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Apple still faces challenges in the fight for better working conditions
The factories where our gadgets are built can be nasty, inhumane and sometimes lethal places to work. As the richest company on the planet, Apple has a duty to lead the charge against poor conditions and child labor. Today, the company has published its ninth annual Supplier Responsibility report that repeats its commitment to treat all workers with "dignity and respect." The headline stats are positive, and the company only found 16 child labor violations, but there's still a few things that have to be worked on.
Arena combat game Forced now on Steam, 20 percent off until Halloween
Action arcade game Forced is now available on Steam. The multiplayer-focused combat arena game is 20 percent off ($11.99) until October 31. Forced is described as a mix between Diablo and Left 4 Dead, featuring local and online cooperative battles for up to four players. Players control slaves in one of four skill classes in "the toughest fantasy gladiator school of them all, condemned to fight to the death." Forced is available on PC, Mac and Linux and also comes in a four pack bundle, currently discounted to $35.99, for those that know exactly who they'll team up with in the game's campaign. The game's developer BetaDwarf has a unique history, as the group of eight lived in an abandoned classroom at Aalborg University in Denmark for roughly seven months while creating Forced. After the developer's hideout was discovered by one of the school's instructors, the team of ten lived together under one roof while continuing development. Additionally, BetaDwarf raised $65,413 on Kickstarter in December 2012 to fund the project.
Indie developer BetaDwarf lived in a classroom for seven months
Denmark-based developer BetaDwarf raised $65,413 on Kickstarter in December 2012 to fund its action arcade game, Forced. Similar to other developers, the team relied fully on the crowdfunding campaign in order to make its game a reality: As BetaDwarf CEO Steffen Kabbelgaard Gronning put it at PAX Prime, the Kickstarter "pretty much saved our asses... If that hadn't went through, we'd have had to abandon the game, I think." Described on its Kickstarter page as a mix between Diablo and Left 4 Dead, Forced has players battle enemies in a combat arena. The game's development traces back to January 2011, when BetaDwarf was founded at Aalborg University in Denmark. During the summer, classrooms at the university went unused, so Gronning and his friends took over one abandoned room to use as their studio. "We moved in and we didn't really want to go home, so we moved in beds and microwaves and refrigerators and things like that and until there are like, eight guys living there our whole vacation," Gronning said. That "vacation" turned into an extended stay, as the group "managed to be there for five more months" since the university "didn't really want to use that classroom," he explained.
Chinese prisoners forced to produce virtual gold, real profits for their guards
The virtual goods economy of massively multiplayer online games may be thriving, but it's also stimulating an undesirable side-effect: exploitation. A former detainee at a prison in Heilongjiang province, China, has told the Guardian about how he was habitually forced into playing MMOs like World of Warcraft for the collection of loot, which the prison guards would then resell online for as much as ¥6,000 ($924) per day. Such totals would be the product of up to 300 inmates working 12-hour daily shifts, though predictably they saw none of the profits themselves. The unnamed source was at a "re-education through labor" camp where the usual toil would involve actual, rather than virtual, mining. The profitability of the online market has seemingly inspired prison bosses to move with the times, however, with business being so brisk that the computers "were never turned off." A Chinese government edict from 2009 is supposed to have introduced a requirement that online currencies only be traded by licensed entities, but it's believed that the practice of using prisoners in this fashion continues unabated.
