Outsourcing is an interesting subject these days, typically referring to the the practice of American corporations using labor provided in other countries to perform some of their operations; exploiting the differences between the American economy and third-world nations to get services cheap. I don't want to get deep into this issue and whether the trade off of cost versus quality is beneficial to the end consumer and if it is really amounting to the loss of US jobs, because frankly that is not what this blog is about (if you want some commentary on outsourcing from a good non-validated source, I recommend wikipedia). What I thought was interesting was a Washington Post article I spied a couple of weeks ago (I started this entry when the article was fresh, but Mike P constantly cut into my blog writing time to play Halo2 on Live). It deals with the convergence of outsourcing with our entertainment culture.
The article talks about how you can now pay a third party company called IGE in Hong Kong to boost up your character in World of Warcraft. I must admit I'm commenting on this issue without direct experience playing this game. I played my share of the early Final Fantasy games, but there were more definite goals to achieve and this was before the subscription based model for all-human players in a universe came to fruition (in the so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game genre).
On one level this seems rather ridiculous: you're buying a game to entertain yourself, then you actually pay someone else to play the game for you because you're not having enough fun. It's sort of like buying a baseball glove and paying someone else to break it in. Although maybe the payoff of the level boosting in WoW is a more than a broken-in glove, you'd think you'd enjoy the game enough to actually play it.
This genre of games essentially creates a virtual life for users to progress through, and just like real life it's more fun being rich, powerful, and having the prestige of a high level as opposed to someone weak, poor, and who gets beat up a lot. In this case you can pay someone to move you up to the next caste fairly quickly, and then you can enjoy your increased status without having to go through the pain to achieve it. Essentially you can skip past high school, and move right into all-night parties in college.
The interesting thing is that the game-maker doesn't want you to use these services, and will actually kick you off if it notices something fishy going on. I guess since they make oodles of money on the subscription services, they don't want anyone short-cutting the process. Why would Blizzard want to you to be able to finish your journey faster, and thus perhaps cancel your subscription. If you could get to the high level 10x faster, then you may also get bored with the game 10x as fast.
