China Terrified of Online Gaming
- Categories: Games, News
- Date: Mar 27, 2009 06:26 JST
- Tags: Bizarre, Censorship, China, MMORPG, NEETs, Net Café, Politics, Statistics
The latest threat to stable dictatorship in China is not America or Russia, but the insidious menace of massively multiplayer gaming.
The Chinese government is terrified by the results of research which shows the nation’s youth turning into legions of gold farming NEETs with no realistic prospect of filling the nation’s factories, and is calling for a clamp down on the decadent gamers.
The research, conducted by the Chinese Network Information Centre (CNNIC), identifies the need for a campaign to root out the evils of the “the Three Lows”, which are identified as low age, low education, and low income. These three qualities are overwhelmingly associated with Chinese online gamers.
The report points to the development of an enormous market for MMOGs in China, with the end of 2008 seeing some 55,500,000 Chinese engaged in such pursuits. Over 75% of these users are now paid subscribers of some game, and the market for virtual goods (RMT, Real Money Trading) is ballooning in size.
The increasing transformation of MMOG players into an underclass of young people with low academic attainment and income is highlighted as a clear danger. Over half of the MMOG population is now under 22, and 77% have less than a technical school education; worse yet, 30% have no apparent source of income, and most other users only have a monthly income in the range of $140 to $240.
The report suggests that if these youths are not “protected” from the wickedness of online gaming, the productive capacity of the nation may soon be damaged. Harsh measure to regulate and restrict gamers are called for as a result.
Via Record China.
The Party’s ongoing battle with the Internet seems set to continue; given its tack record so far we must expect ever harsher bans…
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They didn't know that many bootleg copies of computer games worldwide came from China.If they are afraid,why not take action against their alarming piracy,Aaargh!
on the one side i would feel sorry for the gamers if they ban all mmo, but on the other side that would finally get rid of about 95% the RMT scum ruining the games economys for everyone so i personally wouldnt mind to see such a ban
China needs an anarchist revolution, methinks.
idiots run china...
China sure is terrified of everything. (Youtube, Google, etc.)
That's sort of the ultra conservative mindset. It's hardly unique to China. Establishment has an idea about what people are "supposed to be doing" and tries to ban everything else out of existence.
New things which you are not "supposed to be doing" tend to be extra attention.
no dude,
china actually fears only the lesser part of the ppl, the illiterate, ppl without proper education ppl living in mountains/villages without proper sense of judgement not knowing how the world is constituted and what does NATO mean,
in short,they are just retards that can esailly get stimulated/instigated by western propaganda or swayed by whatever other says..
for the sake of stableness of the society i 100% approve of what our gov. did,
actually this is also one of the many reasons for why democracy or general election is impossible here and why prime minister said we cant simply copy the western system
Pathetic.
i dont think so, not a little...
on the contrary your mindset is lamentable
MMO players concentration camps would solve the problem.
This maybe seen as a problem but there might be other solutions to help the Chinese NEET people to get to work and help the country.
Those guys at the top just doesnt know how to run a country properly...
Things like this requires you to do something about it even before it happens...
They are just lacking discipline in their younger days (Most of them actually)
Lol, that is sad indeed but then again that is what they are good for anyhow. =P At least they aren't to blame for making "China quality" products that we all know to well....
Soon be damaged? It never was at full potential.
China has been hurt since Cixi. Then came the corrupted KMT, Imperial Japs and then the fail CCP.
Chinese people just can't do it right. They can't carry out socialist policies right nor can they go capitalist right.
WOW its WOW
on this one i full agree and so-port them here its been proven teck and online games r destroying us. making us to lazy and making usa again one of the fattist and lazyiest places on earth not just over priced and greedy.
They compare Chinese to foreigners as if things were equal to begin with.It's no surprise poor people make for most of the numbers. People turn into entertainment because they're not happy with what they got and want to forget about it and at least have something to be treated equally as the rich. You don't see Porsche owners being mad over MMOGs 'cos they go to Ibiza,5-stars hotels and hot chicks. you had all that, you wouldn't remember the last time you played a game.
