>Do you know who these people are that you're killing?
She didn't answer, but she had an idea. She killed four more and shook out her wrists.
> They're working for less than a dollar a day. The shirts they make are traded for gold and the gold is sold on eBay. Once their avatars have leveled up, they too are sold off on eBay. They're mostly young girls supporting their families. They're the lucky ones: the unlucky ones work as prostitutes.
> The bosses used to use bots, but the game has countermeasures against them. Hiring children to click the mouse is cheaper than hiring programmers to circumvent the rules. I've been trying to unionize them because they've got a very high rate of injury. They have to play for 18-hour shifts with only one short toilet break. Some of them can't hold it in and they soil themselves where they sit.
> look
she typed, exasperated.
> it's none of my lookout, is it. the world's like that. lots of people with no money. im just a kid, theres nothing i can do about it.
> When you kill them, they don't get paid.
no porfa necesito mi plata
> When you kill them, they lose their day's wages. Do you know who is paying you to do these killings?
they're wrecking the game economy and they're providing a gold-for-cash supply that lets rich noobies buy their way in. They don't care about the game and neither do you
The kids in the sweatshops were being exploited by grownups. It was why their situation was so impossible: the adults who were supposed to be taking care of them were exploiting them.
2 comments:
I don't know about sweatshops in SL, but they are already at work in World of Warcraft:
http://www.newmediamusings.com/blog/2006/09/world_of_warcra.html
This article also talks about the addictiveness of WOW, and there has also been media reports of divorces by SL "widows" or "widowers" :
http://www.slate.com/id/2172145/
The real world joins the social networks!
Doug
Much of the evidence on sweatshops and divorces, etc. are anecdotal. In other words, it's based on reports of specific individual cases rather than controlled, clinical studies. Kind of like the guy my Dad met who told him that his neuropathy (numbness in extremities) was cured due to laser treatments on his feet. There's no clinical study evidence that laser treatments work, but anecdotal evidence abounds.
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