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Real World Anger Affecting MMOG Reality?
We reported late last week that FFXI was under a DDOS attack. The Japanese origin of the title may be the reason for the attack, as Ludonauts asks the question of whether chinese crackers may attacking the game because of political frustration. From the article: "Discussion on the Allakhazam forum points the attack at Chinese protesters angry about the deletion of references to Japanese war atrocities from history textbooks: the DDOS attacks began on April 9, the same day as the protests in China. In FFXI, this issue is linked to the question of 'gil-sellers,' players who farm in-game resources for real-world cash, who in FFXI are usually characterized as Chinese: many who are suspected of being gil-sellers have placed comments in their searchable information fields like 'Resisting all Japanese goods, long live the People's Republic of China.'" Commentary available from game girl advance, Broken Toys, and Terra Nova.
/sarcasm
Its humorous to see how a lot of posts here on /. seem to have this idea that the Chinese are seriously informed about what they're 'fighting' (read: rioting) for. China is still a Communist country with a censored press and is subjected to a censored internet (something few outsiders could probably comprehend). Regardless of what it looks like from the outside, people need to think of what the average Chinese citizen sees from the inside. Once you do that, its not TOO much more difficult to see why the Chinese would/are doing such things.
Japan is attempting to join the security council at the U.N. China is the only MAJOR U.N. player in Asia (Russia doesn't count since its focused domestically and to its southwest right now). Throw in political (North Korea), economic (U.N. sanctions on China for human rights issues to cut competition?) and historical (WWII fears) and you have a nasty case of mass backlash.
"only making the link because the game is Japanese."
In case you haven't noticed, that's pretty much how the rioters have been operating. They've been trashing Japanese cars, reguardless of who's driving them, and attacking Japanese factories, reguardless of who's working in them. You're trying to apply logic to mob mentality, and it just doesn't work that way.
Well, I think you're right--all of a sudden you'd have millions of pissed off gamers taking a quick glance at their PC, then looking again, and thinking, "hmm, maybe America's Army isn't such a bad bet after all."
All the army guys would have to do then is promise the XBOX Live outage victims that they could play with something like this, or this, or these or even better, one of these
Conveniently leave out the part about pushups and getting yelled/shot at and you'd have hordes of HALO fanatics breaking down your doors to come join up. So hey, Al Qaeda, if you're reading this, better leave XBOX Live alone!
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
If anyone wants further news about this, I found this to be interesting.
Basically, during the fall of one of the latter Chinese dynasties, protests against Japan were encouraged as the people had less faith in Confucianism and thus the emperor thought their anger against the Japanese could be used to rally national unity. In the same way, perhaps the current government's ideological grip is being lost as a communist economy is giving way to a much more open-market one and thus China again looks for a way to rally national unity.
Some could even argue that allowing for free forms of expression against the Japanese government could lessen desire for other, less desirable, open demonstrations (ala Tienaman Square).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Two nights ago at dinner my 12 year old son asked me that, if the Chinese were so upset about missing accounts of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese in Japanese textbooks, were they (the Chinese) reporting their own atrocities against their own people in their own textbooks? A basic study of the events leading up to the Cultural Revolution, and on through the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, provides plenty of material for writing about domestic Chinese atrocities.
While living in Taiwan in the late Eighties I had to spend a few hours in a cramped air raid shelter in downtown Taipei, because the authorities there felt that the Communists might use the protests at Tiananmen Square as an excuse to move against the student's supporters on Taiwan, and retake the island.
Got to keep the loonies on the path