Blyaunte

They worked in 12-hour shifts. Some day shift, some night shift. Nowhere in the article is it implied or confirmed that they worked 24/7. Do you honestly believe that prisoners in such an oppressive society as China would be held to a North American style of shift work? Before you start hurling insults at me as well, yes I have worked shift work and in my current job have worked as much as 26 hours straight when needed. I'm quite certain I have a good idea of what a hard day's work is. As others pointed out earlier, and I will try again, it is stated that they would work both day and night at both manual labor and then farming gold It's the very first paragraph in the article. For the sake of argument, let's say they did keep them to a 12-hour shift only. Have you ever been forced to do anything for 12 hours straight? I don't mean forced in the sense of "I need to get this term paper done" or "my boss will yell at me if I don't finish this proposal", but forced as in "if I don't farm enough gold I'll get beaten with a pipe". Neither have I (thank Saradomin). As much fun as playing a video game for 12 hours might sound, if you were being made to do the same activity over and over again with the threat of being beaten if you didn't perform you would be stressed and worried the entire time and after a while that would start to wear on you both physically and mentally. Not all torture is physical in nature. "We worked 12-hour shifts at camp."

Holy Jesus [bleep]ing Christ you people are drama queens -- I mean really. "We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp." SHIFT WORK -- look it up!!!!

[hide] [/hide] Okay -- which part of "Day shift" and "night shift", don't you get? "We worked 12-hour days in the camp." So, he worked 12-hours a day. Not 24/7. The first paragraph demonstrates that he worked "day shifts" and "night shifts". Obviously this concept of "shift work" is foreign to you. Look it up. On the days he worked day shift, he mined rocks or carved chopsticks -- or apparently made autoparts for motor vehicles. On those OTHER days, when he was on night shift, he played WoW. Somewhere in between all that he also read Communist documentation for his re-education ... when did he do THAT? While on the toilet perhaps? Yeah! That had to be it!!! How hard is this for you to understand? Really?

Yes, it's a nicely worded article, isn't it? Too bad you "interpeted" it instead of "reading" it. Go back and read it again. "We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp." If they worked 24/7 he would have said, "We worked 24 hours a day." But he doesn't say that. You INTERPRETED that THAT is what is being said. But he doesn't say that. Therein lies a HUGE difference. That difference is between fact and the fiction that you're making up. It's obvious (or at least I thought it was) that he was refering to playing online games in 12 hour shifts considering the entire paragraph was about playing online games. Also, there are more statements supporting our argument since the article states they work day and night multiple times. I don't have to read it again; I quoted it, the entire paragraph in wich the 12 hour shift statement was made. This was to emphasize the content. My english teacher would call that quote without the context, a floater. No one likes floaters, they're hard to flush. I don't think anyone is saying they worked 24 hours a day. You assumed that from our posts. They obviously have to have some time to sleep otherwise they'd die. Getting less than 7-8 hours of sleep a night for an extented period of time still counts as sleep deprived. If you've ever worked a day in your life -- if you've ever worked "shift" work -- you'd understand the fact that "shifts" work in intervals that cover "night and day" -- that is, DAY shift and NIGHT shift. They worked in 12-hour shifts. Some day shift, some night shift. Nowhere in the article is it implied or confirmed that they worked 24/7.

[hide] Then what the hell does mean? It means he has poor eyesight? It means the computers had poor graphic cards? It means that his graphics settings were too low for him to handle the gaming environment? No - wait! It means you're making something up! :rolleyes: It wasn't in the article? Why would you quote it multiple times? [/hide] You ever work a night shift?

Please show me a quote that says he doesn't. Just because it doesn't specify that he does, doesn't mean it's not true. It's not hard to extrapolate that with 12 hours WoW per night and a minimum of 8 hours manual work in the day, there's no, or little, time to sleep. I think we could all have a bit of a chuckle if this work was instead of the manual work, and the people weren't being physically abused by the prison guards for not being efficient enough, but they are and we aren't. "We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp ..." Which part of above sentence is foreign to you? Seriously? Oh wait -- it's the word "work". You know, you can tell the people who don't actually work for a living. :rolleyes:

