Slashdot Mirror
China Bans 50 Games
Stargoat writes "The official mainland Chinese news agency, Xinhau, is reporting that China is banning 50 gaming titles. These titles include Battlefield Vietnam, The Sims 2, and FIFA 2005. A similar game banning event occurred six months ago in China, but not to this scale."
The only reason I can figure that it's been banned would be if there is a Taiwanese team as an option.
"This especially concerns pirated textbooks, electronic publications and illegal journals that will have negative influence on the youth. "
I'm more concerned about my kids getting run over by a tank because they disagree with the government, or contracting some fatal disease because the country runs around like nothing is wrong, than with textbooks, publications or journals.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
The article says this is a crackdown on illegal games, and specifically mentions pirated versions of all the games listed in the summary.
Really?
From TFA:
As part of the effort to protect intellectual property rights and create a good environment for Chinese youth
It's most definitely at least partially censorship. The fact that they are banning several Vietnam War related games, which almost certainly show the Americans as the "good guys" and the communist North as the "bad guys", supports this idea.
I thought that /. might be having problems today. I read 8 comments before I saw one with MS bashing. That is almost a record.
I mean what else could they NOT like about the "world's" favorite sport?
Let me guess... Taiwan has it's own team?
By banning BFV, FIFA 2005, and Sims2, the Chinese are doing it to protect their society from the misconceptions that America was the "good guy" in Vietnam, from the notion that Taiwan is sufficiently independent to get a soccer team, and a game featuring characters that elevate their moods by "meditating" with pseudoscientific mysticism, see "ghosts", can enter same-sex relationships, and who frequently hop into a bed for pixelated "woo-hoo" -- the latter of which oughta be grounds for a ban in any civilized nation. But all three games are being banned for the same fundamental reason: they threaten the stability of the Chinese government.
When our lawmakers do it, it's for the freedom and security of our children.
40 years ago, Ted Kennedy had to leave his girlfriend to drown so he could continue defending our children's future. And the Senators from Disney probably had to snort a lot of cocaine from between a lot of plastic starlets' tits before deciding it was time to ban the internets.
That's the difference between freedom and repressive communism. Honestly, we have no idea the sacrifices our lawmakers make for us.
They discovered ideology.
--- Ban humanity.
it's generic stuff that's no different in communist China from the USA.
Like the idea of buying things for your family in order to placate them? Promoting mass consumerism as an effective way of life? Sounds like the Communist building blocks that the modern Chinese empire is founded on.
(But it's probably because there is no official distrubitor of Maxis games as of yet, and all the games being retailled are pirated copies of varying quality)
I'm more concerned about my kids getting run over by a tank because they disagree with the government, or contracting some fatal disease because the country runs around like nothing is wrong, than with textbooks, publications or journals.
My friend, it is time to learn that all types of governments have one thing in common, and that is that they don't care about you in the slightest. They organize to use you for power. You don't even have a choice. There is only one thing that they do care about, and that is maintaining the special position that they have on top of you. This is the same the world over throughout history. I dare say it is inescapable.
Whether it be a cultural dictatorship that seeks to keep you in line by giving you no options to think for yourself, or a "no real choice" representative democracy that has two parties that look the same, it doesn't matter what you think. Pull the lever, bucko. No matter what you do, no matter what they say about thinking about "your ethnic identity" or "your freedoms" they still will give most favored nation status to ethnic cleansing butchers and corporations that make plastic crap, because that's where the friends are (and by friends, I mean pieces of paper with other famously successful a-holes on it), and honestly, who could turn down that much oil and cheap labor? I mean, cmon! Remember, life is a video game where the objective is to rack up a bank account score with as many zeros as a galaga champion on a three day meth binge.
Let me put it this way, your money (stamped with the very face of the kings that made the rules your life) has always been taken out of your hardworking hands and given to some bastard at the top to buy polo ponies. It's a graft... a fleecing of the many for the excess of the few, and their friends. Whether they are in charge of China, or getting seven hundred dollars for a special bolt for that aircraft carrier, or in charge of Citibank, in short, we play by their rules, and so they screw us, like they always have throughout history.
Best to find a way make as much freedom, time, happiness, and peace on your own. If you look to those guys for it, you really will get run over by a tank, for their profit margins.
