1up.com has a great feature on MMOG sweatshops, Third-World based companies that "farm" currency and valuables from massive multiplayer games in order to sell them online. This is one that traditional Marxist would love: not only poor nations are doing jobs, but they are also having dirty fun for them! By dirty fun I mean doing the obnoxious part of these games. Ask any teenager anywhere in the world if they would like to get paid in order to play games all day and I bet that more than 99% would say yes... until they actually tried it. It's the online equivalent of working at the icecream parlor. It sounded like a great idea at the time until you are totally sick of eating ice cream and find yourself stuck on a shitty job, surrounded by colored fat. MMOG sweatshop workers are not even playing anymore: they are just coaching the bots that do the hard work for them. Welcome to the taylorization of MMOGs: in the golden days of exploitation (that's, er, a couple of years ago), sweatshop workers at least had to play the game. Now they have been replaced by virtual machines.

I think that the whole MMOG economy can have a fantastic alienation effect among players. Many players are actually happier on the virtual world than on their everyday "real" life. The fact that virtual gold can be so valuable in virtual life may help players to take a critical distance from things like real-world economy and realize that reality is just as much an illusion as WoW (or at least that they both work based on a similar structure). Will MMOG turn players into cynics or, even better, philosophers? I guess it's too early to tell, but MMOGs have the potential to become the greatest Brechtian device ever created (Brecht was a 20th century German playwriter who argued that the audiece should be aware of the fact that theater is artificial in order to take a critical attitude towards real life).