So, what’s up with gaming in china? Like, why does China need its own edition of foreign games? What’s wrong with Chinese players get access to the rest of the world’s version of Minecraft or Roblox? Like why does ChinaBlox always add a parachute to ur player model when ever you fall over X amount of distance, and then puts up a message saying dOn’T dO tHiS iN rEaL lIfE. Yeah, people already get that. You don’t always need to hold the gamer’s hand. Also, Tencent is against teenagers gaming for more than 2 hrs on end. Ppl should just let teenagers play VIDEO GAMES (although that might just be Tencent’s problem, not the CCP’s.) Another thing is, that apparently ChinaBlox has really strict rules for some reason…
TL;DR: China should embrace gaming culture rather than going against it.
Basically the government of China has certain views on video games and wants to promote those views in the video games themselves. Likewise in World of Warcraft, your skeleton that appeared when you died was turned to a tombstone. It’s not that big of a change, really. I don’t really see the issue – if WoW had come out with tombstones instead of skeletons, nobody would have said anything (i.e. I doubt you would have a contingent of players petitioning Blizzard to replace the stones with skeletons). You should also be wary of what western media says about video games in China; it’s usually gone through several intermediaries by the time they get to it and they don’t have to care about fact-checking their story since nobody cares about the truth anyway.
For example I heard on “Chinese” EVE Online, there were two big corporations (guilds) and you were forced into joining either of them. If you make your own, they bully you until you disband and join them. People are quick to add the usual racism you’d expect, but I think China understood there is strength in numbers and the fantasy of being the leader of a rogue gang of criminals (In EVE you can also own a system and build in it, then go out to the neighbouring system attacking the players that wander through) is solely a western one.
As for why there are “two” versions of the game, one for the Chinese market and one for the “international” market, well, you can play the Chinese version of most games, even online games, from outside China. But from inside China, you rarely can play (as a normal consumer) the international version. This is their prerogative and not really an issue. The Chinese market is big enough that they’ll never run out of people to play with and I’m reminded that as a European, I usually only get a “Europe” server where everyone speaks in their local language. These games are usually made by USian companies that make a “North America” server where you can speak English with Canadians and USians. They don’t want to invest in making language-based European servers (which would however also reduce the playerbase in those servers) and so the general chat is often a mess of alphabets and languages.
It’s not without precedent. For the longest time (I’m not sure it’s still applied), laws in Germany banned games from showing human violence, because they were considered toys. So German releases of games usually put robots instead. Couldn’t show blood, couldn’t show I actually have a German cartridge of Turok for the N64 and as a kid I didn’t understand why I was fighting weird robots lol.
In North America, they outright won’t sell you a game rated M without ID. In Europe you could get away with it, most stores did not check, and as a kid in grade school I remember it was kind of an urban legend whether we could buy GTA or not in store.
But in the tl;dr you mentioned gaming culture. What’s gaming culture to you? All I see is people raging over unranked matches, playing for hours on end all through the night, and then making sexist comments on Reddit. I’m not sure what there is to salvage in western gaming culture, and I’d be curious to know the relationship the average Chinese player has with video games. What I’m saying is both “countries” have a gaming culture of their own, even if it doesn’t appeal to your personal tastes or expectations. Personally, I don’t think letting developers do whatever they want on their game is an inherently good thing.
The only thing I’ll add, is a reinforcement to what Critical Resist mentioned; every market has different restrictions, and AAA games are different in each market. And, usually, the changes are either to comply with censorship laws, or to make the game more palatable to a different audience. In the US market, you can show swastikas, extreme violence, illegal activities, swearing, and nudity without being removed from the shelves. The game will have an 18+ rating (or M for Mature, if not A for Adult) and be restricted in some cases, but it won’t be censored too heavily for those things. But, on the US market, if you wanted to make the protagonist an anti-American terrorist who regularly performs war crimes against Americans, the game will absolutely be banned without question.
In Germany you can’t show swastikas and violence is censored, in Australia games can be outright banned if they centre around violence or illegal activities. Censorship in video games isn’t uncommon, and the biggest censors of them happen to be westerners.
Bones carry a cultural significance in China, so they’re considered “too edgy” for a mainstream audience, which is why skeletons were replaced with tombstones in WoW. Hong Kong has a rampant suicide problem, where people are jumping off buildings, hence you’ll find games (like Roblox) that add censorship to falls that would normally kill a person.
So like, so the fuck what if China censors games? they’re not the only ones doing it, and their censorship isn’t the worst of it. The same goes with the "China Cut"s of movies, the Chinese market is a massive one, and Chinese audiences don’t like watching films with a western bias… so they’re reshot to star Asian actors, and to share Chinese values. But, of course, the only people who are upset about the “China Cut” are western bros who genuinely think the CPC is 1984-ing Chinese citizens.
In my hypothetical socialist state, there would only be 2 rules
- Your game must not be fascist propaganda
- Your game must not spread disinformation.
In Germany you can’t show swastikas and violence is censored
Both isn’t really true anymore (for videogames), there is still (effectively) mandatory age restriction though.
