Gold Farming - Chinese Sweatshops Making Money Playing Video Games

Gold farming consists primarily of third-worlders laboring in rural virtual sweatshops, plugged in as peasants in character-based games such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft. Their job is to simply exist in the virtual world, and perform small tasks that will help them build up credit or “gold,” or whatever currency is internal to the game.

Their employers can then sell this virtual gold to other players for real money. They can also create entire characters, build them up with specific characteristics or items with magical powers, and sell them to other players as well, mostly Americans.

This means that people are willing to pay other people to play games for them, but also means the American buyer views playing games not as fun, but as drudgery (like mowing the lawn or scraping the paint off the house or debugging that circa-1978 Fortran code so it works with the new ERP system tweaks). 
(eWeek)