China’s Ministry for Culture always seem to be working on ways to stop nefarious outside influences from entertaining the country’s cultural landscape. The Ministry’s latest move is to ban what it deems ‘unwholesome’ content from appaearing in online games from 1 August onwards.
China's online gaming market is worth around €3 billion.
What does the ministry deem ‘unwholesome’? Well any content that advocates pornography and violence for starters, which is fair enough. Though, they’re also on the look out for any content involving cults, superstitions and gambling. All will be banned from any online game that is targeting Chinese teenagers under the age of 18.
The latest plans to regulate content in online gaming in China (a near €3 billion industry) have been revealed this week by English-language Chinese news agency Xinhua News. The Ministry of Culture also wants game creators to develop techniques that will limit the time that players spend in online games, in order to combat gaming addiction.
The regulations were made public on the website of the central government this week. They require online games to be free of content “that would lead to imitation of behaviour that violates social morals and the law”.
Minors will be required to register in games using their real names and will also be banned from selling or buying anything within online games using virtual currencies. How all this is policed will be interesting to see but then again getting stats or any sort of reports on how that will go may prove a tiny bit difficult.
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