BBrodzkiART BLOG: In and Out - Censorship report on World of Warcraft Gold Farming Websites in times of Virtual Currency Ban in China

Abstract

This report concerns the issue of Chinese government forbidding virtual items trade and exchange, and their gold farming companies bypassing this law. It deals with Internet censorship in the Republic of China, and focuses on unfolding the described problem by applying it to examples drawn from one of the most immersive virtual worlds. All this is explained by a study conducted on the censorship of websites, and a discussion of findings related to the issue.

Introduction

The emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, opened a completely new branch for economies all around the world. This particular branch of trade via gaming started probably as soon as first virtual items have been crafted. In time, changing real money into virtual currency became even more popular, flowing alongside the intense evolution of the Internet and the MMO gaming industry. Soon after, the range of virtual economy started to cover not only gold and items, but also characters (powerleveling), vehicles (mounts), animal pets (companions), giving an opportunity to ‘boost‘ one’s avatar with in-game achievements, reputation, skills, etc. Richard Heeks from Manchester University points out the importance of certain historical aspects surrounding the rise of virtual economies: First cash payments in multiuser dungeons, and the appearance of ebay.com (Hunter, 2006 and Lewis, 2006 in Heeks, R., 2008).

World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying game (MMORPG), produced by Blizzard Entertainment, one of the world’s largest gaming corporations. It consists of more than eleven and a half million players from Europe, America, and Asia, giving the company billions of dollars of income each year.

Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China became an important issue for virtual world explorers since the Chinese government banned virtual goods trade within the borders of its realm. The incident that happened by the end of June 2009 did not generate much attention at the time. Even though the decree of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce may have affected millions of people who make their living through gold farming, minor blog and press releases appeared on the web.

According to the Ministry of Commerce all this is supposed to prevent virtual goods affecting the real economy:

"The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain
exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and
services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services, the
Ministries said (Claburn T., Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).

Same author provides with some quantitative data, as he explains that virtual currency trade in China exceeded an amount of several billion yuan in 2008, which is around 146 million dollars, and is meant to be growing by 20% each year. He also quotes Richard Heeks’ study exposing that the virtual trade business employs hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, producing income ranging between two hundred million and one billion dollars (Heeks R.,“Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on Gold Farming“, 2008; in Claburn T., Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).

All this proves that virtual goods economy, surrounded by a governmental ban, having an extremely vast and diverse ecosystem of users, and large amounts of money involved; is in a way a key factor in the debate concerning Chinese Internet censorship. This study is going to prove how does the Chinese government enforce its rules upon such a widespread industry.

Methodology

To conduct the study I have chosen a sample of forty websites from around the world. Because I wanted to include websites that are commonly accessed by the users, all of the domains were chosen on the basis of an outcome of a google search. The first twenty sites were chosen from the list generated by google.com, and the second part of the sample group was chosen from google.cn, excluding the duplicated websites from the previous search. This made me choose the sample from the first 2-3 pages of each of the used regions.

While searching for a sample group I queried both google searches for the sentence “Buy WOW Gold”. I realized that queries like “Buy Gold”, “Buy Virtual Gold”, produce a much poorer outcome of the search. Since World of Warcraft is one of the dominant virtual worlds in which I am particularly interested, adding the word “WOW” improved the validity of the study by making the list related to an exact environment.

I have chosen my sample according to some specific rules. The first and most important one was reliability of the content. While looking at this aspect of the sampled websites, I tried to pick ones that seemed not to be Internet scams or cons. I looked at the system of payment for the virtual goods, and if it was in any way disturbing or suspicious, I abandoned the site marking it as unreliable and I have not included it in the study. I also analyzed the websites by the graphics used: if the design of a site was not related to either the game in which it operated, nor exposing
the link to virtual goods trade, I also left the site behind. Fortunately most of the accessed sites from the first pages of each google search passed my reliability test.

The second aspect was based on the range of the company’s work. This means that all of the chosen sites had to supply virtual gold for at least one game, which in my study was World of Warcraft. It is important to add here that many of the companies responsible for virtual goods trade, deal items on many more platforms than just one game. Furthermore, each of the games or platforms that can be used as a basis for virtual goods trade is based in more than one place in the world. In this case, each game will have multiple servers on which it is placed, and multiple locations around the world. All this made me choose my sample group of websites based on the range of their sale, so each of the websites had to sell virtual gold to at least one game (in my case World of Warcraft), on two continents (Europe and United States) to at least one server. According to my definition, to get included in my sample such a gold supply group had to fulfill the above requirements (To view the complete list of websites from the sample divided between the ones accessed by google.com and google.cn, please see appendix 1).

After creating the sample group I have run it through the Censorship Explorer program which I accessed through the Digital Methods website. This allowed me to check whether any of the sites from the target group were blocked in China, via running it through three different Chinese proxies. I inserted each of the URL addresses into the Harvester, run it twice for each proxy to be sure the analysis is done correctly (addresses of the proxies can be found in appendix 2, 3, 4 and 5). After setting up the program to check whether the sites are blocked or not, I have analyzed the generated HTTP response codes and produced results.

Results:

There were barely any complications while the study was conducted. The Censorship Explorer ran each of the URL addresses correctly: each website scan produced a response code, the country of proxy was China, and there were no time-outs. This happened for all of the four scans.

Still, no matter how simple the study seemed to be, it produced very unexpected results. Each of the HTTP response codes for the first and last scan stated “1.1 200 OK”, which means that hundred percent of the analyzed websites were fully transparent to the viewer.