They will destroy the root of the problem, uh, oh shit. That's blizzard. That's in america. We're too worn out to wage another war.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....China.
Given the lack of women in China, can you blame these guys for not pursuing a "normal" life path? Not like they can settle down, get married, and have that one child anyway.
china = pussies. cant even give a game the right attitude
who am i going to play counter strike den wit.
55,500,000 is alot of NEET. They can form an army of gold farmers and make real money.
Idea: tax those money and you can make China very rich.
They should encourage NEET to do what they are best at doing, since they can't lift anything heavier than a keyboard. They are not useful in the factories or workforce.
MMOG NEET probably will make more money than factory workers too. lol.
$$$
jeez let china die...
stop making the world worse...well their own people worse...which will effect the world in general...
I disagree.
Just let Americans and Europeans die. Stop making the world any worse than it is now.
Can we settle on a happy medium and just let humanity die?
Just the other day I watched a fellow gamer played Vietnamese MMOG. He played at least 4 characters that I could count. At the same time.
Fucking boring. And a waste of time. But who can dictate his choice of timewaster. Sure as hell not me, seeing as I am wasting my time with manga and games, albeit different kind of games than MMOG.
I can sympathize with those guys in charge in China, actually. The goddamn idiots are wasting time and energy (and money) while they could have done something better. Note that my definition of something better differs from theirs.
I could even understand what drove them toward decisions like that. It's the huge population under them and the huge atlas of their territory. Their peckers got stiff just from looking at those figures . Mine got stiff from looking at the butts of girls, but then again I'm a lowly Net lurker and they are the peep in charge. Megalomania is an attractive form of madness.
They are ignorant of lots of thing, they are driven by megalomania and a sense of godgiven duty. Also, they could something about what bothers them. That's why they did the research, scared themselves silly, and start to do something sillier. But what the hell, as we are doing something silly (like playing PC games?) it's not like we can throw the first stone, eh?
we have freedom of speech here right? If not, disregard everything following this sentence.
What the chinese citizens REALLY need to be protected from are those fatass, backstabbing, two-faced, inconceivable sluts, that are the commies... seriously, they forced those guys to become NEETs, cause htey ruined the fun of 3d/everyday life in reality, thus forcing them to resort to 2d, or internet...
well china is a perfect target because they have HUGE population and their economy is BOOOOMING O_o
but if banning them >_> that's not good anymore. it's like making their citizen animal. no freedom
it's not like those gamer have no common sense >_> me myself is a gamer, and becoming less as i grow old
Awesome article.
It remembers to my days on FFXI mpking chinese farmers, calling GM on them, and so on.
Such fun days. But to see that there are 55M of them doing this stuff is totally crazy, I really never thought there were that many.
Even counting all the major MMOG (WoW, Lineage 1-2), most other games don't break 500k, but I never thought there might be that many "under the radar" games that will account for enough people to work on this,
I know all these farmers work in shifts, sometimes they work with many characters at the same time during 8-12 hours when someone else takes over, they will never leave that camping place, that fishing spot, or that x place without their bots ready to get some loot to sell.
Going by this site: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart4.html there were 17M subscriptions on MMOG by 2008, this only counts paid accounts, so free games aren't included, same as anything similar to http://www.gaiaonline.com which should be a great source of income for those people.
Even so, I still find that 55 million amount, to be very, very high.
Anyone else have any thoughts about this?
55M is actually pretty reasonable. WoW alone has close to 12M (admittedly that's worldwide). And some of the other games like Fantasy Westward and Legend of Mir that aren't that popular in the western countries have millions of subscribers in China. Maple Story is supposed to have something like 87M accounts (source: http://gigaom.com/2009/02/01/top-10-money-making-mmos-2008/ )
Latest estimate pegs the numbers of Chinese gold farmers alone at 1 million: http://www.netharuka.com/games/a-million-chinese-gold-farmers/
Dude, I've been tripping to beijing and areas around during last summer. I had some free days there to walk around buying anime-stuff and cheap gadgets. And my friend took me to a place with MMORPG-farmers (we were actually going for the whores, but decided to see the ugly part of china). That's usually a small firm with 50-100 dudez in, and their life is hell. They "work" 12 hours "farming" in a stinky, hot and small rooms with 10-20 pc's, taking shifts. A modern form of slavery in hell.
