Abstract
This study investigates how gold-farming contributed to worker empowerment and local development in China in the 2000s. Adopting a critical development studies perspective, I appraise the positive social impact of gold-farming but also explicate how it is constrained by the capitalist economic and authoritarian political contexts. I find that gold-farming offered workers informational mobility and low-overhead entrepreneurship opportunities and that it created employment and enhanced social order in marginalized localities. But it provided only slightly better wages and work conditions than the average Chinese factory. A major reason was exploitation by global capitalist corporations and local officials. My primary dataset was collected between 2005 and 2008 from participant observation and interviewing in three gold farms, multiple and in-depth interviews of over 40 insiders, and online documentary sources.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 783-803 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Games and Culture |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 17 Nov 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2023 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is partly funded by a Faculty Research Grant offered by Hong Kong Baptist University (FRG/06-07/II-42) and a Strategic Public Policy Grant offered by the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong SAR (4001-SPPR-09).Keywords
- Chinese Internet
- critical development studies
- digital labor
- gold farming
- ITC4D
- worker empowerment