Though 19-year-old Wang Bangxing has never ventured beyond the city limits of his native Beijing - never mind ever milked a cow or sown a seed - he wants to be a 'farmer'. But the harvest he is after is to be found in the virtual world, in the hugely successful online games such as World of Warcraft and Legend of Mir II. For now, he works by himself, spending six to eight hours a day slaying dragons and ogres, collecting valuable game codes as he travels. He then sells this booty for cash on eBay and online forums, to other players around the world who are desperate to boost their characters' status. Down the line he envisions hiring scores of migrant workers to toil away in shifts as he benefits from economies of scale. Computer gaming is nothing short of a national obsession in China, particularly among young, urban males. Of the country's 103 million internet users, 25 million are regular gamers and about 2 million are playing online at any one time. They gather in front of flickering terminals in the country's 100,000 cybercafes - generally expansive, dank dungeons that reek of stale cigarette smoke and body odour. These places are not for those with sensitive ears, either: as the players engage in battle they intermittently whoop with delight, taunt and tease their co-players and lift the roof with colourful obscenities. Students slurp instant noodles as they play, and around the periphery a few crash out on chairs, catching quick naps before jumping back into the fray. The gaming phenomenon has caused major concern among parents and the authorities. It has been blamed for truancy, poor academic results, ill health and violence. Some experts believe that up to 5 million of the regular gamers are socially dysfunctional addicts, and the world's first specialist clinic has opened in Beijing to cure them of their cyber-cravings. Several disturbing stories have hit the headlines this year, adding fuel to the debate. Among those whose real and virtual worlds have collided was a 13-year-old boy from Tianjin who committed suicide, apparently in the belief that he could meet his virtual character in the afterlife. In Shanghai, an avid gamer was sentenced to life in prison in June for stabbing a competitor to death who had borrowed, and then sold, his virtual 'dragon sabre'. Over the past couple of months, two cyber-funerals have been held for a pair of young gaming addicts who died, both apparently linked to exhaustion and ill-health suffered after prolonged periods ensconced in a virtual world. The government intervened last month, telling companies to introduce a system to restrict the number of hours people can play their most popular games. Now a character's power weakens after three hours and runs out after five. The breed of young Chinese you find in these cafes tends to be patriotic, but politically apathetic. They rarely question the Communist Party or the one-party system, and reading news is far down their agenda. But talking to dozens of them about the recent efforts to curtail their game-playing elicits unusually passionate responses. 'Who the hell do they think they are? They want to control every last detail of our lives ... It is violating our rights,' was a typical response from one 17-year-old boy, who said he was one of thousands who had signed a petition condemning the initiative. But they all seem to share the belief that they can easily sidestep the controls. Mr Wang, with a cheeky grin, talks of a host of programming stunts that he believes can be pulled to dupe the system. 'Like before, people will play as much as they want to play, and it does not matter what some old cadre thinks,' he said. 'But it is stupid of them to challenge young people like this. It just makes people angry. It makes them want to challenge them back.' Peter Goff is a Beijing-based journalist