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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."
But what has FIFA 2005 or the Sims done wrong? There might be a chance that FIFA has a country listed that China doesn't recognize as sovereign, but I'm not sure which one that would be (I don't even play FIFA).
I mean, as a die-hard The Sims and The Sims 2 player, I can't see much that would count as either capitalist or communist in it. It's a generic family, in a generic foreign country (they don't even speak English or any real language), and earning some made up currency (it's "simoleans" not "dollars", and you can't easily convert that into any real currency, because the price ratios and wages are all wrong for any real country.) They go to work, they spend their money on groceries and a bigger TV, and occasionally have dinner with their friends. They can't even open their own business at home, or anything that would count as capitalistic.
I.e., it's generic stuff that's no different in communist China from the USA.
I mean, that TS2 family could just as well be two communist patriotic comrades going to work in the government-owned factories, and buying their fridge from a government-owned store.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
China seems to be if not exactly ignoring the WTO and GATT agreements, then playing loosely with them. American and European governments promised their voters that China's entry into the various world trade organizations would a) promote democracy, and b) allow the West to export high-tech products to China.
Point A doesn't seem to be happening very quickly, but we can have hope for the future. On Point B, the Chinese economy is frankly wiping the West, exporting tons of goods and importing relatively little (while supporting the dollar's high value).
We may think that this is only about IP, but software is one of the few things the West can hope to compete in. This seems like a legitamate GATT / WTO offense. It would be pretty fun to see these agreements actually work for the benefit of the US by overturning the software ban.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Speaking of bans, they mentioned during one of the Prince Dumbass (the guy who wore the Nazi outfit to the party) news blurbs about Germany's ban on the swastica. Do they grant waivers for things like history books? Or do they have to blur out the symbol in any historical photos, or something?
--- Ban humanity.
Actually, in the 1970's neither country was particulary friendly with the Chinese. Remember that the Chinese attacked Vietnam in the late 1970?
Of course, it isn't really true that Chinese citizens are only allowed to have one child. For a short time, I dated a Chinese national who was enrolled in a US College.
She is the youngest child of 6 children. Her family spent most of its 'growing up years' in a farming community, although most of her brothers and sisters, as well as herself, have ended up obtaining rather advance college degrees.
I was a little taken aback when she said she had 5 brothers and sisters and I asked her about the one child law. She mentioned that wasn't necesarily true. It's encouraged, but not set in law where the government will break down your door for having more then one child and take you off to labor camps. That's mostly US propaganda.
Of course, she had several Chinese propagandist ideas about life in the US. It was pretty fun working through those things, while it lasted.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I've got a great VCD published by the Chinese government documenting their China/Vietnam war. After the US finally completely pulled out of Vietnam in 1975 (under Donald "Surrender Monkey" Rumsfeld), China turned on the Vietnamese Communists they had backed in the war against the US. And became the last in a long line of imperial losers trying to defeat the Vietnamese. (Betcha never heard of that dirty little chapter in the International Workers Paradise brotherhood.)
The VCD is entirely first-person movies of actual military action, shot by China from their troops, and some captured from Vietnamese troops who shot their own footage. It's black and white, but full of action and fast cuts, along with subtitles in Vietnamese and (I guess) Han and Cantonese Chinese, over pair of Vietnamese and (I guess) Mandarin narration voiceovers. It all flies by so fast that I want to slow it down, which would stretch its hour into at least two, an epic on a war both hidden in the West, and doubtlessly fictionalized in the East. It looks like a trove of material to illustrate a historical game, even if crudely integrated with overlaid interactive game graphics. And I doubt it could represent that tawdry little commentary on Communism any less accurately does than its Chinese propaganda version. Plus, I'd expect its inevitable banning by the Chinese mafia government to spur its underground popularity in the vast Chinese market. Who's with me?
--
make install -not war
If any of you guys can read Chinese, the Chinese version of the story says that 26 of the games banned were pirated games and the other 24 were being sold before getting any permission from related authorities.
And BTW, some people here need to update their information about China. I can still remember when I casually mentioned that I had watched a movie named A Clockwise Orange or something in an interview with a HK reporter a few years ago, the shocked look on her face (she was pretty... but that's another story). Wake up from the Cold War! Basically people here in China (at least college students) can get mostly everything from the Internet, from anal porn to H-games (oops, these things sound belonging to the same category?) to Friends (SitCom) or 24 Hours. I'm not trying to say that everything is perfect here, and there are still a lot of restrictions officially, but... things are changing, and it's not all that bad.