I don't really think there are 55M of them.
And for each dollar they earn, the guys with higher ranks make $2-$5, and european/usa gamers buy that shit for even more.
You know, it is better working in the factory. I've been to one of samsung's factories in China, and I must say folks there have it good. Not a dream job, but you don't need much education for assembling a notebook. (And lots of workers on the assembly line were females by the way)
MMO's are for taking men's souls and all their rares :P
And thats how I own in PVP :D
Nooo! Don't touch my rares!
Lost my soul a long time ago. No problem there. Thanks Sankaku. ^_^
The problem with MMOs is they can be addictive and a welcome escape from a depressing reality (no job prospects or career in your future). I wish China great luck with their initiative, but unless they shut down the internet completely in China, it will fail. Interactive online gaming is a global trend in the younger generation in most post-industrial countries today and trying to stop it is like a single man trying to cut down an oncoming tsunami with a sword.
I can understand how the so called "three lows" in China might gravitate towards online gaming and stay online as much as possible. If their real world prospects suck, what would motivate them to want to sign off and happily work in a factory?
Despite the censorship in China, I'm also pretty sure some of the wealth and affluence of other countries filters through the internet (not to mention wealthy citizens in China)to give three-low youth ideas of what kind of lives they *could* be living- depressing them even more.
MMOs are great fun and nice for social networking if you keep it balanced with real life responsibilities, but it can also consume your life. I've seen it first hand. I have a couple friends the last few years who have disappeared into WoW. And losing their job and cutting off from RL friends- with all these fails in RL, what motivation do they have to venture out of their MMO? None.
And if some of those MMO three-low can marginally support themselves via gold farming, they will never leave the virtual world.
TLDR:
China will have a tough time making any real headway against this trend.
I'd prefer to play games too if all I had to look forward to in life is earning shithouse money building ipods for those imperialistic american dogs...
A significalnt amount of chinese production is consumed internally. They have no problem in making it 100% and living in stand-alone mode provided that they have some resources imported from africa, mid-east and russia.
I mean, frankly, they don't give a damn bout ipods and other shit, my dear. That's a by-product of their industrialisation.
Oh, yeah, and they have a small trade surplus ('bout $2'000'000'000'000 kept in US T-bonds and other garbage-papers)
I tried playing Lineage 2, WoW, and Eve Online
What ppl find so appealing about thoose games? I never had a patience to level up to at least 30 lvl. ITS FUCKING BORING.
I hate thoose games and I hate mmorpgs, and I hope all thoose fags will just die of starvation.
It's fukken boring, especially when you're farming.
And they're earning money, you idiot. They do it for living, for f00dz, dude, since $140-$240 in China is a good salary, actually.
$140-240 might get you along (barely) in a smaller city but in Beijing and Shanghai you're stuffed... 5 years ago maybe, but living costs have increased dramatically in the past few years.
I'm from Russia actually.
It just happened that I had a trip to China last summer.
Life there is cheaper then life in Russia (which is cheaper then life in EU/US/Jpn). So are the salaries.
Yea I know! China has cheap and great food. Even in Shanghai. I went there last year too and for 4 yuan I could get a nice bowl of noodles that would cost as much as $7 in my country. And it doesnt even taste as nice as the cheap china one. Only bad thing's the oil, fucking oily all the food.
Yes $140 - 240 is enough to eat well, but to live well thats different.
wow, you posibly the only chinese person on this sit that sounds like a real person and not simply propaganda agent, i congradulate you
China life is cheap because china is in Communism,
therefore is all cheap and payment is low...
Dude, don't confuse "living" like normal folks do and "surviving" like those marginal guys do.
Don't haev to pay credit for the car and other consumer crap, cause they've none. Don't haev to buy D&G or cat food.
$140-240 is enough to eat well, even in beinjing.
I personally had a good meal for $2.
So if you buy raw and cook - that's even cheaper.