It’s still true as far as laws go, but it’s unenforceable now.
Imagine if someone decides to release Undertale in China
I think the no-skeleton thing is cultural phenomenon. I am ambivalent to it but would like to hear some Chinese person’s explanation of this. In League of Legends there is a champion called Karthus and he had a skin (cosmetic bs) the splash art of which had a spooky skeleton. The Chinese version of the splash art had the skeleton replaced with something else, which is how I learnt about it.
I don’t think letting developers do whatever they want on their game is an inherently good thing.
Why do you think that? I believe letting developers doing whatever the fish they want on a game makes them better.
Part of it might be revolutionary fervour, lol. That we’ve been exposed to liberalism for so long that we see it as an immutable truth of the universe, i.e. it’s a good thing to let people create whatever they want no matter what because… we kinda believe it’ll always make better things? but I want to see what’s out there. What would happen if we did things differently, with a different mindset.
The other part of it… is online games. They’re predicated on gambling and addictive mechanics designed with one goal: make you play longer. Everything else is secondary to this goal; it’s like when youtube switched their algorithm to a neural network and told it to increase view time. Doesn’t matter if the video is good or bad, you want people to keep watching so you can keep serving them ads.
Obviously in a communist society, there would be no profit motive for making a game and “make people play as long as we can” would likely not be a goal… would it? How do we know? If you create art, you want people to consume and enjoy it. Making people play your game through whatever addictive mechanics you can find would definitely make them enjoy your game. It’s probable such mechanics would not be received well in a communist society, but who knows. It’s all conjecture.
And that’s how we get into the malfunctions I mentioned in my previous comment. How people will spend the whole night playing a game just to get some more virtual goodie (a whole other topic all by itself, but the difference between a physical good you have to spend 8 hours to get and a virtual good you spend the same time on, is that once the servers shut down, your virtual good is gone forever), and then show up to school sleep-deprived.
I mention the all-nighters again because China recently instituted a firewall on games so that students would not be able to spend the whole day playing games alone. They see this as alienated behaviour and I think they are right to. There’s a problem somewhere else if people spend 14 hours a day gaming. There’s a problem if people are spending 14 hours a day doing the same thing, no matter what it is really… except when it’s work. Suddenly when it’s a job it’s perfectly fine.
I used to play some MMOs a while back. They’re absolutely designed to keep players playing them, from rare drops that you have to spend hours grinding to get, to special short-term events that are designed to reel players in with the fear of missing out. It often gets to the point where you’re no longer really having fun, but are just playing because you feel like you have to. And even when you do have fun, you realize eventually that all of it was actually incredibly pointless. You spent all that time trying to get a fancy digital item in a game that one day will just vanish like smoke in the air. It’s not a pleasant feeling, and aside from being a social problem, it’s also a problem on a personal level, as well. So I think there’s nothing to gain by letting people play online games for hours upon hours a day, and people will actually be much happier with both the games, and themselves, if they’re limited to a shorter amount.
I believe letting developers doing whatever the fish they want on a game makes them better.
Would you still believe this if a developer wanted to have an unskippable cutscene that depicts a graphic sexual assault? Would you still believe this if a developer made a game that constantly romanticized suicide? Would you still believe this if a game forced the player to brutally murder innocent people, and made light of it?
These are the kinds of things that games get censored for the most, and imo should be.
If ur mature enough, u should be able to tell fact from fiction
Likewise in World of Warcraft, your skeleton that appeared when you died was turned to a tombstone
This was actually a result of the publisher and not government censorship.
So, while there’s no way to be totally sure what’s going on behind the scenes, can can draw some basic conclusions:
- Skeletons are not censored in all Chinese games, or considered taboo in Chinese culture.
- There is no public law that bans the use of skeletons, blood, or anything else like that in video games. But China’s laws about game censorship are broad and could be interpreted in a variety of ways.
- The censorship of skeletons in foreign games like WOW and Dota 2 was probably voluntary on the part of the games’ Chinese publishers, who were being extra careful to avoid any potential delays in the review process.
In other words, the next time you see a fleshy skeleton lumbering towards you in WOW, don’t blame Chinese culture, and don’t even blame the Chinese government. Instead, blame the game’s Chinese publishers, who put flesh back on the bones in the hopes of getting the game released more quickly in China.
Europe fought entire wars, more than one of them, to keep Chinese people addicted to opium. HSBC, a bank that got its start through the opium trade, still launders money for drug dealers, and the US has a higher drug overdose death toll every year.
People from the capitalist world have no business telling China whether or how to regulate addictive products.
Well, why don’t people on this sub compare games to art?
it’s also interesting to look at China’s console market, which is basically non-existent, even though the country is so close to Japan, where console games are all the rage. instead, playing video games is frowned upon mostly and considered a waste of time/corrupting people’s morale, almost to the same extent as gambling. and let’s not forget there was a ban of videogame consoles from 2000 to 2015.
So, do the Chinese play mostly on their PCs? Also, why isn’t gaming as accepted in China as I’d like it to be
