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.

Liu believes the scheme was more profitable than the physical labor they performed during the day — and also more painful in some respects.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," the former prisoner, Liu Diu said. "I heard them say they could earn 5,000 to 6,000rmb (U.S. $770 to $925) a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

$2 billion of virtual currency was traded in China in 2008, according to figures obtained by the New York Times from China's Internet Network Information Center. The government has issued regulations to restrict the trading and use of virtual money, which is already difficult to regulate at its current size. There are some 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country, says The Guardian.

Image courtesy of Flickr, juanpol