An interesting video posted by Annie OK , shown at left, is funny for people who actually participate in the synthetic world of Second Life and could be taken too seriously by people who are unfamiliar with Second Life - or other virtual worlds.
The video is exceedingly well done - and there are highlights of it that really tease out some of the problems of real world sweatshops. There is a grey middle area that the video neglects - purposefully, I am sure. The virtual sweatshop in the video isn't really practical for some obvious reasons. Paying someone 90 cents per hour may be a corporate dream, but the reality is that anyone with the broadband access and so on would have to be making substantially more if they are paying their own real world bills. Electricity, internet costs, food, water, shelter... even in the developing world, it is unlikely that working in a virtual sweatshop would be anything but a net loss for an 'employee'. But who cares about the employees, anyway? That is, after all, an implicit callousness that creates what we would call a sweatshop.
In November, 2006 I wrote Virtual Sweatshops Or A Digital Solution for People in Developing Nations? - pointing to how China, for example, is using synthetic worlds to employ people in the real world to create virtual items. In worlds other than Second Life, this is generally known as farming.
Farming, in and of itself, is an area of great debate. Edward Castronova accidentally started the glorification of farming before he wrote Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. He simply noticed something and wrote about it. Authors such as Julian Dibbell later came along and, in a seemingly purposeful way, glorified farming. The trouble some have with farming is that in MMORPGs, farming can destroy the very context of the environment. References to RMT (Real Money Transactions) being bad for such games are easy to find - the basis of the criticism is fairly solid: If you can just buy improvements, then what reason is there to do tasks required to get the items? Of course, this may simply be a matter of people who are unwilling to do their own tasks and are willing to pay others to do them. The premise of farming is built on that.
So, in most virtual worlds at this time, at least some people consider farming to destroy the basis of the game. As someone who has swung his share of swords in MMORPGs and MUDs, the biggest turnoff I've had has been people getting 'fluffed'1 by others as well as 'self-fluffing' through RMT. It does affect the experience of others who actually are playing within the rules.
But Second Life is different. First of all, there really are no quests other than, perhaps, the virtual land bug. Everything is wide open. People own their own copyrighted materials, and trademarking of avatars has already begun. There is really no 'fluffing' because the exchange of Linden dollars to US dollars is run by Linden Lab itself, as well as 'authorized exchanges'. At the center, with no quests virtual world owner created quests, there is no game play and therefore there is little in the way of cheating. So, too, it is difficult for me to write that farming in and of itself actually happens in Second Life. Farming in other worlds is simply commerce within Second Life.
And because of that commerce, there is a lot of opportunity for real businesses to flourish - be they registered businesses or not. Many businesses actually run in Second Life are not registered companies in the real world - they are sole proprietorships or other forms of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) based only in Second Life itself.
In the real world, the tangible world of business, a plausible generalization at this time would be that developing nations typically make registering a company a painful, costly and time consuming process. It is easy to postulate that forward-thinking people in developing nations see synthetic worlds as an area of opportunity where they would otherwise have much less - they can bypass many formalities in the real world at this point and simply generate funds by creating or reselling items specific to Second Life. The second they pierce the synthetic veil of virtual worlds and offer real items for sale, they need to have an established real world business to be considered credible - but registration of a business is not always necessary.
But does a developing nation's infrastructure support virtual world usage? Generally speaking, no. With 80% of the world still offline, unable to access the Internet, it is pretty clear in terms of the Internet and virtual worlds that the people who might gain the most benefit are unable to participate. It's funny how that works.
Some places, like China, actually have real 'virtual sweatshops' - but are they really sweatshops? Take a look at the links and videos in this article, and consider whether synthetic worlds offer another opportunity to capitalize on the sweatshop concept... or if they give people opportunities that they would not otherwise have.
The problem, I think, is that both are true. Just as most sweatshops in the real world.
1 I don't know that the phrase is still in use, but that is what we called anyone who was given items without having earned them. It is a phrase borrowed from the porn industry; a 'fluffer' is someone who prepares people before they amble on the set in all their glory to do what... people in porn movies do. Thus the phrase itself demonstrates a bias, and I do not deny my own bias in those settings. I don't work on a character to have some little twit get quest items by simply saying 'gimme'. And so, I don't play MMORPGs where fluffing is prevalent.
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