Accusations of "spiritual opium" sent shares of the China multinational technology group Tencent and other companies in the gaming industry tumbling on Tuesday amid fears a new regulatory chapter was about to begin.
The losses came after an article in the Economic Information Daily, which has links to China's state-controlled news agency, Xinhua, said the gaming industry, especially Tencent, was harming the nation's teens, according to media reports.
While the South China Morning Post subsequently reported the story has been taken down, investors were rattled by fears that yet another regulatory crackdown could be coming. That's even as the South China Morning Post pointed out the article didn't appear to represent Beijing's position on that industry, noting positive comments from an official recently.
See also: Tencent & Chinese Video Games Companies Rocked as State Media Calls Gaming "Spiritual Opium"
Related: No Cults, No Politics, No Ghouls: How China Censors the Video Game World
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No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world
China is the world's largest market for the world's largest entertainment industry. Today, the number of Chinese gamers, about 740 million, is bigger than the entire populations of the US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK combined. Its domestic market is worth more than $45bn a year. Yet, for decades, China has had a stop-start relationship with the entire industry.
[...] Any foreign gaming companies looking to operate in China are legally obliged to have a local partner. For Chinese firms such as Tencent and NetEase, this was a goldmine. These tech giants, the Chinese equivalents of Facebook or Google, have regularly part-acquired foreign video game firms and then helped them access the lucrative Chinese gaming market. One of the first and biggest deals came in 2011 when Tencent made an agreement with the American developer Riot Games. Riot went all in, selling a 93% stake to Tencent for a reported $400m. Four years later, it sold the remaining equity and become a wholly owned subsidiary of Tencent.
[...] According to the [game designer], Riot managers had provided a PowerPoint presentation that she assumed Tencent had made for them, although she didn't know for sure. The slides explained some of the hurdles they would need to overcome. First, Chinese regulators are notoriously squeamish about gambling, strong violence and nudity – not only in games, but in TV and film, too. This is partly because the country does not have an age-rating system. Daniel Camilo, a Shenzhen-based specialist in publishing games in China, has said the government's mindset is that "if something isn't fit for one person, it isn't fit for anyone".
(Score: 1) by Snort on Tuesday August 03 2021, @02:17PM (4 children)
All these companies chasing Chinese yuan only to get CCP'd.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday August 03 2021, @03:04PM
All but sitting at home and reading, eternally, the little red book of chairman Mao is "spiritual opium" and should be refrained from. See life is easy and good if you just follow that one rule.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @05:13PM
Begun, the "spiritual opium" wars have.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday August 03 2021, @07:36PM
According to the Statler Bros., The movies are great medicine [youtube.com], so there's a good chance.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 03 2021, @08:33PM
Always more respectful to BCCP
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @03:17PM
Please. Oh mighty CCP overlords. Please just ban video games in your country.
Please, just let western developers be their regular, venal kind of shitty when it comes to slowly eroding everything that made video games great.
Please do not mandate even more "moral" and "civic" demands, standards, practices or censorship which Western publishers are all too eager to implement at the drop of a hat for the chance to fumble at a few greasy yuan.
Please, stop enacting by decree and markestist carrots crackdowns and censorship which would have sent Jack Thompson and evangelicals into rapture 2 decades ago.
Please do not give American executives and MBAs yet another five-year plan to follow towards the destruction of this industry.
Please, oh Celestial Master's, let my vidya go.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday August 03 2021, @03:27PM (5 children)
I doubt that they crackdown on video games. It would be shooting themselves in the foot. It could happen, but I figure it's worse for the rest of the world, if they don't. So they won't.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 03 2021, @03:34PM (1 child)
Spiritual and physical opium for the West!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @04:33PM
The Chinese have never been known to leave slights unavenged...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 03 2021, @04:27PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 03 2021, @05:27PM (1 child)
This may just be more pretext to enable forced induction of select teens (and adults) into reeducation camps.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday August 03 2021, @05:44PM
I could believe that.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @04:21PM (1 child)
Talk about fsckin' "spiritual opium"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @04:43PM
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by crafoo on Tuesday August 03 2021, @07:16PM (7 children)
Single-child policy - because you know, communism is terrible economics and they couldn't feed their population. Now it's a 3 child policy. Chinese joke that they haven't even finished taking down the single child posters yet before these new ones went up.