If you read the actual article, you will see, as many astute readers have pointed out, that this is an issue of China attempting to crack down on video game piracy, not ban games because they are evil communists.
It is my opinion that recently slashdot has started down the slippery slope of becoming what I despise about big time news agencies: a marketplace for sensationalized stories. Every dramatic article posted on /. recently ends up being far less dramatic upon further investigation. I used to love slashdot for the lack of glitzy CNN-esque flash headlines of empty news articles, now slashdot is becoming exactly that.
And don't give me that "well it's the readers who submit articles, so don't blame slashdot, blame the readers" crap. We all know how hard it is to get an article posted on the front page, and we all know that there are tons of articles submitted and only a few chosen by a handful of people who have their own ideologies/agendas. The only difference with having users submit the articles at this point is that the moderators don't have to dig up the articles themselves.
If trends continue along these lines, I think my days of reading slashdot are numbered. I can read sensationalized news anywhere (CNN, FOXNews, ABC, CBS, NBC etc). I come here for the in-depth, interesting, non-glamorous, I-might-just-learn-something-today news, and I am finding it harder and harder to come across on slashdot.
Mod this however you want. I might be a troll, but I feel like it needed to be said.
But unfortunately they don't really seem to care at the moment how their government treats them.
Or at least they don't care enough about computer games to risk dying for.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
But the US won't, because Freedom is doublespeak for Capitalist Market, which China already is.
Thus, bring on the fascism, as long as the US profits.
I don't know about China, but I can tell you first hand that in Eastern Europe during communism, people also bought stuff to feel good about themselves. There were people starving themselves and their family for a lifetime to get a bigger TV or an imported car, or to show off at work that they can afford imported cigarettes or whatever.
Again, from experience, I can tell you that The Sims could have been just as well about a Soviet family, or a Czech one, or a Bulgarian one, or an East German one. Maybe the prices would be 10 times higher, then, but that's about it. (Well, and also homosexuality would get your sims arrested.)
The difference is the abbundance and cost of goods. In America you might not _need_ to take a loan to get a new fridge. (But you might do it anyway.) And in The Sims you only need to "save up" for 3 days or so for a fridge. In Eastern Europe, you'd feel the monthly paymets a lot more.
But the basic phenomenon is the same. It's basically about keeping up with the Joneses, or preferrably one-upping the Joneses.
And it's existed everywhere humans live, and for as long as humans have existed. No offense to the Egyptians, whose ancient culture I actually admire, but the pyramids are the perfect example of that phenomenon happening verbatim some 4000 years ago. They started with a small mastaba, and ended up with monstrosities that took a lifetime to build, and cost the country a lot. Because each pharaoh wanted to show all y'all that his... ahem... obelisk, is bigger than yours. And than the previous pharaoh's.
Or in the same ancient times phoenicians made a fortune trading in luxury items, like purple dye. It had no other value than being an expensive thing to show off with. Made some people good about themselves that they can afford it. Proto-Consumerism at its finest back then, eh?
And so on, and so forth.
So basically I think the Chinese government is kidding themselves if they think that China is above consumerism.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The article says China is banning 50 games, 26 of which are pirated. Since they are banning the game and not going after sources of piracy, the explanation is simple: it's disguised censorship.
Take a game like "The Sims 2". It's not published in China. Hence, all copies of "The Sims 2" in China are pirated. Hence, China can claim they are fighting piracy... But the truth is, if EA decided to publish "The Sims 2", they would not be able to because it is banned. (Interestingly, Ubisoft tends to publish EA games in China; for instance, Call of Duty. AFAIK, EA doesn't publish in China.)
That being said...
The dychotomy of China is that, while a game, movie or book might be banned from legal publishing, the Government makes no real effort to prevent piracy! If you're a movie director who does gay movies in China, the Government will most certainly 'ban' your film, which means you'll never find a distributor and cannot make money from projections. Your movie can still be found for a buck on the street corner, though.
So, the result of banning a pirated game just means publishers will never be able to publish it in the Mainland.
Result: it encourages piracy by preventing legal publishing.
Keep in mind that the Xinhua story was not altogether clear. It's a translation, so that's not too surprising.
sulli
RTFJ.
Freedom of expressions also did not apply to Gi'tmo detainees...held without charge
How the rules change when applied to oneself...
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer