Chinese labor camp prisoners forced to play World of Warcraft, says report
(CBS) - If playing World of Warcraft is considered punishment, then a lot of juvenile males (and some grown men, for that matter) in the U.S. probably would welcome the thought of being sent to a Chinese labor camp.
All jokes aside, this is serious stuff. "The computers were never turned off," Liu Dali, a former prisoner, told The Guardian.
The Guardian reports that the 300 prisoners who were forced to play worked 12-hour shifts, and would earn around 5,000 to 6,000rmb a day. (That's about $662 to $803.)
Guards would then take the credits inmates would build up while playing the game and trade them in for real cash. This is called "gold farming." Gamers all over the globe pay for these credits to save hours of playing time. (I guess it's like cheating.) It's estimated that 80 percent of all gold farmers are in China.
So what if you weren't very good at playing World of Warcraft? Dali (that's not his real name, by the way) said prisoners would be punished for not fulfilling your quota. "They would beat me with plastic pipes," he said. "We kept playing until we could barely see things."
These memories from 2004 while Dali was at Jixi
re-education-through-labor camp will always haunt the 54-year-old.
Although the central government issued a directive making it illegal for businesses without licenses to trade fictitious currency, Liu believes prisoners are still being forced to earn online currency today.
