China is getting ready to launch a new crackdown on those
videogames that are deemed to be “undesirable.” The official reasoning is that, as the number of players grows, especially those interested in MMOs, the possibility of addiction is also growing and the state must make sure that gamers are protected from the bad influences of the content they experience.
Kou Xiaowei, who is a senior official with the General Administration of Press and Publication, tasked with taking care of what videogame content arrives in China, recently told the China Daily newspaper that “Although China's online gaming industry had been hot in recent years, online games are regarded by many as a sort of spiritual opium and the whole industry is marginalised by mainstream society. If we don't make adjustments, the industry will suffer sooner or later.”
Not long ago, China also announced that it planned to make it mandatory that sellers of PC implement a system, called Green Dam, on all computers sold in China, so that undesirable content could be blocked by the government. Basically, China is interested in censorship, which could soon be extended from social networks and specific websites to the content delivered via videogames (titles mentioning Tibet are already banned in Communist China).
Some of the measures that China has taken in an effort to make sure that videogames do not affect the larger harmony of the society have been to ban children from using Internet cafes and to force owners to implement time restrictions so that gamers cannot spend too much time playing MMOs.
At the moment, the country is one of the
videogame markets that are growing quickly, and a lot of people are interested in playing online games, both subscription-based, like World of Warcraft, or free to play. Still, piracy is rampant in the Communist state and the government, for all its worries, has failed to implement a system of ratings in order to make sure that buyers are informed about the content of the videogames they get.
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