Video games are a small window into Chinese life, but they’re a window nonetheless, and video games themselves, in China, are huge. China accounts for more than half of the entire planet’s PC gaming revenue. In fact, despite it being smaller than mobile gaming there, China’s PC gaming market alone made over $15bn in 2018; more than half the entire amount of revenue made in the US gaming industry overall, including consoles, mobile, the lot. Going by the numbers of analyst firm Niko Partners, as of 2018 there were a total of about 630 million gamers in China – a little over 8 percent of humans on the planet.
Huge. But we know there are lots of people in China, and we know lots of them play games. What’s really interesting is that these people are playing games in what is, on paper, the most aggressively censored system around. I suspect this sort of thing is why economists love visiting China, even if doing so is a risk: everything is a case study.
Games are no different. Under Chinese law, video games can’t contain anything that “threatens China’s national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity”. They can’t harm “the nation’s reputation, security or interests”. They can’t promote cults, or “superstitions”. They can’t “incite obscenity, drug use, violence or gambling” – although loot boxes are, of course, fine (in fact Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad reckons a Chinese game may have invented them as far back as 2003) – and they can’t include anything that “harms public ethics” or China’s “culture and traditions”. They also can’t include any “other content” that might violate China’s constitution or law, whatever that may be, and they have to be published in China by a Chinese company.
There are no definitions or examples of case law provided for any of those remarkably loose terms, of course – no precise legalese in paragraph 13b. How those rules are interpreted is purely at the discretion of the committee, which, by now, we’ve seen in action time and again. Shenmue 3, for instance, is set in China, but as a recent trailer showed, developers Neilo and Ys Net changed the names of locations in the Chinese version from real Chinese cities to fictional, non-Chinese ones, likely so they steer clear of that part about Chinese “culture and traditions”. More dramatically, Monster Hunter: World was due to launch on Tencent-run WeGame in 2018, until it failed to get a license and was ultimately pulled from sale altogether.
“Let me tell you, it’s a fucking fortress.”
Mike Rose, No More Robots
There’s no ESRB or PEGI to act as industry self-regulators (although very recently it’s looked like there might be an equivalent in the works) meaning some government-linked mega companies, like Tencent, are wise enough to “self regulate” in their own ways instead: policies like forced age registration when you sign up to play their games, for instance, enable them to place two-hour time limits on children’s gaming sessions. As things stand though, there are no age brackets or classifications: just that catch-all set of rules that show a government at peak paranoia.