Chinese Gamers Circumvent Anti-Obsession Measures 176
Turtlewind writes "A survey by iResearch China shows that the Chinese Government's "anti obsession" measures, reported on Slashdot last year, are being bypassed by MMORPG gamers. While the controls - which force operators of popular games such as World of Warcraft to impose penalties on players who play for more than three to five hours a day - were welcomed by almost half of Chinese gamers, a core of around 14% of players admitted to registering multiple accounts to get around the restrictions. Meanwhile, the government seems to be taking a different approach to the problem of gaming addiction, planning a campaign over the upcoming summer vacation to increase enforcement of laws banning minors from internet cafes."
Gaming companies (Score:3, Interesting)
As an outsider... (Score:5, Interesting)
When life is so force-fed and censored as it can be in China, outlets like MMORPG's are the only form of "freedom" and people flock to them... so much so that it is an epidemic.
On top of this I see a problem where the more people inside playing MMO's are not out pumping money into the economy for goods, services, entertainment, etc.
As an avid gamer, and someone who has worked in this field, I actually find this sad. It is not that WoW is such an amazing game, as it is a sign of how low many people value their lives and free time. Gaming is one thing, _needing_ to spend so many hours inside a virtual world is another. Most MMO's aren't really that great, and force long grinds and tedious gameplay with little reward for the time and money spent. This is not confined to China either, it is just magnified there. MMO's are a bad trend, and one that needs to be channeled in a different direction. Massive online playable games are good, and are very engaging, but they need to become more than long, drawn-out time wasters and overflowing coffers of money... they need to become fun and exciting and to the point even if this comes at the expense of some profit. I'll admit Guild Wars had me hooked for a few months myself, but the endless nerfs and radical gameplay changes that constantly rendered my time and effort useless made me remember why MMO's are a sham. I just think that many people are missing the real story here... WHY are MMO's such a big problem, what is the root of this problem?
ADHD (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this the same China we keep bitching about? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that somewhere, somehow we lost a bit of touch about China's reality. Perhaps the government isn't as powerful as we thought...
If I was the chinese govt, I would issue ID cards with photograph and fingerprint to all people over 12, and then over 18, and use that to verify that the teenagers can't REALLY access internet cafes.
Oh well.
Re:Not surprising. (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, there are some hardcore addicted players - these are not the players who want to play for 5 hours, 8 hours or even spend their entire saturday playing. The addicted ones are those who
1) Take drugs to stay up insane hours (i.e. 24 hours)
2) Drop out of school, quit their jobs
3) Neglect to do things like, I don't know clean their house
4) Stop contacting anyone in their lives outside of the game or the pizza delivery guy
I am sure there is more to this list, and some will argue one or two of the items.....I play, and I play often - in fact unless I am going out I will play from when I get home from work/gym until I go to bed. I still go to work, go out with friends/girlfriend, go to the gym, visit my mom, clean my condo, cook dinner, etc.
Re:Bring it on! (Score:2, Interesting)
Then stick to your word. Come on, it's not that hard.
Because they do it in public (Score:3, Interesting)
Because if you die at your home computer in your house, it just gets written as Trombosis [wikipedia.org], which is due to all that sitting without moving can cause. Or whatever else killed you.
If you do it in a cyber-cafe in Korea, they publish a story like "gamer dies after a month of playing Lineage!!!"
Note that in most of those cases the guy didn't exactly die at the computer, but did something like go to the bathroom and die or go to the bar to ask for some water and die. So if you did it in your home, they wouldn't even find you at the computer with WoW running.
Re:As an outsider... (Score:3, Interesting)
It is even more sad that you have no concept of what life is actually like in China for the average citizen, and that you let your own ignorance keep you from actually seeing or understanding the real reality of this situation. Please take some time to actually look into this issue and I guarantee your eyes will be opened to what is really at the heart of my post and this issue.
Re:As opposed to? (Score:5, Interesting)
A video game addict spends anywhere from 40-80 hours per week playing a video game. Marriages are ruined, children are neglected and people become more and more antisocial as the problem persists. Eventually, when they do wake up they have a very hard time dealing with the real world, getting back into a real social circle of friends and getting out of the house. Some even experience social anxiety.
I know, I was one of them. I was single so I didn't have a problem with marriage or children but some of the people I played with regularly...different story. I knew numerous people who had marriages fail due to gaming. Also, on many occasion after an 8 hour grind session you might hear "I need to feed the 2 year old". WHAT?! You've been sitting here for 8 hours, having barely gotten up to even use the bathroom and you have a toddler doing who knows what!?
College and high school students who become addicted also suffer from grades dropping or even flunking out of school.
