China announced a radical new measure to keep citizens’ MMO addictions in check: mandatory real-name registration with the government for all newly-created accounts.
Plans for the system have existed since at least 2006, and according to the state-run newspaper People’s Daily, four online game companies have so far had their operations “suspended” for not linking their products to the government database.
Adult gamers at the time expressed objections to being lumped in with younger gamers, who tend to display a higher potential for addictive behavior. Concerned were also raised regarding similarities to the real-name accountability systems that govern Chinese citizens’ blogs, online music, and mobile-phone systems – however, as noted in Ars Technica, it appears that these critics had little choice in the matter as the real-name system was turned into law essentially unchanged.
The government did grant a concession, though: the name for the MMO flavor of its ID system (translated as “identity verification”) – which shared the same name as all of the others – was assigned a different Chinese name (translated to “real-name registration”) in order to ward off the stigma associated with the public’s overall negative reaction.
“Any guesses as to whether ‘real name registration’ will allay those fears?” asked Danwei’s Joel Martinsen back in 2007.
The Chinese government already heavily regulates MMO usage among students, citing concerns for the games’ highly addictive potential. Many Chinese universities already forbid freshman from bringing a computer with them to school, claiming that these students are simply unable to control themselves.
Indeed, Asian countries seem to exhibit a higher rate of negative consequences stemming from gamers’ so-called addictions, with several reported instances of players gaming to the point of real-life death or, more recently, committing inexplicable, MMO-related suicides.
So far, 2009 has been a heady year for Chinese regulation of its citizens’ internet usage – mandatory ID registration for MMOs trails crackdowns on porn and other “vulgar” content by less than two weeks.