Now the "lay down flat" movement is taking off. Again, because top-down fascist economics is almost as bad as outright communism. They are trying to mandate a cap on wages to keep cheap sweatshop labor work in China. So yeah, wage caps. And extremely entitled women due to the demographic shift from their last terrible single-child social experiment.
What must be the problem? VIDEO GAMES! Young men aren't crawling under the yoke and pulling the load for the country. What madness is this!? It can't be that the life deal they are looking at is outright slavery in all but name. No. It must be VIDEO GAMES!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 03 2021, @08:39PM (1 child)
Lay down flat, isn't that just the logical extension of the "tallest tree is first cut" philosophy?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Tuesday August 03 2021, @11:46PM
Maybe it's the Chinese version of "lie back and think of England"?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 03 2021, @10:25PM (4 children)
What is that? I couldn't find anything by web search.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @12:29AM (3 children)
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-lying-flat-movement-standing-in-the-way-of-chinas-innovation-drive/ [brookings.edu]
https://www.insider.com/disenchanted-chinese-youth-join-a-mass-movement-to-lie-flat-2021-6 [insider.com]
I recommend using searx to avoid getting google-holed: https://searx.me/ [searx.me]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 04 2021, @01:32AM
Another thing is that they are live and let live. Too often people here want to use the power of the state to enforce a sort of "lying down" lifestyle. If this story is true, they just do it without expectation that everyone does it too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @01:51AM
https://searx.space/ [searx.space]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @11:26AM
They need to come up with an un-censorable name for it. Call it something like "red booking". Have a picture of the little red book lying flat as a logo. Let's see Pooh Bear censor that.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday August 03 2021, @08:56PM (3 children)
Oh boy, Video Games are Bad, 2.0. Not just violent ones, all of them! Maybe board games such as chess and Monopoly, too. I wonder if some market player connected to the news org just made a killing short selling Tencent. Hope the reporters got a good cut, for risking their cred.
Since the 1970s, been hearing that fear that games are a waste of time. Seem to have displaced TV as the boogeyman that some fear are dooming our young to a miserable life of poverty and bachelorhood, unable to do real, productive work. I have always regarded games as much better than TV, as the participation is active, not passive. Did "Thou shalt not play games, for they weaken body and spirit" get shoved into the Ten Commandments recently?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday August 04 2021, @02:41PM (2 children)
I'm a long time video gamer, and also felt that the active-versus-passive entertainment put them well ahead of TV and movies.
But the more I think on it the more I think the "addictiveness" of games may be its own kind of long-term problem . Games are mostly designed to offer ever shorter and more frequent endeavor-reward dopamine-triggering loops, and there seems to be some genuine cause for concern that it's desensitizing gamers to the much slower and less frequent dopamine feedback loops that reward real-world accomplishment.
Obviously this is just anecdotal evidence, but I know that these days when I feel like doing something to pass the time I'm much more likely than I was 20 years ago to sit down and play some video games than engage in a personal programming project or build something in the shop, despite having a healthy backlog of projects I'd like to work on "when I get the time". If that's indicative of a common trend then I think there's genuine cause for concern.
