Cyber-Farmer Convicts in China

Guardian Newspaper wrote: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.

"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.

To me at heart RPGing is when a kid picks up a fallen branch and calls it a magic sword. No cost, no buy-ins, no DLC or pay-cash-for-extra-lives stuff. This attitude remains in the table-top RPGs. The games emerge from your mutual imaginations like water from a bubbling spring. Not just 'free' but at the heart of human freedom.

The branch you call a magic staff or sword is infinitely more powerful than the most fabled and expensive magic item in any computer game. [Just as the life of an ant is not worth a billion dollars of debt accrued from interest.]

Computer RPGs were always a different beast and escaping their pre-programmed sadism was why I first got interested in coding. [Telengard was just as fun with maxed-out stats.] But their is a discipline to the iron fist of a computerized GM that i can respect. MMORPG have their own set of game-play constraints including the need to keep having a person pay each month - 'grinding' for gold and skills occupies time and creates investement. 'Grinding' is a time hononred RPG theme ("More rats to kill!") but computerized 'grinding' takes it to a whole new level of tedium.

Imagine some Asian worker grinding away at a corporate-owned fantasy world to make fake gold pieces to be sold for real money. The world of the kid with his magic sword-stick has become a factory where alienated labour produces viritual gold. It is perverse. Profoundly wrong. A crazy metaphor for all the absurd things we must do in capitalism to earn the fake credit-dollars that buy real food and shelter.

Yet the MMORGs adapted and set-up gold-piece/Yuan/Dollar exchanges. You could get into currency speculation with it. It was so crazy and absurd that it was almost wondrous. But it sinks lower, the shiny chrome of capitalism that allows you think "They are playing WoW instead of cleaning toilets - they shouldn't complain" rusts away and salt-pit slavery is seen beneath.

The escapist fantasy worlds of the West have become so tedious we have out-sourced playing parts of them to tortured Chinese prisoners.  We have help create another one of the 10,000 Hells in Chinese mythology: The Hell of Gold Farming. First we out-sourced our imagination to corporate game factories, then we out-sourced the very playing of the games, all that is left is stop by and marvel at the grand heroic character-avatar we choose to represent ourselves.  

Consumers chasing the corporate illusion of 'magic', are never satisfied and always hunger. So step outside pick up a branch and hold it toward the sky with an open heart. All the magic and fantasy you desire will unfold around you - and your frustrated desire for fantasy with dissipate and stop transforming you into a fantasy preta.