Uebermorgen - Chinese Gold

In China there are over 2000 Online-Gaming Workshops that hire people (over 500.000) to play online games such as World of Warcraft (WoW) day and night. The gaming workers produce in-game currency, equipments, and whole characters that are sold to American and European Gamers via Ebay. These people are called „Chinese Gold Farmers”. The future is now!

Keywords:
Metallic - Alternative Energy Sources - Trade Agreements - Ghostbuster, Roaming - Steel, sugar and services - Consumer-made content and value - 1500 Gold $ 131.99 - close Internet cafés in Beijing to prevent the spread of SARS - Modified sees/crop, hydrogen – The Myspace angle – Media Hacking – prepaid Pass9 - a group of WOW players in China committed mass suicide, virtual die-ins – Taxes, copyright and Freedom of Speach, in game civil rights - Unions fighting Louis Vuitton living oceanfront - Boomtimes in Kuala Lumpur – Kaogma Festival - Megaphone diplomacy - New cartoon uproar

Economy / Inflation
In Warcraft, it’s the currency itself that’s being overproduced, not just any product. That means it’ll take more units of that currency to exchange for any product. Inflation. The price of everything goes up. Everything you worked so hard to save up suddenly becomes worth so much less. The Warcraft economy appears to be on the lip of this plunge and administrators are taking steps to curb inflation. When they find a career farmer, they ban the character. Now the farming company has to re-buy the game and set up a new account. This makes the process of creating these goods overseas more expensive, and functions similar to a tariff (which is a protective tax). There is a balance, which in the real world, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve, and International Organizations try to maintain. And by maintain, I mean getting as much cheap shit for themselves as possible without throwing the system completely out of whack. (In the finance industry, human rights is a footnote, if anything.) What lies ahead for the Warcraft economy? Let’s keep watching it in the future.