[hide] Are you serious? Really? Did you read what you just wrote? Do you realize how silly that sounds? If not, read it again. Do you realise how silly YOU sound? Stop trying to justify your ill informed opinion by making everyone else who believes this IS torture, a majority of people, out to be ignorant. We can't all be as gifted as you are, but please give us the decency of rendering us competent enough to read and understand an article. They aren't PLAYING these games, they're being forced to do repetitive actions on them for 12 hours in lieu of sleep. If it's not torture I'd honestly like to see you try it. Try it for one night, after a backbreaking day of hard labour, and see how it's funny then. It's psychological and slow physical torture. Prisoners would slowly be worn down by this and sleep deprivation is a [bleep]. "Ill-informed"? LOL! Read the article. They worked 12-hour shifts. They did NOT play video games "in lieu of sleep" -- you're making it up. Just like everyone else. Then, after you run wild with your "made-up facts" you call ME ill-informed. Honestly ... :rolleyes: "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." May I ask what time of day between 'day' and 'night' is there time to sleep? [/hide] Please show me a quote from the article where he says he worked 24 hours a day.

Yes, it's a nicely worded article, isn't it? Too bad you "interpeted" it instead of "reading" it. Go back and read it again. "We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp." If they worked 24/7 he would have said, "We worked 24 hours a day." But he doesn't say that. You INTERPRETED that THAT is what is being said. But he doesn't say that. Therein lies a HUGE difference. That difference is between fact and the fiction that you're making up.

Wow just wow ... You leaped over logic in a single bound! Congratulations!

Are you serious? Really? Did you read what you just wrote? Do you realize how silly that sounds? If not, read it again. Do you realise how silly YOU sound? Stop trying to justify your ill informed opinion by making everyone else who believes this IS torture, a majority of people, out to be ignorant. We can't all be as gifted as you are, but please give us the decency of rendering us competent enough to read and understand an article. They aren't PLAYING these games, they're being forced to do repetitive actions on them for 12 hours in lieu of sleep. If it's not torture I'd honestly like to see you try it. Try it for one night, after a backbreaking day of hard labour, and see how it's funny then. It's psychological and slow physical torture. Prisoners would slowly be worn down by this and sleep deprivation is a [bleep]. "Ill-informed"? LOL! Read the article. They worked 12-hour shifts. They did NOT play video games "in lieu of sleep" -- you're making it up. Just like everyone else. Then, after you run wild with your "made-up facts" you call ME ill-informed. Honestly ... :rolleyes:

Are you serious? Really? Did you read what you just wrote? Do you realize how silly that sounds? If not, read it again.

[hide] Then what the hell does mean? It means he has poor eyesight? It means the computers had poor graphic cards? It means that his graphics settings were too low for him to handle the gaming environment? No - wait! It means you're making something up! :rolleyes: I respected you on the forums a long time, but your opinion on this matter made me think otherwise about you. They MUST KEEP ON playing, which causes them to see badly, that's clearly a sign of sleep deprivement. Your eyes and brains get tired of watching a lightened screen for long time, which causes bad sight. If you have to do hard work during the day, and then you got to look for several hours a day directly in a screen, you get ill, and really ill. Your brain and eyes need to get some rest, just as the rest of your body, but they can't, because they must "game" when they should get rest. And saying that they deserve it, is also farfetched, in China, you can get arrested because a relative of yours doesn't support the communist regime, a lot of people there are being put into something we might call concentration camps because they just don't share the same thoughts as the government or have symphaties for the Dalai Lama for example. It isn't up to us to say about those people that they deserve punishment, I only find the legal system wrong in many countries, including the Chinese, the one of the States, and other so called "democracies". [/hide] You people are hilarious. In fact, you're all like Superman. You make hyperbolic leaps of logic in a single bound. Again -- read the article. You're leaping to conclusions that ARE NOT provided anywhere in the article. You're ASSUMING things that simply aren't there and then trying to justify them with unfounded "logic". FACTS. FACTS. FACTS. FACTS. FACTS. FACTS. FACTS. FACTS. Again -- once more with feeling -- here's the actual quotes from the man himself: NONE of this stuff that you're throwing up here are FACTS -- you've simply read a single article, from someone's point of view, and then made [cabbage] up to support your own wild imagination.

Where on that list of yours is sleep deprivation? Hard physical labor > hard physical labor + sleep-depriving forced goldfarming + risk of further torture Letting time pass doesn't make things go away. A torturist who get to keep on after a report has been filed is not "innocent" because the reported incident was one of the past. Blyaunte; you generalise when it suits you, and close your eyes when it benefits your point of view. That does not make a strong foundation for an argument. LMAO -- *I* am not the one making up "sleep deprivation" -- the others are. Thanks for making things up. Come back later when you learn to read. Buh bye! :rolleyes: Once again, you're making things up. READ THE ARTICLE. He says they worked in "12-hour shifts at the camp". NOT 24/7. You're making things up in your wild imagination to suit your "facts" -- but you haven't any.

