Asia, Online Games | featured news

"I come from the orcs, we eat with spoons and forks, we love to eat our pork!" That's the sound of a male orc in online roleplaying behemoth World of Warcraft. In China, it may also be the sound of an orc male working on the chain gang, by which I mean an actual Chinese prisoner playing an orc male in Blizzard's mega-MMO to rack up very serious (and very real) coin for Chinese prison guards.

A World Bank study to be released Thursday reports that the online gaming industry has grown into a $3 billion business that provides living wages to migrant workers in Asia who play games all day, amass virtual currency and sell it to wealthy customers in the Western world for actual cash.