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I have finally got around to gathering my notes together from my talk at Leeds University this summer. My talk, The Stratified Global Informal Economy of Virtual Games: The Case of World of Warcraft’s Chinese Goldfarmers, highlights the emergence of the specialized labor of Chinese Goldfarmers. At the end of my notes, I have forecasted some implications.

Here's a summary of my main talking points below and you can click here for the extended notes:

• What we have here is not a new type of economy, but a new type of informal economy - the trading of online world currencies against offline world currencies.
• I believe that we are witnessing a new transition in capitalism, a transition to a virtual economy that transforms the medium in which capital is exchanged, labor is sold, production is organized, and value is created. But a new medium does not mean we are seeing new forms of economy, capital or labor relations. The new medium of virtual markets still reproduces the structures of labor and production of material capitalism.
• The economy of WoW is stratified, much like a complex capitalistic economy, where participants have different roles
• As long as value is a measure of wealth, complex virtual economies reproduce parallel conditions of labor power of material capitalist economies. Any utopian visions for virtual economies to transform social structure should take into account that a change in platforms does not always mean a change in structures.
• in China, we see a persistent loosening of technology skills acquisition but not a loosening of network resources.

Future implications for China, virtual worlds, and labor:

• Play is increasingly commodified in a complex global economy
• • In a post-industrial economy, we see the phenomenon of skill saturated intensive labor in technology sectors. Aneesh's theory of the phenomenon of skill saturation highlights the decisive role of repetitive skills in a post-industrial information technology world. This type of labor means that every action of labor can be monitored and surveillanced.
• • Governments will have a bigger role in virtual economies, for example China Central Bank's inquiry into QQ coins. And in China, how will the great internet-wall effect online global economies?
• • The offline will be increasingly tied to the online and future analysis of online worlds should always be tied to offline worlds.
• • The poor, but not necessarily less skilled, wiil have a larger impact on the formal economy - we will see this in other areas, like the increased ownership of cellphones among migrant laborers in China and India
• China's post-socialist dual economy is already considered to look more like a hybrid of a redistributive and market economy. We may be looking at an emerging tripartite post-socialist economy in China: redistributive, market and virtual. The question is to how they will be integrated and what type of combinations will be prod

Thank you WUN and Leeds University for the research fellowship! Special thank you to Dr. Xiyi Huang and Dr. Flemming Christiansen. It was an honor to meet scholars who's work i've read in journals. If you are in graduate school and you study something related to China, then apply for the WUN 2008 fellowship, which will be located in Brisols, UK. Here are my pictures from Leeds, where I found some great hidden graffiti next to the University. Thanks JimmyDan for this great photo of WoW coke cans in China and of course Jin Ge for your your research on Chinese Goldfarmers - without your generosity of sharing your footage and data, I wouldn't have been able to contribute my part to the discourse on WoW Goldfarmers.

Here are some of my new favorite research articles on China that I learned about during my research at Leeds, which I think will be excellent to read for anyone doing research on contemporary China:

• Martin King Whyte's Rethinking the Rural-Urban Cleavage in Contemporary China
• Wendy Bottero's Stratification: Social Division and Inequality (this one isn't about China, but I think it's useful for those studying inequality in China, and plus Dr. Bottero is really approachable so that always makes it more fun to read their work!)
• Xueguang Zhou's Economic Transformation and Income Inequality in Urban China: Evidence from Panel Data
• Carabine Jean's Unmarried Motherhood 1830-1990: A Genealogical Analysis, in Discourse as Data (this isn't about China either, but she shows step-by-step how to apply Foucauldian Discourse Analysis on illegitimacy in 19th century Britain, that can be easily abstracted to Chinese specific issue)

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