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.
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.