Slashdot Mirror
China Mandates Parental Controls For Online Games
eldavojohn writes "The quintessential nanny state is tightening its grip on online gaming a little further today, as it announced that starting March 1st, 'online game companies must set up a web page, enquiry hotline and other special channels for parental supervision of their children. Besides, these companies shall authorize parents, who want to monitor and control their children playing online games, to take measures to limit or ban the playing. Also, the online game companies shall provide help to parents in supervising their children's online game accounts and preventing them from playing improper games, as part of the project.' If you're a parent, the new effort by the Ministry of Culture has surprisingly specific recommendations for how to regulate your child's gaming: 'The document suggested a school student play online games for less than two hours every week and spend no more than 10 yuan ($1.5) on playing online games every month.' The article (from the state media) ends with amusing speculation that the youth will simply acquire a fake adult ID to get back online. Stay tuned for more rules and regulations from China's new 'Parental Watch Project.'"
Is it really a "nanny state" kind of action if it is giving power and control to the parents?
I wonder if all of those quiet Chinese kids in college were quiet because they didn't speak english, or if it was just because they spent the previous 19 years of their life not allowed to look up from their homework so they had no idea how to interact with people.
Hardly a nanny state, I have family over their and paradoxically its less (in some ways) of a nanny state than Australia, the way they can let fireworks off in the street is only one example, their OHS rules or lack their of is another. So who's the nanny state?
Just because you can use the word quintessential like that doesn't mean you should.
Why do some chinese kids work in iPhone factories and other ones get to play video games? That doesn't sound like much of a communism to me.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
This has to be a double wammy for WoW.
One also has to wonder if this will temper or be used as a data mining tool recruiting into the Chinese hacking community.
Think about how easy it will now be to contact Johney Chan's parents to grant scholarships into the fold now that they can map IP's to so easily.
Very subtle way to bring hacking under management.
So, like, how are they going to enforce a law that isn't accepted by the various online gaming companies EULA when they aren't based in china??
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I do believe that it is a parent's duty to keep a child at sane levels of any activity the child takes part of. Giving parents the tools to determine if a kid has been playing insane amounts makes sense. But IMHO an emailed report with a per-day total time summary and perhaps some trends should do fine.
The rest should be good ol' regular parenting and communication with your offspring. Ultimately any technological block/tool can be circumvented, and they never can replace mutual trust and understanding.
.: Max Romantschuk
...this will do little to solve it.
When I was living in China, I met several families with children and teenagers. Though almost all young people there have your run-of-the-mill Facebook-style "internet addiction", those who stood a serious chance of ruining their lives by spending too much time online were either spoiled senseless or totally ignored by their parents.
I can't imagine many (if any) flash game sites outside of China doing this - and I'm certainly not going to even try on mine. They surely can't think that we're all going to go out there and make separate versions of our web sites to support the weird and wonderful laws of every country in the world. That means no blood and no nazi references in Germany, who-knows-what disclaimers for Australia - and all of this other baggage for China...there are over 130 countries in the world and a bunch of other law-makers such as US states, counties and cities who can each slap on a bunch of arbitrary restrictions. Plus you'd probably need legal help from experts in each place to greenlight your site before you went live. Nobody can hope to cover all of them and keep it all up to date.
So it's just not going to happen - the law will likely be ignored by more or less everyone who isn't web-hosted in China. Not just because we don't want to comply (although we don't) - but because it's simply impractical to do so.
That means that they either have to block sites that don't comply using the great firewall of china - or their kids will grow up preferring to play games that aren't under these draconian restrictions...which means exclusively foreign games. They'll lose even more of their chinese culture to the Internet. Worse still, they'll cripple any chance for their own, home-grown, games industry because players both inside and outside of China will run screaming from a site that limits them like that.
Those are all rather nasty consequences for the Chinese government that they surely must have foreseen in making the law. So I'm betting they'll just use non-compliance with the law by foreign sites as a reason to firewall...which must be the consequence they intend with this silly piece of legislation.
Yea this is a big "fuck you" to blizzard-activision, not only is it likely to cut into their "customer base" but its also going to force them to spend money and resources on new (much needed) support infrastructure. I think we all know how much blizzard likes to shell out money on customer service - last time I had an issue with my wow account it took them 4 days to respond to my email and that whole time I was unable to talk to anyone on the phone because of either busy signals or 3+hour wait times, resulting in me giving up.
