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 |
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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 |
Scopus Subject Areas
- Cultural Studies
- Communication
- Anthropology
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Applied Psychology
- Human-Computer Interaction
User-Defined Keywords
- Chinese Internet
- critical development studies
- digital labor
- gold farming
- ITC4D
- worker empowerment