Tag Archives: gold farming
Getting paid to party: what is the difference between work and play?
July 17, 2010… like StarCraft in front of television audiences of millions. Hundreds of thousands of virtual gold farmers in China, Vietnam and elsewhere are paid an hourly wage to harvest treasures in online games like EverQuest 2. And most recently, companies like CrowdFlower have started to hire gamers and online community members to carry out real chores like categorizing search engine results and verifying links. The catch: these workers are paid in virtual currency.
No wonder some punters …
Tags: Adam Smith Crowdflower EverQuest games gold farmers Karl Marx StarCraft virtual currency work
Adam Smith, Crowdflower, EverQuest, games, gold farmers, Karl Marx, StarCraft, virtual currency, work | 6 CommentsSome work is born digital: from gold farmers to game masters
June 1, 2010… agriculture and other shady bits
Perhaps the most extreme example of born-digital work is gold farming : harvesting valuable assets inside a massively-multiplayer online game and selling them for real money. A similar service is powerleveling, which involves charging a fee for playing another player’s character, so that the character gains experience points. Another is boosting, which refers to making one’s own character act as a sort of bodyguard to another player’s …
Work Hard, Play Hard (then Die Hard)
December 21, 2009… that hundreds of thousands people are now paid to play online games, in what have been coined “Gold Farms”. These “workers” play the games specifically to produce virtual goods and services, which are then sold by their employers to gamers worldwide for real money. These people are actually getting paid to play computer games.
While the use for computer game currency is obviously limited, the development of crowdsourcing (where firms outsource problems to the online community) has …
Tags: gold farming Mechanical Turk turking work workaholism world of warcraft
gold farming, Mechanical Turk, turking, work, workaholism, world of warcraft | 2 CommentsSeptember 27, 2011
… : the quest for a substance – known as the philosopher’s stone – that could turn lead into gold and even prolong life.
Alas, no one ever succeeded in this quest ( aside from Paul Coelho ), and the only people who still believe that such a transformation is possible are boy wizards and American Idol contestants.
That is, until now.
From boring tasks to gaming gold
At Microtask we practice alchemy by turning the menial tasks that everyone hates into fun, online games.
Our …
Crowdsourcing and machine translation: the start of a beautiful friendship
June 30, 2011… Here is an extract from our result:
Our country is poor and will remain so,
if it’s gold you want.
A stranger walks by us proud,
but this is the land we love,
its forests, its mountains and its reefs,
they to us are dear.
Dear GT, thank you. It is an honor to be your collaborator and friend!
Inviting the crowd
I’m sure you can see the “crowdsourcing potential” of this human/computer approach. I just ask a native Finnish crowd to do the pre-editing phase …
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