With a passion for online games, the Chinese are racking up some serious hours playing such titles as World of Warcraft. Half the fun is taking on a new persona, but for the Chinese some of the freedoms presented by online play will soon disappear.
Chinese gamers will soon have to reveal their real identities when playing online games. Starting in June, all Chinese Internet game makers will have to install mechanisms that demand players’ actual names and ID numbers.
While, I’m not a fan of registering to play a game under a false name or misrepresenting oneself, the motivation behind the move seems a bit sinister. It’s being forced by the government to supposedly to stop teenagers from playing online too much. In a free society this would be up to the parents to decide. No, wait, maybe not. Kind of makes me hope Hillary Clinton or Jack Thompson don’t catch on to this idea.
The companies work with the police to ensure the name and identification number given by players are real. Currently, many players simply register fake IDs. The new system is aimed at helping parents track how many hours the teenager has played and which games he or she plays, Xinhua (News Agency) said. “Using a system of real names is to standardize the Internet games network market and promote the stable and healthy development of the games industry,” Wang Feng, vice chairman for Jinshan Software Company, was quoted by the Beijing newspaper Daily Messenger saying.
The move is the latest attempt by the authorities to regulate the booming online gaming market after a measure last year to automatically log players off games once they exceeded a set number of hours of continuous play.
China’s government has also tried to control the market by banning “unpatriotic games” that make Chinese soldiers or agents the enemy and by persuading companies to develop “healthy” games that feature Chinese heroes such as the communist do-gooder Lei Feng.
Statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center show that China had 111 million Internet users by the end of 2005, more than 20 million of whom were online game players.
Daily Times
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