SCENE: Anachronistic Suburban US kitchen in the 1980s, dinner is just finished
Mom: “OK kids, off to play WoW”
Child 1: “Aww, but mom, I wanted to study my math facts”
Mom: “No ‘Buts’, Sally, think of the poor kids in China who don’t get to play video games…”
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Now would be a good time to translate any single-player, offline games into mandarin.
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Are you really so confident in your VPNing that you’d bet on yourself not getting tossed in jail by the China authorities?
“VPN around and find out”
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It’s part of an anxious multi-front effort by the country’s corrupt state capitalist leaders. China is also fighting this “Tang Ping” revolt by their Millenials against the toxic mug’s game “966” (9AM-9PM, 6 days a week) work culture that results in little class mobility:
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The government is symbolically striking out against 996… my guess is that they’re going to try and drive it “underground” much like the Japanese “Black Companies”… can’t have Jack Ma openly spouting off about the virtues of 996 when the law says workers can only work a maximum of 44 hours a week (ha!).
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On reddit I saw several people say they just register their parents’ ID when they sign on to the state’s ISP.
Makes sense. Sounds like something my brother and I probably did to sign up for runescape accounts back in the day.
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Well, overreaching and government surveillance aside, there is such a thing as addiction to gaming, and as with any addictions it’s an issue that affects society as such. The problem is that, as usual, they’re approaching the issue from the wrong angle.
Middle-class kids in China are being crushed under expectations to get the best grades, get a well-paying, upwardly mobile job, an appropriate partner, to eventually create a comfortable existence that allows them to take care of their parents. It’s a huge pressure at best and insane at worst, it often leads to burnout and that often leads to addiction, often to gaming in particular. This measure aims to prevent issues arising from that, but of course it’s not going to help because it doesn’t address the actual problems that they don’t actually want to change.
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There are probably a lot of parents in China, and in the USA, and in pretty much everywhere else, who would welcome this, because it gets the kids away from the screen all night, but lets mom and dad say “gee, we’d be fine with your playing games, but the family might get busted and lose our internet (or worse) - sorry”.
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Yeah, this is exactly what happened. Pretty much as soon as the news broke, TenCent’s share price took a dive.
I follow a lot of gaming news sites through RSS on The Old Reader, and the more business oriented ones were all over this.
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While there’s a lot to be worried about with this announcement, there’s also some nuance that is missing. Note that it’s mentioning online gaming, and online games in China tend to practice some of the most egregious monetisation tactics. Free-to-Play is the predominant business model for online games in China, and with that come all the usual nasties that we get in the West too, such as loot boxes, over-priced cosmetics, paid-for unlocks, etc.
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Gotta worry about the suddenly ascendant social gaming company which permits part-time students ‘work’ there…and isn’t Roblox, yeah.
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