China: Prisoners Forced to Play Video Games to Earn Credits That Prison Bosses Exchange for Real Money
May 26th, 2011Except for the forced physical labor part, this sounds strangely similar to the lives of many IT workers I used to know. They would sell digital game shit on eBay to make extra money, but these men and women (yes, women) really just lived to play video games. Gaming was a sort of digital drug and they used it to tolerate the miserable grind of the day-to-day life in the IT world.
So…
I wonder if there might be something more to this situation in China…
Might it be a sort of mind control experiment, to get prisoners hooked on the video games, in order to numb the waking nightmare of the forced physical labor program. Pimps supply prostitutes with heroin. Millions of people self medicate with alcohol daily. Maybe the diabolical Chinese regime sees the games as a way to disassociate the victims from their reality—and, for the controllers, pocketing cash is just an added bonus.
Via: 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.
How much is a decent game-playing computer in china? How much for the internet connection fee?
Not sure if the economics of this works out…