China tightens regulations of online games
by Blake Snow 
{ Dec 12th 2006 at 2:45PM }
According to the Associated Press, China is tightening content regulations for game makers in a country with 23 million online gamers. New controls in place require distributors to closely monitor games after some were found to include forbidden religious, political, pornographic and overly violent content. From the article: "Distributors must obtain approval to release new games and submit monthly monitoring reports confirming that operators haven't added forbidden content, the Xinhua News Agency said." State regulators said game makers conceal the content in question when applying for approval. They later upgrade the games with the improper content. Though China's political doors are more open than ever before, full information exchange is still a sensitive issue.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tel @ Dec 12th 2006 3:09PM
What you mean is:
"Though China's political doors are more open than ever before, full information exchange is still totally unallowed."
'Sensitive issue', my butt.
I find it endlessly depressing that now China is a place businesses can make crap-loads of money we are willing to overlook it’s horrible human-rights issues.
Sure, no less people vanish each year. Political prisoners are still executed and (China now openly admits) their organs are harvested. There is no freedom of the press. They have execution tables in vans for ‘speed and convenience’. They can’t access ‘harmful western ideas’ via the Internet. If you speak up you’re a criminal. But, Hey – they got money now!
Some people still alive can remember when we overlooked Germany’s human-rights breaches because they were a economic powerhouse and there was serious money to be made. Companies like IBM flocked there. Didn’t work out too well for the world in general, if I recall.
JS Beckerist @ Dec 12th 2006 3:36PM
Well put Tel, well put.
Ndric @ Dec 12th 2006 4:17PM
I feel sorry for the Chinese :|
James @ Dec 12th 2006 4:26PM
Way I see it, if governments were companies, China would be desperately trying to sell buggy-whips as more and more Fords roll off the lines. Seriously, I don't think China has enough fingers (firewalls) to plug all the holes (Tor, etc) in the dam (the Internet). (Man, am I King of All Analogies or what?) They can't keep democratic ideas out forever -- they can ban games that have "unacceptable" content put in by devs, but what about Chinese-speaking aliens (e.g. in Japan, the US, or Korea) that play on the same servers? Most online games have a chat client of some sort built in -- what's to stop a Second Life resistance movement from forming?
Tel @ Dec 12th 2006 5:09PM
@4.
The possibly of death and the well-being of your family.
Don’t let the network news fool you – China is a repressive as it has ever been. Take a quick look at the news sites and search for China. Weed out all the “China is now big business!!1!1!!” articles (which will be the clear majority) and you will quickly find a lot of ignored, and genuinely frightening, stories.
Remember, these are genuinely the ‘publicly approved’ versions.
Here are a few to get you started:
Criminals’ organs harvested
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/world/4344382.html
(Question: How many of those ‘criminals’ are political prisoners)
Death Vans
http://web.amnesty.org/wire/May2003/China
Human Rights getting worse
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20061212-0114-china-rights-taiwan.html
UN Monitoring Body Urges UN to Discuss Human Rights Violations in Tibet
http://www.savetibet.org/news/newsitem.php?id=1067
Foreign Music Banned
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2006-12-12T135557Z_01_SHA357182_RTRUKOC_0_US-CHINA-MUSIC.xml&WTmodLoc=InternetNewsHome_C2_internetNews-6
All it takes for evil men to win is for good men to do nothing.
reppy @ Dec 12th 2006 6:59PM
Remember: trade with China is good because it's fostering relations, but trade with Cuba is bad because they're communists!
pete @ Dec 12th 2006 7:48PM
@#4 china has THE MOST advanced internet filtering systems in the world, that do not even outright block certain pages but it makes it seem as they do not exist. i will throw my news source behind my comment when i have time to look it up but yeah they dont fuck around over there. oh and ill throw this titbit for yall, any one rememeber tiamese square. yeah they dont fuck around
Andrew Fong @ Dec 12th 2006 7:52PM
Tel, the government is still more afraid of its people than the people are of the government.
If you actually go to China, you'll see that it's not as bad as you make it out to be. Is it repressive? Sure, but anyone who remembers it from 30 years ago will say things have gotten a zillion times better since the Cultural Revolution.
The government's resources are contrained. They can arrest and execute one person, perhaps even one village, but it can't afford to do that to everynoe. There are the occasional setbacks but they are slowly losing ground. Eventually, the government has to give in to the people.
That said, I'm sure foreign companies can do a more active role in speeding up the process. American game makers, Hollywood, software companies, etc. should all get together and secretly discuss how to sneak in "improper content" into their products. Personally, I think some someone should leak a pirated version of Windows with "organharvesting.txt" hidden in a system folder. That would put the Chinese government in a pickle. Either crack down on piracy or let every pirated version of Windows become a blow for democracy!
Andrew Fong @ Dec 12th 2006 8:30PM
pete, it's the most advanced in the world but it's still not very effective. It blocks the average user, but the dedicated folks know ways around. Tor usually works. Proxy servers and anonymizers allow you to see most things.
Their system isn't designed to regulate MMOs too. I'm sort of curious how they would manage this. I'm guessing that could do a couple of things. First, they'd have to mandate that all game servers be stored locally and block all connections to foreign game servers (on a more positive note, that completely wreck the Chinese gold-farming industry). Second, they'd have to hire lots of "big mamas" (seriously, that's what they call them in China -- Google it) to play MMOs all day long and remind people not say certain things.
Thing is, you'd need a lot of "big mamas" to cover an MMO. Some of these virtual landscapes are huge. Are you really going to post a person in every virtual cave and desert? And what about traditional MP games where anyone can setup their own server?
FSK405K @ Dec 12th 2006 8:33PM
China's a fun place, as long as you have money and don't want to participate in any group that the government thinks could in any way rival it's centrality in people's minds.
It's a lot of fun running into internet cafes! There aren't any that I've found in the US with half as much cool factor. And the internet cafes are either filled with tourists VOIPing/emailing home or thirteen-year-old boys playing MMORPGs. Ragnarok Online was all the rage when I was there.
Jamar @ Dec 13th 2006 7:07AM
It's really not that bad- know the right people and the Great Firewall is nothing (that's how my school gets access to Wikipedia- the director of technology "got friendly" with the people running their fiber line, and so it runs out of the country around the firewall). If you're a foreigner the worst that can happen is that you get kicked out of the country. Also, if you're in China and you want news about "certain things" that are otherwise blocked, go to 2channel ( http://www.2ch.net )- they're never blocked, and their "China" board goes into great detail about all that you want to know (don't click the Taiwan board, though- then you'll get blocked out of 2channel too).