Workshop At Ithaca College To Examine Online Gold Farming

Keith Davis, 7/6/2009

ITHACA, NY — Ithaca College’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is bringing two guests to campus on Tuesday, July 14, to present a free workshop on gold farming — the practice of Internet gamers in less developed countries collecting and selling virtual gold to wealthy gamers in the developed world for real currency. Entitled “Gold Farming and the Geopolitics of Trade,” the workshop will begin at 7 p.m. in 111 Park Center for Business and Sustainable Enterprise. The guest presenters will be Ulises A. Mejias, assistant professor of new media at SUNY College at Oswego, and James Bolen, a cinema and screen studies student at SUNY College at Oswego.               

The gold and other goods needed to move to more advanced levels of play in massive multiplayer online role playing games such as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy are produced under sweatshop conditions, the presenters say. Their workshop is intended to engage participants in an exploration of gold farming as an embodied economic practice in a gaming context characterized by virtuality and disembodiment, and in the context of globalization and trade as a process that reinforces unequal human relations rather than merely intensifying connectedness. The workshop will include a gold farming demonstration, a review of an alternate reality game experience created for the 2009 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and an interactive discussion of the concepts.               

A technocultural theorist whose research interests include networked sociality, the philosophy of technology and learning design, Mejias’s research focuses on the use of the network as a model for organizing and mediating social realities. He holds a doctorate in education in communication, computing and technology in education from Columbia University.

Bolen is a former player and gold farmer/seller of World of Warcraft.           

Launched in 1997 as an outreach project sponsored by Ithaca College, Cornell University’s Center for the Environment and Eunadi Center for International Studies and others, FLEFF is now under the auspices of the Ithaca College Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies. FLEFF has become a major regional event in upstate New York and enjoys an international reputation as a cutting-edge, multi-arts program.

For more information, contact faculty co-director Tom Shevory, professor of politics, at (607) 274-1347 or shevory@ithaca.edu.