The only problem that occurred was linked to one of the chosen proxies not responding correctly (Appendix 3). One of the websites did not produce any response code, two gave a connection-failed response, and the rest responded with a server error message. The second scan through the same proxy produced the same server error for the whole sample (Appendix 4). Since I was looking for a client error message, those two scans can easily be discarded due to proxy failure.

Since all of the sites produced positive response codes (Appendix 2 and 5), one can state that Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China does not cover sites that deal virtual goods and gold.

Discussion

Since the findings can be perceived as unusual or unexpected, I find it extremely important to discuss why the Chinese government did not ban the access to goldfarming websites. I believe that there are certain facts that lie behind the occurred phenomenon.

The first one may relate directly to the new Chinese law, and is much similar to what Heeks describes in the article by GamePolitics.com:

“This [new Chinese law] therefore is not about what gold farming
clients do: use real money to buy these virtual currencies; it’s the mirror
image. And it’s not about the major trade in gold farming such as
World of Warcraft, which relates to other types of virtual currency. And
it’s not about buying/selling in-game items. And it’s not about the
power-leveling of avatars. Bottom line: it’s not about gold farming.“
(Heeks, R. 2008 in GamePolitics.com)

Still, this explanation and definition of the author’s ‘Mirror Image’ is not fully clear. The notion carried by Heeks can be seen as opposing to what was said by Claburn in the introductory paragraph of this paper. If this particular law restriction is not about farming, but about the exchange rate that may affect China’s economy, farmers themselves had to find a way around the system. Similarly as described by Claburn in relation to gold farming and various companies‘ attitude towards it, smartly built operating systems may be the factors that drastically affect the fail of the ban on virtual currency trade. According to the author:

“Game companies typically forbid gold farming but committed virtual
currency traders find ways around such rules. Some game companies
have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built
virtual commerce into their game infrastructure“ (Claburn T.,
Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).

In this case, what I find particularly important to add is the thought of Dean Takahashi, which proves that Gold Farms as companies are built on a very smart and careful basis, commonly located outside of China’s boarders. In relation to why this specific law is so hard to enforce, Takahashi points out the factor of technicality:

“The practice of trading virtual goods for real money is easy to make
illegal, but hard to enforce. The gold farmers may not be affected...
because of a technicality. Most of China’s gold farmers, who operate in
sweatshops with dozens of fellow farmers, operate on servers on
foreign soil. The government can only control what goes on with
domestic servers.“ (Takahashi, D. GamesBeat, 30th June 2009)

Still, the most important fact exposed by the study and the target sample analysis is that all of the analyzed companies sell gold outside of China. If all the gold farming Chinese firms are located outside of the boarders, and they sell virtual currency to other countries, it is much probable that the Chinese government cannot do anything about it. This discussion exposes that there is an obvious confusion over the Chinese law regulations, presenting how in-game gathering of virtual resources bypasses a not fully operational restriction.

Nevertheless, some positive aspects of the study can be found while looking at the article by David Barboza in New York Times, where the author quotes an email received from one of the most influencing theoreticians of virtual and MMO environments:

“This action shows that at least one government is concerned about
the way virtual worlds challenge its control of society. (…) As virtual
currencies take over more and more purchasing power, control over
the effective money supply shifts from the central bank to the game
developers.” (Castronova, E., in Barboza, D. 30th June 2009)

References:

Barboza, David, 30th June 2009, “In China, New Limits on Virtual Currency”, New
York Times;

Claburn, Thomas, 29th June 2009, “China Limits Use Of Virtual Currency”,
www.informationweek.com;

GamePolitics.com, 1st July 2009, “Is Gold Farming Really banned? Confusion Over
China’s New Virtual Currency Rules”;

Heeks, Richard, 2008, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold
Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies
of Online Games“, University of Manchester;

Ministry of Commerce, 29th June 2009, “China bans use of virtual money for trading
in real goods”;

Takahashi, Dean, 30th June 2009, “China’s crackdown on virtual goods transactions
could ripple through the game economy”, GamesBeat;

Other sources:

♦ Internet Censorship Explorer
link: http://tools.issuecrawler.net/beta/proxies/

♦ HTTP response codes list
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

Appendices:

♦ Appendix 1: List of sampled websites

List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.cn):

http://www.2moonsdilvip.com/
http://www.beautifulwowgold.com/
http://www.gamegoldme.com/
http://www.wow-powerleveling-wowgold.com/
http://www.goldteamsale.com/
http://www.bye-wowgold.com/
http://www.ugamesale.com/
http://www.mywowgoldsite.com/
http://www.yoyo-gold.com/
http://www.wowlion.com/
http://www.wowgoldfirm.com/
http://www.wowgold4s.com/
http://www.mmoshop.eu/
http://www.wow-goldstore.com/
http://www.wowgoldfed.com/
http://www.gamesworth.com/
http://www.wowgolddig.com/
http://www.wowgoldcow.com/
http://www.mywowgold365.co.uk/
http://www.wowgold-cheapwowgold.com/

List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.com):

http://www.gold4power.com/
http://www.hisgame.com/
http://www.itemgarden.com/
http://www.wow-gold-team.com/
http://www.ugamegold.com/
http://www.game2guide.com/
http://www.zyy.com/
http://www.susanexpress.com/
http://www.wowgold2k.com/
http://www.worldwarcraft-gold.com/
http://www.wowgold-europe.com/
http://www.wow-cheapwowgold.com/
http://www.game4world.com/
http://www.power-level.net/
http://www.helpwow.com/
http://www.guy-game.com/
http://www.gdpchina.com/
http://www.offgamers.com/
http://www.wowgoldbank.nl/
http://www.wowko.com/

♦ Appendix 2: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 118.122.85.215:80
(China)