To understand how Chinese gold farmers have begun to alter the economic climate in China, we must first understand what gold farming is and how it came to be. Relative to MMORPGs, gold farmers are players who stay online for extremely long hours and collect, or “farm”, large amounts of in-game currency and goods for the purpose of exchanging or selling them for real-world money (Toscano 10). In this article, gold farmers refer to players who spend the approximately the same amount of time farming online as an average person would spend working during the week. For simplicity and uniformity, I will explain the technicalities of gold farming as a function of a MMORPG using World of Warcraft (WoW) as the primary example. Many gold farmers are also known as “Chinese farmers” or “China farmers” due to high number of gold farmers located in China (Barboza). In 2011, it was estimated that approximately 80% of gold farmers were in China (Usigan). As of 2005, approximately 100,000 people in China were employed as gold farmers for WoW, which constitutes approximately 0.4% of all online gamers in China (Barboza). On average, Chinese gold farmers typically work 12-hour shifts and sometimes up to 18-hour shifts (Toscano 10). In this case, gold farming is very much a real job as they spend more than a typical 40-hour workweek on such a task. However, wages largely depend on location and the size of the gold farming company. 

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