Farmers Without Subsidies
By Ian
In the world of massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games, "farmers" are those people who play the game specifically to make money off the business of trading virtual-world goods for real-world money.
Via Terra Nova comes this article on numerous aspects of the Farming Community. Incentives, property rights, work conditions, effects of economic activity; it's a fairly detailed piece with some fascinating tidbits. You'll have to slog through a bunch of game jargon, but its worth it for an inside-baseball perspective on the effects (both in the virtual world and the real one), of people working obsessively to turn gaming into real cash.