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26 May 2011 15:18

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World: Chinese labor camps: Where MMO games stop being fun?

  • World of Warcraft meets the world of forced labor: The Guardian has an interview up today with a 54-year-old prisoner at the Jixi labor camp in China, who makes an extremely bizarre and terrible claim; that prison bosses forced some inmates to play World of Warcraft after finishing the day’s grueling physical labor. The idea is that they’re being forced to grind out high-level characters with choice equipment and lots of gold, which are then sold by the guards to cash-rich, lazy gamers who want all the gain with none of the pain. It’s sort of like the anti-drug argument that your money might be financing terrorism or violence — don’t take the shortcut to World of Warcraft glory, or you might do it on the back of a Chinese prisoner. Bizarre story. source

04 Dec 2009 23:48

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Tech: Some guy in Taiwan beat “World of Warcraft,” wasted his life

  • 986 objectives completed – one of them apparently not “getting a girlfriend”
  • 390,895 creatures killed – none of them as scary as the mean, evil bullies at school source

21 Sep 2009 21:53

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Tech: The scale of World of Warcraft is beyond massive

  • 5.5 million lines of code for the game, which is 1.3 petabytes in size (a petrabyte is a BILLION megabytes)
  • 4.4 billion in-game rewards have been handed out the game’s 12 million subscribers/shut-ins source

24 Jun 2009 11:15

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Offbeat: WoW: The world needs more rage over video games, guys

  • Despite all his rage, he’s still just a rat in a cage.

24 Feb 2009 10:17

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Tech: Among the Oscar winners: A World of Warcraft guild leader

  • You know it was for something nerdy, too. Steve Preeg, a visual effects artist, won for his work on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Preeg, when he’s not making Brad Pitt age in reverse, is Combat Rogue with 450 Enchanting and Inscription and leads a guild that’s done everything but Sarth 3D. WoW, good for him. source