leiam aí - e comentem, por favor.

Então, eu tenho um problema. E uma alegria, claro.

Poucas pessoas sabem disso por enquanto, mas esse meu trabalho abaixo foi aprovado para apresentação em um painel no 9o. congresso da Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR9), que vai se realizar em Copenhague, na Dinamarca, em Outubro desse ano. (essa é a alegria)

Fato é que preciso de um financiamento pra conseguir uma passagem pra isso. (esse é o problema) O trabalho VAI ficar bom - prometo - e o congresso é IMENSO. Provavelmente o mais importante no gênero.

Então, alguém sugere algo?

-------

Towards a new configuration of the dichotomy Play/Work: the ethics of Gold Farming

Thiago Falcão[1]

There is an agreement present in the various aspects of media separating the act of play and work in two corners of a well-established dichotomy. This assumption has been supported by some of the classic game theorists, like Caillois (1961) or Huizinga (1950), which believed that in order to play, the subject had to step consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life and engage in an activity considered ‘not serious’.

The Magic Circle, as Salen and Zimmerman (2004) refer, has been severely questioned in the late years, as videogames and online virtual environments begun to blur the boundaries between play and work, especially by producing real currency as outcome of hours of activity in front of the screen.

Juul (2006) reworked the concept of game itself to include the ‘negotiable outcome’ characteristic, implying that the act of play could create material profit. This shows that the act of playing videogames can – sometimes – be considered something different of pure entertainment.

This is especially visible when approaching from the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), where the generated capital involves as much the fair player, which keeps himself up to in-game efforts, as the player who makes use of unusual methods to evolve his character: using real money to gain advantage in the in-game world in a practice often referred as Real Money Trade (RMT), which inspired another practice commonly called “Gold Farming”, where companies were created with the objective of making money out of virtual goods, mixing the logic of playing with the dynamics of work.

The following paper aims to produce a reflection about the ethics of Gold Farming, demonstrating that its practice blurs entirely the frontier between play and work, using, to such extent, the media repercussion around the term, besides making some assumptions about the concept of Magic Circle and immersion.

Keywords: Gold Farming, Virtual Worlds, MMORPGs.

---

[1] Thiago Falcão has a bachelor degree in Social Communication, by the Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil, and is currently a Master candidate at the Communication and Contemporary Culture Post-Graduation Program, at Federal University of Bahia, also in Brazil. He is currently researching the development of subjectivity inside online virtual environments. His recent research work can be found at http://www.thiagofalcao.net.