“Gold farming” and ICT4D

Salon (via Boing Boing) had an article about Richard Heeks’ interesting economic and developmental analysis of so-called “gold farming”, titled “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming”: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games”. Gold farming is the fairly common (albeit unethical and in some circumstances even illegal) practice of playing online video games for the sole purposes of collecting in-play money and valuables to sell for real-world money. Heeks claims that this has become a very lucrative activity for developing countries especially with several players involved, including individuals all over the world (often sending remittances to developing countries) and even enterprises whose primary business is gold farming.
Heeks sees this as an important issue for many fields including economics and the ICT4D (ICT for development) field. Heeks claims:
“Gold farming presents two things [for ICT4D]. First, a current model for earning money via an Internet-connected PC. Second, an example of a possible future model in which Internet-connected workers in developing countries produce a wide range of virtual goods and services. For both these reasons, the ICT4D field should be taking a keen interest in gold farming.”
I certainly agree with Heeks that this is something that the ICT4D field should be aware of, but I do not see this as being something that the ICT4D field should be especially occupied with. First of all, as far as I can tell, gold farming is merely about making money and has little, if anything, to do with the types of impact the ICT4D agenda hopes to achieve in terms of the advancement of the knowledge economy, education and encouraging equal access to, and distribution of, the fruits of globalization. Tying up scarce computers in schools and telecenters in developing countries with dubious activities in online virtual worlds is something I hope that few would condone, no matter what the fiscal returns might be. Heeks does address some negative sides of this development, ex. when he compares it to the exploitation of Chinese immigrant workers in the US in the 19th century (hence the “quaint” title given to some Chinese gold farmers, “playbourers”).