Out Damn Source!

Look what MTV found! A grad student from UC San Diego has posted this YouTube teaser for his upcoming documentary on MMOG gold farming. The shocker? Half a million Chinese now make a $100 a month living from acquiring and selling WoW gold to gamers in the US and EU. Clearly the amount returned by these workers is creating a hefty profit for their employers.

In other outsourcing news, courtesy of this GigaOm article, Second Life content (which you will remember can be sold for game or real currency) is being outsourced to a Vietnamese firm which works for a fraction of the cost of US artists. This is a simple parallel to the "real" world where a task that has to be done anyway gets shipped off to a lower wage provider.

Surely the forward thinking among you can continue to extrapolate from these trends. Here are some things I'm expecting to see low wage workers do in the near future:
1. increase their employer's gamerscore on XBOX Live!
2. click their employer's Google Ads
3. play my media over and over again (song, video, etc.) to increase it's popularity and position on a well-known site like YouTube or iTunes

Now let's get some comments from you on this one...