Boring game? Hire a player

For anyone wondering why "Chinese gold farmer" is an online insult, here's your answer.

As a lifelong gamer myself, I find this kind of thing facsinating.

(Here follows a rambling, heavily annotated meditation on my online gaming career...ladies, feel free to skip ahead to the next post)

I've always been a process guy when it comes to games...I like the journey more than the destination, whatever it is. Even when I played fast-paced kill or be killed FPS games like Counterstrike or Urban Terror, chatting with other players was a major component of my enjoyment.

I was never able to enjoy fps games that didn't involve "dead time" when you could safely chat with the other ghosts (and since I came to the genre late and lacked the requisite fast-twitch coordination to compete on even terms with the legions of teens suckled on the merciless teat of console gaming, I had plenty of down time to hone my l337 typing skillz...)

I played the game mentioned in the article, WoW, for a few months. The game mechanics are more suited to my temperment, since the whole game is built around elaborate time sinks that provide ample opportunities to chat with friends and strangers.

But I was eventually driven away by the very feature that makes it so attractive to the gold famers- the end game.

The whole of WoW is just a huge time sink leading up to level 60, when it changes from a traditional MMORPG where you team up with other players to perform game tasks to a pure PVP game where the focus is on having the best equipment and weapons so you can defeat other players instead of computer-controlled enemies.

Most WoW enthusiasts are destination oriented...they play the game because they want the PvP cherry on top of the sundae. For people who only want the endgame the ability to skip all the 'tedious' stuff that comes before makes sense....and has apparently given rise to a strange niche economy.