A Different Sort of Farming

As of April 2008, there were about 16 million active massively multiplayer online game subscriptions according to www.mmogchart.com. (Trivia: 10 million of those subscriptions were for World of Warcraft alone. With less than 1.5 million players, RuneScape was a distant second). With such a growing population of online gamers, it's no wonder farming gold has become huge thing. A recent article in a Singaporean newspaper featured this recent trend but did a poor job at it. Not only had they failed to define the term, they cast it in negative light.

Every online community has an economy that, like in the real world, has a currency - usually in-game gold. For obvious reasons, acquiring gold is necessary for in-game survival (the more the merrier) but it's not necessarily wrong. What's wrong is if the player acquires gold through unethical means like hacking into another account, duplicating items, etc. What's wrong in addition to that, is selling the unethically acquired items for a profit.

This is where people get confused or misunderstand. I think it's perfectly okay to sell items acquired ethically for a profit. But because of these no-good doers, the term gold farming (now intrinsically associated with exploitation) was coined and among other repercussions, eBay now doesn't allow ANY virtual property auctions to be listed. Another case of greed in human nature destroying a perfectly great way to transact.

Cos really what's the harm in paying real money for some in-game gold to improve virtual game play, especially if one doesn't have the time to hunt for gold? Likewise, if a player has more time on his hands and acquires in-game gold fairly, why can't he be allowed to sell some of it to make a real profit? The time he's put in for the hard earned gold should be worth something shouldn't it? In shaping new law to govern online behaviour, let's not forget that there's more to internet crime than "farming gold". It comes in forms of bullying, harassment and discrimation just to name a few. Perhaps an equal emphasis should be placed on solving these problems as well. 

Respect For Ants

Most of what I've seen on the screen about ants have been in animated features. It started with the 1984 movie, "Gallavants". It's so ancient, I couldn't even find a clip of it on YouTube. To date, there are about four ant movies I can think of - and all in the animated form. There is no shortage of documentaries about them either. After all, ants are easy to personify and are certainly not strangers to us. Then again, how well do we know them?

A recent viewing of "Ant Bully" got me thinking about these insects. As pesky as it may be, it is no mean feat for a species to find their way into our homes and adapt to living in a new environment (this concrete jungle we've created). How many other species can claim to have done that? And they are so selfless. Despite the perils attached to scouting for food, forager ants work really hard at keeping the colony fed. They use their long thin antennae to pick up on pheromone trails left by other ants and to detect food scents, which explains why they tend to follow a certain path (often times the shortest route possible). Pheromones are also used for warning purposes. That's why other ants seem to know when one ant gets crushed. An alarm pheromone is sent out.

In many ways, ants set good examples for us. Here are some clips from documentaries about ants:

So the next time you see an ant, think twice about saying goodbye to it. Say hello. If it's on my table, I usually just blow it to the ground. And don't worry about it falling to its death. Beyond a few centimeters, ants stop accelerating. This means to say, they can fall at any height and survive. Besides, they have their skeletons on the outside of their bodies. Are you an ant convert now?