In Kal Online all the activities associated with kal geons farming - gathering in-game cash to items to sell, buying game gold or sharing accounts - are a violation of the terms governing that title.
Anyone caught engaging in any of these activities is likely to be banned from the game and have their account shut down.
I was drawn to write about gold farming due to my perception that it's a significant phenomenon that academics and development organizations are unaware of, he told the BBC.
Already, he said, kalonline geons farming was comparable in size to India's outsourcing industry. You could get rid of it, but you would get rid of one of the most fundamental parts of player-to-player interaction.
The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000, said Prof Heeks. Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile.
Prof Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the virtual off shoring likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time working and playing in cyberspace.
It is also a glimpse into the digital underworld, he said. Or at least the edges of a digital underworld populated by scammers and hackers and pornographers and which has spread to the Third World far more than we typically realize.
