International Law

MOC Regs to Focus on Virtual Currency Issue

By Stan

Interesting conjunction of financial, social and IT regulations here:

The Ministry of Culture (MOC) plans to release new regulations banning online games that place excess importance on virtual currency exchanges and leveling, reports Sina quoting MOC vice minister Tuo Zuhai.

I don’t have any details, so this is more of a "What If?" than anything else. On the other hand, there has been so much criticism in the past of games that encourage gold farming and incessant grinding, that in the minds of a lot of government officials, this is a social crisis with Chinese kids. We had stories a few years ago of virtual sweat shops, where sicko entrepreneurs were paying gamers to gold farm (very long hours for little pay) — this was a real business, at least until they got shut down.

Couple that with the close attention paid to virtual currencies (the QQ Coin was the big one here) and their effect on the "real" world. At one point, the financial regulators got into the act, putting such games on notice if they attempted to cross the line between virtual currencies and real-world currencies. I thought things went a bit far when someone from CBRC or MOF (can’t remember which) said that the QQ Coin was having a direct impact on the value of the RMB. A bit over the top, but suffice it to say that the government has had an eye on this for several years now.

It will be interesting to see if this regulation is solely an MOC deal or if other regulators will be involved.

The most interesting thing about this is that the proposed new reg could have a very significant effect on game content/structure. We are all used to MOC’s role in censoring game content (usually nudity/’adult’ content, sometimes political or otherwise), but that goes mostly to language, images and perhaps the portrayal of characters.

In this case, we are talking about game structure itself. That’s a big leap. While I understand why the government is concerned, given what some hardcore gamers will do to themselves physically (e.g. poopsocking), I’m not sure if forbidding a specific game structure is such a great idea.

What ever happened to parental responsibility?

Full post as published by China Hearsay on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).