The Null Device

Prison administrators in China have found a new use for prison labour: putting inmates to work in multiplayer video games, generating in-game gold, which is then sold online for real money:

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 make 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."

¶ bizarre china corruption gold farming human rights mmorpgs prison videogames 0

When buying experienced characters for that multiplayer role-playing game, always to check that they're not made with sweatshop labour:

Early last year a small Southern California company called Black Snow Interactive made a business move you could almost call shrewd if it werent so surreal. They rented office space in Tijuana, equipped it with eight PCs and a T1 line, and hired three shifts of unskilled Mexican laborers to do what most employers would have fired them for: playing online computer games from punch-in to quitting time. The games they were required to play were Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, two of the most popular massively multiplayer role-playing games online. As the workers sat mouse-clicking virtual trolls to death, their characters acquired skills and gold at a brisk, assembly-line pace. For this, Black Snow paid the Mexicans piecework wages -- then turned around and sold the high-level characters and make-believe money on eBay, where a grandmaster dragon-tamer account from Ultima can fetch $200 and a Dark Age gold piece trades for roughly what the Russian ruble does.

(via Things Magazine)

(Btw, I wonder how long until the first online game currency appears on currency exchange markets next to the dollar, the pound and the euro.)

¶ gold farming mmorpgs videogames 0