This isn't about protecting children, it's about making damn sure no men get to roleplay as hot female elves:
http://boingboing.net/2007/09/26/chinese-mmo-bans-ing.html
Is there any valid reason for forbidding a fictional piece of entertainment rather than just informing the very, very few children who don't realize that it's fiction that it is fiction? You're not a bad parent if you let your children play/view harmless entertainment. You're a bad parent if you construct a bubble around your children, though, in my opinion.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Blizzard has plenty of support infrastructure, it's just that they have an insane number of players. Last time I checked they had more then 2,000 people employed in WoW customer support, outnumbering the Devs 10:1.
I don't find this move objectionable. As a person professionally involved in social work I'm acutely aware that the ignorance of many parents concerning their children's internet habits is appalling. Anything that can be done to mitigate that ignorance is fantastic as far as I am concerned.
If you're reading this then that probably doesn't apply to you, this is Slashdot...
The story could easily have been titled "China Leads the Way in Child Rights". Just demonstrates that reporting is as much about agenda as anything else I suppose. When will the US or EU catch up and do something about this too?
The vast majority of parents are less informed than their children when it comes to all things technology, any help is a good thing. It's far to easy for a child to deceive its parent and thereby be exposed to risks and factors that the parent is ignorant of and therefore can't help to mitigate through good ol' regular parenting and communication or anything else for that matter.
You have to know what your children are doing so that you can give the the advice, encouragement and support that they need. Empowering parents is a good thing. Period.
The nanny stuff is ridiculous. Get over yourself already. The more secure a child's environment to more free it is to develop interest in more abstract topics and interests. It's not 1285 any more.
I guess you just can't ignore the law of unintended consequences...
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
The summary notes, they can just get fake adult IDs. As a foreigner, I just had them generate a new ID for me every time I went in (I used a semi-permanent one when I became I gold member). Kids would do the same thing if they had a few extra yuan; if you weren't willing to pay, the cafe I usually went to refused school age kids
Others did not; it was normal to see high school kids pulling all nighters there using fake IDs, supplied by the PC cafe. At home? Just use the same software (or website) as the PC cafe to generate your own ID number. Just enter your birthday, sex, and place of birth, and there ya go.
It's just one more step in the arms race. Guess what, it's like Bittorrent. The masses are still winning.
I think his point was, that due to actions by the "Man" approximately 6% of 1,342,100,000 Chinese might seek redress from local Chinese Blizzard/Activision support.
Using your number Nominal support being 2000 personal to address the average volume in the Wow Commiseration Chat rooms.
The game has 9 million "subscribers". Blizzard's Chinese partner, the9, stated on May 22nd that over 7.5 million of the 9 million total are Chinese accounts.
Although it's likely that a couple million Chinese accounts regularly lapse.
So upwards of 83% 1660 of 2000 of customer service agents may receive a severe spike in support calls when their Chinese over lords start to clamp down.
This will effectively DOS all support.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft
http://askville.amazon.com/Americans-play-World-Warcraft-daily-basis/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=19244488
Doh Was planning to update the 6% with a real number before submitting and forgot.
What % is 7 million of 1,342,100,000.
Obviously a very small percentage.
Just forgot to do the % replace, my bad.
I don't know if your kid went to school, finished all their homework, and then spent 2-3 hours at some kind of sports activity and came home with their friends, and it was only about 7 pm at night, would it really be that unhealthy to later spend 1.5/2 hours doing many different things on a computer for a total of maybe 14 hours a week? I guess if I said "read a book while listening to music and calling friends on the phone" instead of "computer" it would be a lot more palatable to the older generation even though those same activities are basically what you use the internet for now.
Unlike our own busted ass country, China does not assume that Chinese parents are smart enough to realize that 20 hours per week of gaming turns their children into mental midgets. Maybe that is one contributing reason why our first rate universities are now overflowing with first-rate Chinese students. Our young'ns decided that Grand Theft Auto was more compelling than studying for their SAT...
All I can say is that I wish we had that here.
@peetm