Now, your examples might be relevant comparisons in a situation of casual gaming however they are completely at the other end of the spectrum from gaming addiction. Your examples are things that I used to tell myself to justify my problem. "I don't have anything better to do", "I'd just be watching tv", "It's keeping me out of trouble". You know, they all sound like good reasons to continue gaming and very justifiable but in the end, the fact was that I didn't have anything better to do because the addiction had consumed so much of my life that I had lost interest in things that I liked to do (besides gaming). They were all excuses to make sure I got my EQ fix. Since then, I have found new things I like to enjoy. I've made new friends. I actually get out of the house on nice afternoons or weekends. For the 2nd summer since 1999 I actually have a tan!
Gaming addiction is one of those things that is more easily justified in the mind of the addict than drugs. It's also a very tough addiction to break if you've fallen to the point that your self esteem is tied to the characters in game. Every mental social mechanism ends up tied to the game, your sense of reward is tied to the game. When you remove all of that, its a personal rebuilding process from the ground up.
Re:As opposed to? (Score:2, Interesting)
An addiction is self destructive behavior whether it be mentally destructive, emotionally destructive, physically destructive or financially destructive. Kids are not immune to this. Sure, the consequences may be different but the resulting personal damage is usually the same. Antisocial behavior, weight gain, lack of physical activity, "replacement" scenarios in which a person replaces things they found gratifying before with things related to the game.
A student or child may be able to spend more time playing a game because they have more free time but even then a gamer playing 8-14 hours per day 5-6 days per week is very excessive. In any activity that is excessive (even work - people don't work that much because they want to - they do it because they have to make ends meet in some cases). Sure, the student may not have a job or a family to take care of but what about the damage to their social skills? Sitting in a room for 40+ hours per week does internal emotional and mental damage to self esteem, their fitness level and circumvents their real world social structure.
Sure, by going outside I may risk skin cancer some day. However, after going through my EQ addiction and pushing away people I cared about, always being late on bills, being sleepy and tired from staying up until 2 am on raids and having my life revolve around people who have never met me and only view me as a graphical avatar...I got sick of pretending to be someone else. Instead of striving to be a lvl 50 necromancer, I have since been striving to be a lvl 50 "ME" and do the best I can at everything real world.
re: gaming addiction (Score:3, Interesting)
Therefore, your options were either A) invite a friend or two over and play "head to head" against each other instead of vs. the console or computer, or B) quit gaming for a while, until something else exciting enough was released and you had money to buy a copy.
With either choice, you were getting in some social interaction with other people, and were likely to get distracted from the "gaming" interest for a little while too.
But MMORPGs are a whole different beast. All of a sudden, not only is the world your playground, but you're *always* playing against real people on the other end. No longer do you feel that bit of guilt when you can't get any of your friends to come over to play you at the game because they've all got "better things to do". You *always* have willing opponents. The game designers even keep modifying the world you play in so it doesn't get too "stale".
I won't go so far as to claim an MMORPG "ruined my marriage", but it was a big contrbuting factor. My ex-wife got hooked on Shadowbane, to the point where we'd really have nothing to talk about when I got home from work besides her babbling on about this or that event that happened in the game. We had a kid, and I started realizing that while I was at work, she was often neglecting her to play her game during the day. (One of my friends clued me in when he told me about coming over and finding my kid up on a glass kitchen table, about to fall off, while she was completely oblivious because she was in the computer room concentrating on organizing a raiding party against someone's "clan".) I even had to deal with long-distance phone calls coming in at 3AM from people on the other side of the planet calling to get her to sign in to the game because their group had something or other "important" going on. (I guess they forgot about the time zone differences?)
Re:As opposed to? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's easy to blame MMORPGs over other kinds of games because of the nature of the beast.
1. They're never ending. You can play forever and ever and never win. So of course they lend themselves to larger amounts of playing than 'other' games.
2. They're social in nature. Instead of static boring worlds, you have a dynamic atmosphere because of the sheer number of people involved. No two days of adventuring will ever be the same.
3. It's in the companys' best interests to keep you playing. Obviously, the longer you play the more they get paid... and they want to get paid, so they invent nice ways to keep you p(l)aying.
I know some people who spend hours upon hours doing everything in the world. Some of them ride horses, some hunt, some fish, some watch tv, etc, etc. But because those are accepted activities, nobody considers those things an addiction. But you get a video gamer playing his games for that amount of time, and all of a sudden you're some kind of crazy addict. If you compare the tv watching habits of the average person to someone who's supposedly addicted to gaming, you'd probably find that they're not all that dissimilar...