Chinese prisoners forced to farm gold.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam

Sounds like a fair punishment to me

I don't see the problem with this, except that there are too many people in Chinese prisons who are innocent, who shouldn't be prisoners in the first place by Western standards. For those who are correctly convicted of theft and assault, this routine is perfect.

edited 1st Jun '11 6:16:47 AM by Shichibukai

Did you read the whole article? Because from where I'm sitting, making people do backbreaking physical labor and then not even letting them sleep so they can farm imaginary video game currency seems pretty fucked up to me.

Yeah, but then most of them deserve it. The rest of the article is just to be expected from the Guardian.

edited 1st Jun '11 6:18:06 AM by Shichibukai

How do you know that? People get convicted for trivial shit left and right in China.

edited 1st Jun '11 6:29:45 AM by annebeeche

The guy was jailed for an "illegal petition".

Now I'm usually one of the first to say that China's not all that bad, but their prison system's running rampant with corruption and always has been. This is just the sort of thing to push it into the realm of surreality, though.

Also, we have a thread about this in Videogames.

I think we can leave this open. OTC has very different readership from VG.

On topic, I find this bizarre and slightly disturbing. You hear a lot about how the Internet can be used for emancipation and how wonderful it is, but you seldom hear about how it can be used exploitatively as well.

If it's "fair" and "deserved" to subject prisoners to beatings, then fairness and deservedness are clearly bad things.

On the one hand I already fucking hate gold farmers as they wreck virtual economies for anyone who doesn't want to pay real money for gold, and on the other hand what they are doing to prisoners is pretty fucked up too. Can't decide which I hate more.

Prisoners are still people, you have a sentence to carry out. I'm not the most merciful mofo around, granted, but I find 12 hours of back breaking labor followed by all that gold farming to be outright inhumane, especially if it's to line the pockets of the guard staff and not to give that money back to society, then again, I hate the Chinese Govt at way more levels than simply their prison system.

Shit, forcing anybody to play World Of Warcraft is inhumane and should be in in a blanket UN Human Rights Charter. The game is a piece of shit.

On one hand, I have no problem subjecting prisoners to labor so long as it's not abusive and the prisoners get adequate amounts of food, breaks and sleep. That and manual labor actually gets shit done—it gets people's roofs tarred, houses built, roads repaired, etc. Prisoners essentially belong to the law until they finish their time, so you might as well put them to good use that will benefit the community.

This however, never even mind the fact that it's in conjunction with 12 hours of backbreaking labor and they're forced to do it well into the evenings until their eyes bleed, benefits no one except the guys making a profit off of it. It's pure selfishness and misuse of prisoners is what this is.

edited 1st Jun '11 8:24:18 AM by annebeeche

I'm also worried about the eventual state of the prisoners' mind. Will they be completely addicted? Or will they forever be scared of MM Os?

I wouldn't consider them addicted. They gain nothing from playing World Of Warcraft to line the pockets of the guards.

World Of Warcraft would have to be enjoyable for them to get addicted. And if they were having fun mining gold when they should be sleeping, then it wouldn't be a punishment.

Eh, I personally like the idea of such a punishment IF done properly. You know, make an agreement with the company, maybe set up a "Prison server" and such. Monitor the players to avoid having them try to do dumb stuff. If handled right, it can result in a profit so that the prisoners are actually giving back to society. As far as it's being handled in the Chinese prisons, I have several problems with it, but the concept itself is an interesting and possibly good one.

What do you mean, addicted? People get addicted to a game when they have too much fun with it or put too much value on advancing through the game. There's nothing fun about being forced to farm gold in a game until you can't see.

What makes a game fun is being able to apply your intelligence and creativity to advance through the game and immerse yourself in the world and story. These guys likely don't have the freedom to do any of that. Farming materials in games involves applying the same dull repetitive strategy over and over, and these guys are doing just that for 8 hours straight with no opportunity to genuinely play the game.

It is my speculation that they may develop an aversion to Warcraft and MM Os, maybe even to videogames in general.

edited 1st Jun '11 8:30:44 AM by annebeeche

I don't have a problem at all with forcing prisoners to produce a product, but to do so for 20 hours+ a day or however long they made them do it is just fucked up.

But they're not even really making a product—just money for the guards that run the whole scam.

Also, isn't gold farming against the rules of World of Warcraft?

Well, Gold farming no, Gold-selling, yes.

So this is really tortious interference.

Blizzard does a lot to get rid of the gold-sellers, they annoy paying customers, they cause a lot of harm through hacking, and also tend to use credit card fraud.

It may, of course, be pissing on a bonfire, but they try.

edited 1st Jun '11 8:39:52 AM by blueharp

I doubt it's enforced very strongly in the first place, that would mean losing all those accounts that belong to gold farmers. I remember when I played Lineage 2, there was no way in hell to get those guys banned, even if there were just nonresponsive bots that just auto-farmed gold all day and never did anything else for 10 hours.

Breaks the entire economy of the fucking game, I hate gold farming and selling.

edited 1st Jun '11 8:39:02 AM by Barkey

really now

Considering many sites conduct it through pay pal and it's starting to become a booming industry, I believe it.

Sure knows priorities.

edited 1st Jun '11 8:43:29 AM by Delles

That would be part of their job.

Other committees and agencies deal with other problems.

I can't wait for L$ to start showing up on finance tickers.

"who shouldn't be prisoners in the first place by Western standards."

Well there ya go...Values Dissonant, Dissonant Values. You get what I mean.

edited 1st Jun '11 11:41:09 AM by Ruubickss

I said this before in the other thread but this is hella fucked up. I wonder if they made a big deal out of this, like the nike sweat shops, would it stop it? Or at least get the government to crack down?