Minors Forbidden to Play Online Games Involving Killing (PK) Says China   8/5/2005 - 2,721 views, 4 Comments

Said Liu Shifa, the head of China’s Ministry of Culture (MOC), “Minors should not be allowed to play online games that have PK content, that allow players to increase the power of their own online game characters by killing other players. Online games that have PK content usually also contain acts of violence and leads to players spending too much time trying to increase the power of their characters. They are harmful to young people.”

Additionally, the MOC, along with the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry, have ordered online game publishers to develop an authentication system which would keep minors from accessing such games.

Admitted a senior official for one of the large online gaming firms in China, who asked to remain anonymous, “We don’t want to put the authentication system in our games. PK game content is an important and attractive part of almost all MMORPGs. This new regulation will have a major impact on China’s online gaming market.”

“MMORPG” stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

While recent studies have suggested that Internet addiction is not a big factor in online gaming, the Chinese government is nonetheless concerned as well about the amount of time that Chinese youths are spending playing online games, which averages nearly 11 hours a week.

In fact, in addition to the other new regulations, the Chinese government is also requiring online game portals to install timing mechanims which will automatically boot a player out of the game after a certain period fo time.

Said the same anonymous spokesperson, “A lot of operators are not willing to install these timing mechanisms. Some have already installed them, such as Shanda, but we are not going to install it. Even if it is compulsory, many companies will not install it because it is contrary to their interests.”

In June Chinese gamer Qiu Chengwei killed (in real life) fellow gamer Zhu Caoyuan after Caoyuan loaned to a third gamer a virtual sword which Chengwei had earned while playing Legend of Mir 3, and last month a divorcing couple in China fought over their online game points, even over and above the apartment they shared.