At the redesigned American Scene blog, Matt Frost posts on "All Candy All the Time", riffing off the phenomenon of "Chinese Gold Farmers" who are paid actual money to play World of Warcraft or other big multi-user role-playing games, accumulating points (or "gold") for Western players. Those Western players want to get to higher levels in the game, but don't want to spend time actually playing the game at lower levels to accumulate the necessary points. So they effectively pay the Chinese to do that for them.
Bizarre! But what are the implications for—say—computer system administrators, who could also "farm out" mundane tasks to overseas cheap labor? Or—gulp!—perhaps their supervisors will do that anyway?
Dang, just when I was getting the hang of this job.
Anyway, Matt's short post has a lot of interesting twists and turns, and fascinating links you'll want to follow. But I wanted to quote this in particular about those gold farmers:
Through this Ricardian alchemy, players in wealthy nations escape days, even weeks, of drudge leisure."Drudge leisure." I love that, and (unfortunately) know exactly what it means.
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