Apparently China's latest cruel & unusual punishment is...online gaming? What?

Charles Stross relays a report from The Guardian about prisoners drafted into gold farming on MMORPGs, for the benefit of the guards. This is apparently a new variation on the much older scam of drafting them for grunt labor.

It seems prisoners are forced to stay at the computer nonstop for 12 hours a day, a torture completely unlike my life in that I don't speak Chinese.