Chinese Bureaucrats Duel Over Right To Regulate WoW

upto0013 writes "Chinese bureaucrats are battling each other for the right to regulate World of Warcraft. They hope to gain the political clout and the revenue that comes along with controlling a new industry with potential for explosive growth. 'If you supervise a more dynamic area with a lot of growth potential, you have more budget and more administrative muscle,' said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research firm in Beijing. 'They see this pie is getting bigger and bigger, so it is no wonder different administrations are fighting over pieces of that territory.' It's absurd how orcs and elves (and Moonkin) can affect so many different faraway places."

Comments

they really want to stop any anti chain chat in ga

[Joe The Dragon]

they really want to stop any anti chain chat in game and they want to tax the gold farmers.

China demographic nightmare

[tail.man]

China is a nightmare communist dictatorship hell hole.

China demographic nightmare
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1810166,00.html

China...
execution vans
http://tinyurl.com/d2wzev

falun gong organ harvesting
http://tinyurl.com/nlx7z4

Re:Can we watch?

[meerling]

I think you mean 'Hidden Nightelf' since they are the ones with Shadowmeld.

Don't have a problem with the Crouching Tauren thing, since they keep having to duck down to get through most doorways without wedging their horns in the frame... :)

Re:The first line of the story tells you everythin

[sopssa]

OK, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Western reporters in Beijing are total dumbasses. They constantly write stories colored by their own blinders they're not even aware that they're wearing.

So, pretty much like every reporter and newspaper?

Re:The first line of the story tells you everythin

[DNS-and-BIND]

The BBC, for one, is renowned for its objectivity and lack of bias.

It's a sign that China is modernising

[Kupfernigk]

Instead of warlords fighting for turf, you have civil servants fighting for budget. Progress. You also have the advantage that, unlike the US and the UK, you already have an overbearing, censorship-obsessed, fascist* slave state, so you don't have the civil servants fighting to get the budget to create one.

* anyone who thinks China is Communist doesn't understand either (a) the meaning of communism or (b) history.

Re:It's a sign that China is modernising

[Phil-14]

China would appear to me to meet the definition of a fascist state more than it does a communist state. The Chinese government is single-party, authoritarian, nationalistic, and while it plays lip service to old communist tropes like class struggle, in point of fact it has increased the stratification of its society into classes radically over the last two decades. It plays host to a large contingent of corporations that are hybrids of state and private control, and it manipulates its society through direct and active control of religious institutions and public discourse.

That's the classic communist definition of 'fascism,' but it's also what most communist states invariably end up looking like. There's always a 'new class,' there's always lip service to communist tropes while the new class stratification is implemented, there's always corporations or corporation-equivalents, sometimes foreign based or sometimes 'design bureaus,' whose presense benefits the New Class more than the old one, and there's always control over public discourse and religious institutions. It happened in Russia, it happened in Cuba, in Eastern Europe, in SE Asia after the communists finally won there... you'd think by now people would be asking why communist-definition fascism seems to be the end state of communist governments, but it never seems to happen.

Re:The first line of the story tells you everythin

[grking]

Isn't this just a cynical way of describing ones "perspective"? Every mind perceives the world from it's own perspective, has it's own world view coloured by it's experiences.

Sure you can compare perspective to "blinders" and call those people "dumb asses" but they are the same blinders worn by your dumb ass.

Re:The first line of the story tells you everythin

[khallow]

For a really simple counterexample to the claim that the BBC is unbiased, what's the BBC's take on the television licence? Would they be indifferent to being thrown to the wolves of capitalism?

I guess...

[jipn4]

US bureaucrats are also falling over each other to regulate whatever they can because it gives them power. Bureaucracies work the same the world over, communist or not.

Re:The first line of the story tells you everythin

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC as a company is different from the BBC as a broadcaster. The broadcaster may well be unbiased while the company protects its own interests. The difference is obviously that the broadcast is public and the company affairs are behind the scenes.

Re:Worse than that...

[thetagger]

Not only that, but there are some really weird censorship issues you wouldn't expect. For example, there are no undead in Chinese WoW because the Chinese government won't allow any human bones to be shown in the game. So anywhere you see a skeleton, it had to be removed by Blizzard.

Well, if I made a MMORPG where everybody is naked and targeted it to the 13+ audience, I bet I would have to make some changes before it was published in the US. It is ultimately my problem if I designed thousands of NPCs while ignoring the culture of my target market.

Some things are cultural. Don't expect them to make a lot of sense. If Blizzard had planned for the Chinese market from the start, instead of undead you would have a different race and they wouldn't have to change a thing.

get real already

[onyxruby]

This is about who gets to be in a position of demanding bribes to allow WOW in their country. This is about good old fashioned greed and doesn't have a damn thing to do with Orcs or Elves. Since this is seen as potentially very lucrative, people will fight to be in a position to exploit this. It's fundamentally no different than any other fight for territory.

Re:Worse than that...

[DigitalSorceress]

Hmm if it's truly a cultural issue, then wouldn't it be a self-regulating feedback loop?

In other words, if you're that offended by the game diong something repugnant to your culture, you won't play... end of problem.

It seems to me that the whole bones thing may go against certain cultural norms, but that the government is the one who has a problem with it.

I honestly don't know enough about Chinese cultural norms to know if showing bones is equivelent (to the Chinese) as your hypothetical MMORPG would be to America.

I keep trying to think about this from an outsider's perspective, but I keep getting back to "dude, it's just bones. if it bothers me, I won't look, but it doesn't so where's the harm?". There are one or two substitutions for the word "bones" that you could add that would make it illegal in the US, and where most members of our culture would even agree that it should be a crime.

Cultural relativism is a damn minefield.

I'll just go back to LFM H ToC 25 now and be happy that my culture allows me to waste my evenings and weekends in this manner.

Re:Ah, but these are chinese we are talking about

[fractoid]

(Honestly though, this is a non-story: Several government department have partially overlapping areas of control so they argue about which one has the control on those areas. Those things happen a lot, especially with the internet and other new technology. In other areas those fights have already been settled a century or so ago.)

It's not really a non-story when last I heard, there are something like 6 MILLION accounts in China. Even if each of those only pays $1 a month (they're charged on a different schedule to us) that's a $72M/year business they're talking about. No wonder there's a turf war over who 'owns' it legislation-wise.