Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Government to Put a Time Limit on Gaming
Flyph writes "The Chinese Government unveiled a new online gaming timer mechanism that will try to prevent gamers from playing online games for more than three hours at a time. From the article: '"This timing mechanism can prevent young people from becoming addicted to online games," Kou Xiaowei, Deputy Director of the Audiovisual and Internet Publication Department of the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), said during a press conference.' Maybe this is a way to prevent the goldfarming that goes on in MMORPGs." Of course, China may just want to avoid a tragedy similar to the recent South Korean man's death covered on Slashdot.
Human rights and environmental concerns slow the economic growth of any country.
It is extremely hypocritical of Europeans and Americans to point a finger at China. Much of the European growth came from the fact that they raped Central America of gold. The US railway system was built on Chinese slave labor.
If you are living in the US or EU, you are reaping the benifits of hundreds of years of human and environmental plunder.
I'm not saying it isn't wrong. I just think that China will see it for what it is and tell us to get stuffed.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
probably 99% of the MMORPG players play with a single account, thus the discouraging effect should work on them.
So do you claim that fewer than 1 percent of MMORPG customers play more than one publisher's game? Three hours on EverCrack, three hours on World of WarCrack, three hours on Guild Wars, and you can still feed your addiction. Or are you counting on some government-backed federated identity system to enforce a cumulative limit of three hours per day across all games?
In communist China...
I think it's more likely that the companies are pledging their support because it's not a good idea to argue with the Chinese goverment. Greed is secondary to survival. On the flip side, corruption from either side will enable the existence of loopholes in the laws or implementation where multiple accounts may allow gamers to bypass the time limit with multiple accounts. Just as likely would be (for WoW,at least) where rewards for killing specific NPC's (i.e. The last boss of any major instance) would be unaffected as those battles are expected to take a long time to reach and complete. Well, that or they incorporate some kind of weekend/holiday filters.
Too bad this won't affect the gold farmers on the US servers. Even if they made it so that chinese accounts on US servers were affected, there would just new hacks around it, if not just new accounts created. What will be interesting is how the farming on the Chinese servers.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Heh.
Canada was built by grabbing land from the indians. They're still whining about it, I'm sure they consider it a human rights abuse.
Oh, and our railways were also built with Chinese labour, but I don't know how well/poorly they were treated.
Follow me here. Online Gaming is always reduced to the guys who spend 18hrs a day sniping at newbs. Pick any game, its always reduced the same, if you didn't buy it in the first 6mos, by the time you get in you are a serf to a hundred jobless LVL32 (insert Superior Class here). To give everyone a fair shot, maybe developers should limit online time to say 6 "in world" hours a day, Extend other (Under-utilized at present) areas of gaming for the interested. Character development and customization, Economic commerce decisions, etc.. all that stuff that drags us out of the immersive feel of the game. Instead of layering "windows" and text on-top of the 3d world, move it all out of the world. Library, Hospital, Commerce, School, Chat & Socializitation, Story & Quest Info. All these would benefit from being free of 3d paradigm (except Combat school).
Seems like it would go a long way to extend the funlife of the game. The truly addicted will all be off by 6am. Take a lot of work to pull it off well.
Any Takers?
SourceForge is waiting....
Think about it, we already have a captive chinese audience, what is that 1..2.. billion?.
As a parent I wouldn't mind seeing a max hrs listed on the box. As a player, hmmm the extra stuff would have to be done very well, you know with Professional Writers and Artists. What? It could happen.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
This might get the somewhat left-leaning /. audience to wake up a bit about the PRC?
I know it's so very fashionable to b**** about corporate America or the religious right, but the religious right are libertarians compared to the atheist PRC.
Is the great Chinese network able to identify both big budget MMORPGS like World of Warcraft and smaller ones like the classic MUD? These I think are more prone to causing addiction than any "here today gone tomorrow" packaged MMORPG...
The first line of text I saw on my first mud was (roughly) "YES! 32 Hours nonstop and counting!!"
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.