Recent searches
Search options
In 2004, my wife came home from the Game Developers Conference with a wild story. A presenter there claimed that he had set up a sweatshop on the US/Mexican border where he paid low-wage workers to do repetitive tasks in Everquest to amass virtual gold, which was sold on Ebay to lazier, richer players
1/
The presenter was a well-known bullshitter and people were skeptical at the time, but my imagination was fired. I sat down at my keyboard and wrote "Anda's Game," a story about "gold farmers" who form an in-game, transnational trade-union under their bosses' noses:
https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/
2/
"Anda's Game" was a surprise hit. It got reprinted in the year's Best American Short Stories, won a bunch of awards, and Jen Wang and Firstsecond turned it into the NYT bestselling graphic novel "In Real Life":
https://firstsecondbooks.com/books/new-book-in-real-life-by-cory-doctorow-and-jen-wang/
Then, in 2010, I adapted the story into *For the Win*, a YA novel about gold farming and global trade unions (led by the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, AKA IWWW, AKA Webblies):
https://craphound.com/category/ftw/
3/
There's an old cyberpunk writers' joke that "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion." Alas, my parable-like stories about how digital technology enables the creation of new, high-tech sweatshops that arbitrage weak labor protections in the global south to worsen working conditions everywhere embodied the punchline to that cyberpunk joke. Over and over, these stories became touchstones for all kinds of global, digital labor exploitation and global, digital labor solidarity.
4/
But sometimes, the stories don't merely analogize to describe current situations - they end up *very* on-the-nose. Nowhere is that more true than with the blockchain-based, play-to-earn, NFT-infected gaming world, whose standard-bearer is the scandal-haunted Axie Infinity.
5/
This week, my mentions have been full of "Don't create the Torment Nexus" jokes referencing Neirin Gray Desai's outstanding *Rest of World* story on the rise and implosion of the "play-to-earn" Minecraft/blockchain game Critterz:
https://restofworld.org/2022/minecraft-nft-ban-critterz/
6/
Critterz was yet another one of those blockchain games, but they made a fatal mistake: they built their virtual sweatshop on Minecraft, whose parent company, Mojang (a subsidiary of Microsoft), banned NFT integration, stating: "blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods."
7/
Very quickly, the in-game money issued by Critterz tanked, and players - both the poor people who actually played the game, and the rich people who bought the treasures they earned from them - ran for the exits.
Even without Minecraft's ban on NFTs, play-to-earn is in serious trouble. As the sector seeks a new lifeline, some *wild* ideas are emerging, straight out of the Torment Nexus.
8/
For example, Desai talked to Mikhai Kossar, who consults on NFT games. Kossar proposed that the future of play-to-earn might be poor people pretending to be non-player characters to give richness to the in-game experience of wealthy people. They could "just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible."
9/
There's another tech joke, that "AI" stands for "Absent Indians" - the gag being that the "AIs" you interact with in the world are actually low-waged Indian workers pretending to be bots.
Once again - and I honestly can't believe I have to say this - that joke is a warning, not a suggestion.
--
Image:
Jen Wang (modified)
Critterz (modified)
eof/