In an article that looks like something from The Onion but isn’t, the Guardian is reporting that Chinese prisoners in labour camps are being forced to farm gold in World of Warcraft. China has a list of human rights’ violations that makes the Nazi regime look like a hippie love-in, but forcing prisoners to play World of Warcraft? That’s a whole new category of atrocity.
“Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” former detainee Liu Dali tells 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.
“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.”
Of course, China’s gold farming business is nothing new, but what’s perhaps most appalling is that Blizzard has done nothing about it. If the demand for cosmically inconsequential fake cash is resulting in the abuse of actual real human beings, is it not maybe time to reconsider the whole cosmically inconsequential fake cash thing?
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