I always contended that the "Skillcape craze" really was a turning point in terms of the player environment within Runescape. Seems I am not the only one who thinks so. :thumbup:

Then what the hell does mean? It means he has poor eyesight? It means the computers had poor graphic cards? It means that his graphics settings were too low for him to handle the gaming environment? No - wait! It means you're making something up! :rolleyes:

Here's the actual quotes from the man himself: "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games." "We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp." ""If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically." "We kept playing until we could barely see things." No where in the article is the term "sleep deprivation" mentioned. No where in the article is it determined that he was made to do this "work", constantly, for more than 12 hours a day. No where in the article is there any indication that he was never given breaks. STOP. MAKING. [cabbage]. UP. ALREADY. Seriously!

If I was in prison playing a video game and I was seeking sympathy for it -- yes, I'd expect people to laugh at me. Wouldn't you? :rolleyes: No. I would say you are wording it wrong. No - I would say I am wording it correctly. Once again, like the others, you're implying something that, really, isn't even in the article. You're trying to equate this thing with some warped derisive vision of something that isn't there. You're letting your imagination run WILD and making up [cabbage] to support your point of view.

Actually it IS a non-issue in this situation. It's not even IMPLIED. You DERIVED this notion yourself. No one or no thing lead you there. You went there all by yourself. In fact, you made it up. Now you're sheepishly trying to validate your ridiculous viewpoint, based on no facts at all, by claiming that it's an issue because hey, since you made it up, it's an issue.

If I was in prison playing a video game and I was seeking sympathy for it -- yes, I'd expect people to laugh at me. Wouldn't you? :rolleyes:

A few comments then I am off to bed for the night: 1. So far, I have shown this thread to my children, my husband and a half dozen other people IRL -- and they've all agreed with me. Okay, maybe we're all screwed up, but the point is that there's something that some of you are clearly missing, and that appears to be a sense of perspective. Hell, my own son, who plays WoW, read the article and the thread, and half-way through this thread turned to me and said, "They do realize that there's are huge number of people who play WoW for 3-4 days straight, right?" No. Apparently not. 2. Secondly, for the purposes of double-checking my own response to this subject matter, I have also dropped the original post and the link to the article in question into two political message forums in which I participate. The main response to it is -- why aren't [we] using this same system in [our country] to make money off [our] prison system? So far, everyone I know is complete agreement that the entire idea of playing WoW for 12 hour shifts as some form of torture is not only laughable, but the responses aimed at me are, likewise, just plain silly. As compared to the long list of atrocities employed by humanity upon humanity, over the course of human history, making someone play a video game under threat of personal injury is, as I said, not even up for consideration as anything more than laughable. Hell -- I am old enough to remember how, in school, the teachers would "improve" our handwriting skills by breaking rulers across our knuckles -- and that was the least of punishments received in those days. Heaven forbid that you complained about it to your parents either, because you'd likely receive a punishment of equal value. 3. Thirdly, I'd like to point out something set down in the original article that was clearly missed: it's not even the editor's/writer's opinion that the prisoners playing WoW are sleep-deprived. Read the article again. There is nowhere in that article where it indicates that prisoners were forced to operate under conditions of extreme sleep deprivation. It's implied by some readers, sure enough, and that is clear in their postings here, but that notions is not provided by the source himself or anywhere within the article itself. You all jumped to conclusions that simply weren't there. Threw yourselves into a veritable tizzy about it, in fact. Personally, I find it amusing that I was repeatedly challenged that I hadn't "read the article" when it was abundantly clear that I had, comprehended it, and didn't bastardize the contents of it. :shame: 4. Finally, for those armchair International Politics experts trying to exert certain concepts related to the operations of United Nations with respect to the employment of "Universal Human Rights", you may want to better educate yourselves before you engage in these types of discussions. For one thing, the United Nations does not and cannot enforce any Universal Human Rights. As for the other, "Universal Human Rights" are neither "Universal" nor are they "Rights". Sure, there's a lovely idea that every human life should exist under some form of guidance under which all people should be governed -- but that's merely wishful thinking. There's a plethora of countries -- all U.N. members -- that, like China, do not hold to those conditions. Nor should they be expected or demanded upon to function in that manner -- and the U.N. won't make such demands either ...