You don't haev to live in the center where the shops and f00ds aren't for the poor, as well as rooms to rent.
"And they’re earning money, you idiot"
Im talking about general mass of players who swarm WoW servers like roaches. 55,500,000 chinese playing mmos judging from the post, and you telling me they all earn money? you are the idiot, idiot.
55M of players is obviously a fake, if you count the numbers. Look, the majority of MMO players are males, there are >~600mln of males in China, + 100mln females. eq 700mln of possible players. Now, take the age group, and we have 200mln left. From this age group we sort out folks who have no internet access (that's China, dude!) We'll have approx. >50mln of possible players. If they all play MMO, u still don't get 55M. And it's impossible that all just play MMO.
About 10M it would be, I suppose.
And if there's 500K-1M of "farmers" it would still make a great amount.
Not 55M though.
Now, the "farmers" do that for money, that's their only source of income. The rest? I don't know. Some "china" new form China sound fishy. "China" news from Japan sound are even more.
The life in China isn't that cool that you can afford playing MMO instead of working, really. You'll have nothing to eat and the salaries aren't high.
What about the "3 lows" - I suppose that's true.
to get addicted to online games you still need to be able to actually make some kind of friends. people failing this wont experience any fun at all.
same here. The thing I hate most about Asian MMOs is that, they require you to do a lot of grinding to advance ONE level.
Other than that, the character designs are moe.
That's right. Most, if not all, Asian made MMOs emphasizes the grind to level, not the grind to get better equipment.
I was never as bored playing a game as when I played WoW. I had a free 14 day subscription from a friend, who talked about how awesome the game was. Bullshit.
I also tried it with a friend who loves the game. I stopped playing it at the 4th day.
I personnally play MMOs for the interactive aspect. I can meet lots of people who enjoy the same things as me.
These games are also very rewarding. Achieving a certain level or a certain quest that took hours to get is really rewarding.
Too bad you don't have enough patience to enjoy these games. Some of them are very well made.
As for chinese trying to ban mmos, good luck with that. They sjhould probably offer them better job, better salary and get rid of the overall poverty in their country... MMOs shouldn't be their main concern...!
Pillow... you are on good way to ruin your life, your time, money and your social feelings. You are one of that people who send mail to neighbour who is 50m distanced from them...
(but that is your income, not my)
Oh believe I had friends there, the guy who tried to hook me up on L2, gave me lots of money, bought me best equipment available and helped me level up to make things easir, bringing me to the most interesting parts of Adena with his friends. And you know what? It was still boring as hell, I have MUCH more fun hanging out with friends in rl, fucking my girlfriend, playing my guitar and riding my bike. You know, the stuff boys usually do?
Anonymous
"but given where you are posting"
Yeah, cuz I love anime. I'm wathcnig 1-2 episodes every day, and I spent about 10 mins every day, reading news about anime to sort out the good ones. It's not a big influence on my personal time. So what? Doest it mean I'm a fag already? If you say yes, I'm done talking here.
I'll give you points for the Alpha Male attempt, but given where you are posting, your friends likely list their favorite food as pocky, your girlfriend is a dakimura, your guitar has only four strings, and your bike still has training wheels.
I can say I'm pretty fortunate then. Every time I enter a MMORPG, I meet some new people within a week and find myself in a rather trigger-happy guild. Most of our time is spent on raking up the head count while undermining all efforts from the other side. It has been a blast.
Nothing beats going into a battlefield with at least another two people to watch your back and then pick off our enemies and generally frustrate them.
^^^^win
Ah, crap, didn't refresh. I meant Anon
What they need is girls!
There are actually set to be several hundred million more men than women in China at current rates.
Awwright! Time to get my pimp-mobile. *bow chicka wow wow*
Unfortunately, due to the one-child policy, there aren't nearly enough to go around. As objectifying and cold as that sounds. (To any female readers, I apologize.)
well as for me i still love mmorpg's(those with content atleast)
i cant afford to buy a console like the xbox 360 or any handhelds for that matter..
i know im poor ~_~
Gey a job, you three Low.
Get*
~_~