http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/chin...urrency-market/

Prisoners at a labor camp in northeast China were forced by guards to play online games in a moneymaking scheme, a former prisoner has told The Guardian.The scheme, a practice referred to among gamers as “gold farming,” required some 300 prisoners at the Jixi labor camp to gather currency (usually by repeating monotonous tasks) in multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest, which the guards then hawked online for cash.

Many recreational gamers willingly exchange real currencies for virtual ones to obtain extra advantages in the game — a special piece of equipment, for example, or to pay other players for in-game services.

Liu Dali, who was imprisoned at the camp between 2004 and 2007 for “illegally petitioning” federal authorities about corruption in his local government, said he was forced to play the game at night after full days of trying physical toil, which included digging trenches and carving chopsticks and toothpicks from lumber with raw hands. He was held accountable for keeping up on both forms of labor.

“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.

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good”