Working on the virtual chain gang

I am as guilty as the next guy but this living part time in a virtual world business is creating real life stories so bizarre that even Philip Dick couldn't have envisioned them. Last year I told you the story of Qiu Chengwei, who killed his friend Zhu Caoyuan for stealing his virtual sword from the Legend of Mir online game.

Today the Guardian recounts the story of a new industry in the People's  Republic of China. Prisoners at the Jixi prison camp are forced to spend long hours "gold farming." Gold farming, if you are not familiar, is obtaining virtual currency in online video games by building online credits through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in games such as World of Warcraft. So that the fat, lazy adolescents in the suburbs won't have to. The Prison guards at the camp forced prisoners like Lui Dali to work all day breaking rocks, digging trenches and carving chopsticks. By night he was forced to work on the online games.

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 memorize 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.

Over 1.2 billion dollars are estimated to have been traded for virtual currency last year. There are over 100,000 estimated gold farmers in China, approximately 80% of the world's number. I am sure that most gamers would never consider (or care frankly) that the virtual money they were purchasing came from the sweat and blood of prisoners, or even political prisoners like Liu. But it is disturbing nonetheless. Free all political prisoners, even those trapped in the hells of cyberspace.