In what might be the most bizarre mistreatment of prisoners since 1,500 Filipino inmates were forced to perform the dance from Thriller, The Guardian has recently alleged that a number of Chinese convicts were required to "play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money."

Most people equate labor camps with back-breaking physical tasks (and apparently there were no shortage of those, either), but the real surprise is that for nearly 300 hundred prisoners at the Jixi Labour Camp, a lot of their time was spent performing menial tasks online. A 54-year-old inmate has come forward, saying that between 2004 and 2007 he was required to farm gold in World of Warcraft that the prison guards would then turn around and sell online.


The amount of money being made by the guards was actually pretty impressive:

"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."

And, much like the most die-hard of WoW players, one prisoner states, "We kept playing until we could barely see things."

However, for anyone who thinks this wasn't actually a punishment for the prisoners, the conditions in which they played were a far cry from what most gamers are accustomed to. Prisoners who couldn't complete their in-game work quota were subjected to real-life punishments and beatings.

It is estimated that China plays host to over 100,000 full-time gold farmers, and despite a crackdown in 2009 attempting to regulate the sale of fictional currencies, the former inmate turned whistle blower suspects many prisons may still be engaging in similar practices. After all, there's still plenty of virtual money to be made.

Is making prisoners participate in “gold farming” a form of abuse?