Not that I believe games are inherently bad - but just like sugary food overstimulates the reward systems that evolved to encourage us to eat calorie-rich fruit, or porn overstimulates the sexual gratification reward systems, I think games may be legitimately overstimulating the "accomplishment" reward loops, creating a self-destructive trap that we'd do well to keep in mind, and avoid over-indulging in.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 04 2021, @04:46PM (1 child)
As to the fear that games are addictive, and may overstimulate our reward systems, we've been gaming for millennia. What would the Olympic Games overstimulate? In all the time the Olympics have been played, are there any credible reports of problems of this sort? The typical Olympic athlete has to be obsessive, to have a chance of winning. Animals too play games, are they also having troubles balancing play with other activities?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday August 05 2021, @09:09AM
And some people have been getting addicted to games and sports for almost as long. Compulsive gambling especially has long been recognized as a dangerous addiction, and many modern video games invoke similar reward patterns. The rewards in a video game are less material, but when well-delivered can be no less compelling in the moment. And the rewards tend to come far faster and more consistently than in any sport or board game. Single-player games in particular can truly deliver on a promise to make every player a winner, the only question is how much they enjoy the game.
And from what we understand of it, the brain's training system doesn't care nearly as much about the "real value" of the rewards that trigger it, as it does the emotional value in that moment, and how optimal a pattern they are applied in. And many of the most satisfying games converge on optimal training patterns in normal gameplay. We're learning animals, it feels good to train.
Asia in particular seems to have spawned a growing culture of gamer shut-ins, though they certainly exist everywhere (EverQuest anyone?). It seems disingenuous to suggest that there's not a *potential* for addiction. The question is only what, if anything, society should do about it. Laws? Social stigma? Rehab clinics? Embrace it as a new and different but fully legitimate lifestyle? Given the misery the lifestyle often causes, perhaps we should consider the last option with caution.
I'm not a fan of bans myself, I think every person should have the right to pave their own path to self-destruction if they so choose. Or better yet play on the gentle slopes well above those cliffs - you don't need to be a drunkard to appreciate a bottle of fine whiskey. But completely ignoring the danger is unlikely to turn out well. And I can fully understand how a government with a more... Chinese... relationship with its citizens might be far more enthusiastic about such bans. Heck, we've got plenty such people right here in US Congress seats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @06:26PM
If China is trying to preserve the soul of their nation will the International Jew (and the Shabbos Goy who suckle them) send in the Goy Slave States to murder men, women, and children in the millions like they did in ww2 and before?
Learn the Truth: https://odysee.com/@kNoWing:2/Europa-The-Last-Battle:e [odysee.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 07 2021, @08:25AM
The western nations, above all others, have the most powerful propaganda. If China intends to uphold a certain, 'system,' it would be imperative for them to curtail threats to that system that arrive in the form of propaganda. That's just the nature of the beast. It's no different than a strictly religious family putting a ban on certain TV, movie, music, and video games they don't want their children to have access to, for the simple reason they don't want them to be influenced that way.
And of course, as always, any activity that can be experienced as, 'enjoyable,' has the potential to be detrimental to other areas of life that fall into neglect as a result. People who come at life at the angle that, 'feeling good is potentially dangerous and bad,' can fuck off, as far as I'm concerned. You do what you love in life, so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. If some one wants to grind loot boxes in some waste of time game, every hour they aren't working, how's that my business?
So to the extent China is protecting itself from outside influence, that's understandable; though, quite likely a futile effort. To the extent china is trying to root out maladaptive and self destructive behavior patterns, well, that's just a symptom of their own failure as a culture. In my opinion, a healthy culture produces people not only capable of producing offspring; but, also people who have the desire to not only produce such offspring, but give them love, and raise them. Unwanted children and reluctant parents who are primarily driven by a sense of duty, rather than desire, to love that which they have created, speaks to an unhealthy culture. When a culture reaches that point, it can try to enforce certain laws to shape behavior; but, in the end it's like putting a cat on a leash. The leash doesn't really stop the cat from freaking the fuck out, and simultaneously prevents it from being what it truly is, a hunter of small prey. Industrialization kills culture, because it fractures the family unit, and until we can find a way to move on from that, society will likely always be it's own worst enemy.