North Korea Now Supplementing Itself With Virtual Gold

No, that's not a headline from The Onion, or for that matter, news from Second Life. That's from the New York Times:

North Korea is believed to train an army of computer programmers and hackers... Working from Northern China, the police said, the squad created software that breached the servers for such popular South Korean online gaming sites as “Lineage” and “Dungeon and Fighter.” The breach allowed round-the-clock play by “factories” of dozens of unmanned computers. Their accumulated gaming points were exchanged for cash at Web sites where human players are focused on acquiring enhancements for their online personas, or avatars... In a little less than two years, the police said, the organizers made $6 million.

I suspect the Times' isn't quite clear on how virtual gold farming and real money trading works, because a dramatic hacker-style breach isn't usually required to do this. To make matters more surreal, relative to North Korea's blighted economy and starving populace, $6 million is actually quite a lot. Here's another strange thing: Years ago, when renowned military strategist and futurist Thomas Barnett made an appearance in Second Life, he predicted that MMO technology would one day be used to help overthrow a real dictactorship. Our present is even stranger than he imagined: Instead, a real dictatorship is now using an MMO to help stay in power.

Image via the great Kim Jong Il Looking at Things.

Comments

[Ann Otoole InSL]

hahaah Hey nobody would even care if they built a gigantic hooker palace in Zindra!

Equal opportunity right?

[Liberty Tesla]

Hamlet, some Asian MMOs put hard limits on how many hours a day an account can be used, as a sort of counter-measure against MMO 'addiction'. Maybe the 'hack' was a matter of bypassing that limit.

I'd bet that the game companies could defeat these practices, say by having diminishing returns on mining rewards the longer an account is logged in. But the fact is, these are accounts paid for, and cost them zero in customer support; and the farmers have to buy new accounts every so often when they get nuked for gold selling. They are probably a major revenue center.