For those of my vintage who haven't heard of the online mutil-player game "World of Warcraft" (WoW), well it is kinda like the old role playing game "Dungeons and Dragons" only on a server with millions of players. Just like the D&D of old the game uses Gold and Silver as the circulating currency - it might be a fantasy game but using fiat money is still too ridiculous even for this game. Like all such games players need to buy equipment for their characters, to do this they need Gold and Silver (virtual in this case). To earn gold players have to do sometimes quests or labour, such as gold mining. Typically activities undertaken to earn gold are fairly repetitive and boring and are to be avoided if possible, and here is where there is a market to be made. Rich kids (and adults) in the West don't want to go thru all the boring stuff, they just want to play the game's interesting bits, but they can't do that without Gold and Silver. So they buy virtual Gold and Silver from a 3rd party seller with fiat money (yes, the irony is so rich) who then "meets" up with them inside the game and passes them the Gold and Silver discreetly as the game owners actually ban this type of transaction, think of it as a virtual black market with the game owners as the Stasi trying to bust the black marketeers and their clients.
If that wasn't weird enough, it has been discovered that many of these 3rd party Gold and Silver sellers are using Chinese prisoners as slave labour to mine for virtual gold. No more do they need to send prisoners to gulags to mine real gold, now they just chain them to a PC for 12 hours at a time to mine virtual gold.
From The Guardian
As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.
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 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."
It is known as "gold farming", the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games' makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.
It is estimated that 80% of all gold farmers are in China and with the largest internet population in the world there are thought to be 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country.
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