternatives is a justification for its existence.