It’s not news to many Americans that the Chinese treat technology in much different ways than we are used to in the Western world.
It is news, however, that one of the most popular online games around is shutting down its China servers November 15. That’s right – Fortnite is leaving the Middle Kingdom.
The latest news of the closure is the most recent link in a spate of reports suggesting that Chinese officials are cracking down on different kinds of online activity, including gaming and cryptocurrency.
Chinese officials have created new rules on crypto within the last year, and sent Bitcoin miners fleeing to other countries.
As for the Fortnite game, called ‘Fortress Night’ in China, players were always restricted from purchasing the in-game currency called V-bucks. Then, weeks ago, the Chinese placed a time limit on the game itself, ostensibly to protect school children from abandoning their academic work.
While it’s easy to see Chinese activities as the jurisdiction of a paternalistic nanny state, the flip side of this is that Western nations also want to limit children’s access to online technologies. Since some of these other cultures balk at imposing rules of any kind on a collective level, it’s up to individual parents to make their children put the screens away.
Not so in China:
“The Chinese state has been exhibiting growing opposition towards video games over the past few years,” wrote Alex Hern at the Guardian September 4, in a piece describing the Chinese strategy in detail, and talking about the greater context of what it might bring. “Tencent’s age verification system wasn’t implemented out of the goodness of the company’s heart and last month a state media editorial attacked the gaming industry for peddling “spiritual opium”. But even against that background, the limits seem excessive. Shares in leading gaming companies such as NetEase plummeted, while commentators around the world predicted the effects would do as much to trigger a new generation of teen hackers, adept at circumventing technical blocks, as they would to encourage kids to get out the house and take on more productive hobbies.”
Will other nations follow suit at all, if not in the same extreme way? We’ll see.
