It's all fun and games until...

This news item has the greatest opening paragraph I can remember. It also makes me wonder at what point - somewhere between the coming of the ATM and the death of dial-up, perhaps - I started to lose my grip on the technological revolution.

Apparently the practice of selling virtual powers is known rather ordinarily as 'gold mining', and it isn't far off some of the more traditional mining industries in its value - something like $3bn in 2009 alone. This perhaps isn't surprising, given that the games industry long ago overtook the cinema in financial takings, and that the production of Grand Theft Auto IV employed 1,000 people for three and a half years.

Obviously, though, there's a difference between motion-capturing a well-paid actor in a games studio in California and beating a prisoner for failing to earn enough credit from "monotonous tasks" (whatever they are) in World of Warcraft. It's all part of the topsy-turvy, loveable barrel of contradictions that is global capitalism, I suppose: found an industry, no matter how seemingly innocent, and sooner or later someone will find a way to exploit people from it.

And here we are, too, with yet another way for us Guardian readers to fell guilty about everything. It'll never end. Soon I'm going to discover that the seeds for my lettuces, grown with rainwater in my new organic vegetable patch, were packaged by children in Bangladesh and flown to Wilkinson's in a special helicopter fuelled by tar oil.

That's the real world, folks. Sometimes I can see why people want to exist in the virtual one.