China’s games industry is massive, but along with the massive industry have come massive problems. Chief among those problems is the effect games are having on children. Just within the past few months we’ve seen a debate about whether Chinese net cafes should be age-restricted, read reports suggesting China doesn’t have enough games suitable for children, wondered about the Chinese gaming industry’s overuse of sex, and learned that gaming addiction is a serious enough problem that China will develop its own diagnostic criteria for it. Not to mention the teens we’ve seen attempt to murder and actually murder their parents over internet game-related disputes.
But increasingly, some in the Chinese games industry have been wondering if children well served by a ratings system not unlike the ESRB in the USA, which rates games as “Early Childhood”, “Everyone”, “Everyone 10+”, “Teen”, “Mature 17+”, and “Adults Only” according to their content and how appropriate it is for children.
China does have the “Green Game” system — which is based in both name and concept on the Green Dam censorship software — but there is no specialized organization officially dedicated to rating games, and the result is that even with the Green Game system it’s often unclear to parents whether games are appropriate for their kids. As some gamers pointed out at a meeting with government and industry reps during this year’s Two Meetings, many games have cartoony graphics that look very kid friendly but still contain adult elements like gambling, confusing fees, bawdy jokes, etc.
So does China need something more? Many gamers think so. In a web survey conducted by QQ Games that has drawn over 4,000 respondents (as of this writing), nearly 95 percent said they would support a game ratings system for China. Barely 3 percent oppose the idea.
Unfortunately, creating an effective ratings board wouldn’t that simple a task. In the West, ratings systems are helped by the fact that console gaming is very popular and the games that work on consoles can be relatively easily regulated. But online games, which are hugely popular in China, are more difficult to regulate because anyone with a little coding knowledge can build one and upload it to the web without getting it certified or inspected by anyone. Even if a Chinese ratings board was able to effectively police China’s biggest web game platforms — and that alone would require a huge amount of manpower — it would still have no way to account for games hosted on fringe platforms or just posted to their own websites.
On the other hand, even if a ratings board isn’t a perfect solution, it’s hard to imagine how the creation of one could hurt if it empowers parents to identify at least some of the games that may not be safe for their kids to play. With that said, though, parents should also probably be making an effort to try out some of these games for themselves. Ultimately, that’s the only way you can really be sure if any given game is right for your child.
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