NYT On Gold Farmers

The New York Times, in addition to its slide show of people and their avatars, ran an article about gold farms, operations that level up MMO players for real-world money. It's a good article, but isn't the point of a game to play it yourself? I guess I don't understand why a player would choose to sign up for a game and then let someone else do the playing.

But add cheap labor to any sort of market, and opportunity appears. It doesn't sound like gold farmers have a good life, though: "He works two floors below the plywood bunks of the workers’ dorm where he sleeps. In two years of 84-hour farming weeks, he has rarely stepped outside for longer than it takes to eat a meal."