China To Ban Online Gaming, Chatting With Foreigners Outside Great Firewall

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — After blocking a popular Nintendo game "Animal Crossing," the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is taking its political censorship to the extreme by disconnecting Chinese online gamers from their guildmates outside China.

On April 10, China banned the popular social simulation video game in which gamers can create a home and interact with cute animal villagers, owing to Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong (黃之鋒) revealing a customized scene in the game which reads "Free Hong Kong" and mocks Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Several other players were also found leveraging the game to vent their discontent with the CCP and making satirical content related to the CCP's failure to tackle the virus.

The communist regime is said to have noticed an authority vacuum in online multiplayer games, which enables people to freely socialize without monitoring. Local metropolises are scrambling to draft laws to expand the scope of online censorship in video games and even prohibit gamers from meeting and chatting with people on the other side of the Great Firewall, according to LTN, which cited news from a Chinese gaming forum.

One-player online games will also be subject to surveillance, as a new real-name mechanism is going to be implemented in China. Also, the new law will not allow for zombies and plagues, map editing, roleplaying, as well as organizing a union in games — regulations which are believed to be inspired by the sensitive content made by Joshua Wong.

As the CCP's audacious global propaganda campaign to silence critics abroad and to defend its infallibility fails to work out, the new law is expected to block Chinese people from learning how the world is reacting to Beijing's handling of the outbreak and subsequent cover-ups.

Other rules under the new law are less political. They include an online gaming curfew (10 p.m. to 8 a.m.) for gamers aged under 18 and a maximum amount of money they are allowed to spend on games to combat internet addiction.

[ By Taiwan News ]