But who are we to assert that our definition of human rights is superior to those exercised within one's own borders? :unsure: The ability to realize that our definition is not necessarily the same as another's definition is the first step in achieving a compromise -- dontcha think? As others have pointed out, China is part of the UN and (Should) accept and abide by the UN's definition of human rights. I'd be the first to point out that not every member, especially not the US, has a great track record with this, but you were also pointed out that China's treatment of their people is ATROCIOUS. If they weren't a part of the UN your argument might be valid, but they decided to be part of a Western-oriented multinational organization so they have to play by those rules. And understanding that opposing views are different is not the same as knowing that they are equally valid and diametrically opposed, inherently. EDIT: I'm still not sure where you stand. You're cynical about our response and laughing at the "bleeding-hearts," I get that. But in the beginning you weren't laughing at our naivety, you were laughing at the tortured. Mock us for being optimistic, fine, but you still haven't answered us as to why you're laughing at the torture victim. ... and I am still laughing at the "tortured" -- because like it or not, they're right where they got because, somewhere, they crossed the line ... ... and in crossing that line, they deserve the punishment they received. Again, like it or not, China has every right to treat it's citizens in the manner that they deem appropriate. ... and the fact that said punishment was, contrarily, being forced to play video games makes it laughable. On the scale of crying out for attention, the source of the story seriously dropped the ball. If he had wanted sympathy from me, he lost any of it the moment he began the whole playing video games was torture portion of it. In the history of all that is inhumane -- of the stories of the Soviet Gulags, the Concentration Camps -- of man's inhumanity to other men, playing video games is ... what? Really? Really! Like I said -- get some perspective here. It's a sad story. A terrible thing. Yes. ... and I can see them making a movie about it now -- Jackie Chan as the man whom, against all odds, gets his Night Elf Mohawk action, wins the girl, kicks all the guard's asses and then escapes the prison in a moment of furious keyboard action, the likes of which one has never seen before on the big screen. All in 3-D!!!! :rolleyes:

I hope this comment isn't directed at me ... :unsure: My contribution to this conversation is, mainly, for Jagex to finally own up and admit that they're either unable or unwilling to do anything about the botting problem. Sure, they talk a great game - but everywhere you go in game now -- all you see are bots, and nothing seems to be done about them, despite what Jagex claims ... its not for you, Im all for being against Jagex lying about their methods of stopping bots and wanting to hold them to their word. What im personally annoyed by is the people who think botting in runescape is heracy or a felony. Maybe we should ask Jagex to add "public stoning" to the game? :lol:

As compared to what, exactly? Can you so easily condemn China for forcing people to play WoW (those bastards!)? If, say, the Americans made an al-Qaeda "terrorist" play Runescape, non-stop, without ever letting him sleep, would that be considered torture too? Would you condemn that too?

But who are we to assert that our definition of human rights is superior to those exercised within one's own borders? :unsure: The ability to realize that our definition is not necessarily the same as another's definition is the first step in achieving a compromise -- dontcha think? Better men than you and I have debated the philosophy behind basic human rights for as long as the world was turning and I can't recall there ever being an overwhelming cry for human inequality. This isn't a matter of compromise. It's almost as if you're trying to condone this because it's in China, a place where you and I aren't from, simply to play the Devil's Advocate. Oh -- I am not condoning it at all -- but I am trying to give you and the others here a sense of PERSPECTIVE. You're all acting as though this is the worst thing ever, and it's this response that is entirely laughable. You can piss into the wind all you want, but it's not going to change the wind's direction, and you're only going to end up peeing all over yourself. Trying to declare something as self-evident to someone who cannot or will not agree to it is precisely the same thing. Judging them for it make it all more ridiculous, particularly when, in your own back yard, you're committing far worse atrocities in the same name of those same inalienable universal human rights. In the end, you can only laugh at people who proclaim that they've been tortured by playing video games. Sure it's mean. Sure it's awful. But on the grand scale of things, it's not half as bad as the worst things that are going on in this world.

But who are we to assert that our definition of human rights is superior to those exercised within one's own borders? :unsure: The ability to realize that our definition is not necessarily the same as another's definition is the first step in achieving a compromise -- dontcha think?