Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Buy WoW gold and support your Chinese overlords
It makes sense, in that inevitable gut-wrenching way, like when you first find out that poor people are selling their kidneys for cash: in China, prisoners are forced to farm gold in World of Warcraft in order to make some extra cash for their jailors.
Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.
“Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”
Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.
But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.
“If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.
Later in the article, the writer notes that there are over 100,000 full-time gold farmers in China alone. I’m betting that Blizzard wishes they had seen this coming, and had planned some way to take a piece of the action (over and above their monthly user fee).
We’re on our way to San Diego today, so just a quickie, folks. See ya.
D.
