coupled with the exhaustive digital footprints of their activity potentially provides a unique window into understanding how clandestine networks operate in other contexts.

 

WHAT IS GOLD FARMING?

While playing alone or with other players, MMOG players accumulate experience, armor, spells, and weapons to improve their power against computer non-player characters (NPCs). The virtual goods and in-game currency players acquire make their characters more powerful, and the acquisition of these items is one of the major goals of play. Virtual goods like in-game currency, scarce commodities, and powerful weapons require substantial investments of time to accumulate. However, these can also be obtained from other players within the game through trade and exchange.

“Gold farming” and “real money trading” refer to practices that involve the sale of virtual in-game resources for real-world money via exchanges outside of the game. The name stems from a variety of repetitive routines (“farming”), which are employed to accumulate virtual wealth (“gold”), which is sold to other players who lack the time or desire to accumulate their own in-game capital [ 3]. By repeatedly killing NPCs and looting the currency they carry, farmers accumulate currency, experience, or other forms of virtual capital that they exchange with other players for real money via transactions outside of the game. Other types of activities also fall under the banner of “real money trade”; players can sell rare weapons, armor, and spells within the game for offline money and accounts with elite characters have been known to sell for thousands of dollars.

Gold buyers then consume the gold they purchased in the game to obtain more powerful weapons, armor, and abilities for their avatars. This, in turn, accelerates players to higher levels and allows them to explore larger parts of the game world, confront more interesting and challenging enemies, and increase their social standing without having to invest much time in the tedious parts of completing quests and killing monsters for money and items.

“Gold farming has
been constructed
as a deviant activity
by both the game
developers as
well as the player
communities.”

Gold farming and real money trade operations originated in the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Ultima Online, in 1997. The practice grew rapidly with the parallel development of an e-commerce infrastructure in the late 1990s and the introduction of MMOGs into East Asian markets. Gold farming operations now appear to be concentrated in China where the combination of high-speed Internet penetration and low labor costs has facilitated the development of the trade.

Although outwardly innocuous,
gold farming has been constructed
as a deviant activity by both the game
developers as well as the player com-
munities for a variety of reasons. First,
in-game economies are designed with
carefully calibrated activities and
products that serve as sinks to remove
money from circulation. The injection
of farmed gold into the game economy
creates inflationary pressure, unin-
tended arbitrage opportunities, and
other perverse incentives that under-
mine the stability of the game econo-
my. Second, farmers’ activities often
overtly affect other players’ experienc-
es, for instance taking over profitable
regions of the game and preventing
other players from completing quests.
Farmers also employ anti-social com-
puter scripts (“bots”) to automate the
farming process that results in the un-
canny experience of zones filled with
players but bereft of social interac-
tions. Third, the game developers are
risk-averse to the legal implications of
sanctioning a multinational industry
estimated to generate between $100
million and $1 billion in revenue annu-
ally [ 4] while lacking legal jurisdiction,
precedent, or regulation.

HOW DO GOLD FARMERS BEHAVE?

Our initial work approached gold farming as a binary classification problem: you are either a gold farmer or you are not. What behavioral attributes influenced whether or not accounts and their characters were identified as gold farmers? First, a training set of known farmers caught by human players and customer service representatives from Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) gave us our reference set. Then, using deductive approaches like logistic regression as well as inductive machine learning techniques, we examined an anony-mized database constructed from both surveys and behavior data collected by the game maker. By combining self-reported demographics (like age, language, and gender) with gold farming behavior (like time played, money earned, NPCs killed), latent behavioral proxies (like quests completed, recipes learned, deaths), and behavioral patterns (like successive NPC kills), we classified players based on their likelihood of matching “caught” farmer’s patterns [ 5].

As expected, some variables such as speaking Chinese, playing for long periods of time, using recently established accounts, dying repeatedly, and avoiding quests greatly increased the odds of being identified as a gold farmer. This meshed well with journalistic and community accounts of gold farm-