By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - They're fine with this. Hopefully, you wouldn't be.
Remember how mainland China implemented scary bans on minors (under 18) playing online videogames, enforced by dystopian privacy-violating surveillance on game-playing devices? And, reportedly, parents within mainland China thought this was a great idea because now they don't have to parent their own children, but the Chinese Communist Party can do that for them? Must be very boring being locked in your house without access to videogames during the government's totalitarian zero-COVID policy. But, hey, adults can play, at least.
Well, not anymore. According to reports, all of the online game servers residing in mainland China were shut down today in “honour” of former Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, who died last week. Earth is a better place without this very bad guy around, between his sweeping away of the Tiananmen Square incident, his very antagonistic posture towards Hong Kong and Taiwan, and his absolutely brutal, genocidal treatment of the religious minority group Falun Gong.
But with regards to the gaming, that means no one in mainland China—adult or minor—could play online games on December 6. Now, I myself wasn't planning to play online games today either, between my work as a prince of Koopa Kingdom and following the Georgia run-off election results. (Looks like Raphael Warnock the Warlock won, just as I advocated for!) But I made sure to play—I mean, work—at least a few shifts of Salmon Run in Splatoon 3 upon reading about this news. You know, just to express my freedom to choose whether I want to play videogames on a given day or not. I don't want a government forcing me to not be able to do that!
And this isn't equivalent to Queen Elizabeth II dying and a lot of things shutting down in the United Kingdom as a result. A lot of businesses gave a day or more off for their workers out of choice—often the wrong choice, but their choice nonetheless. The Chinese Communist Party just flipped a switch on their game operators (which are really agents of the Party) by force. The United Kingdom didn't turn off access to their citizen's personal leisure products. Nintendo chose to release their Nintendo Direct an hour late. Sony delayed nothing. They chose their responses and it wasn't forced.
You may think it's inappropriate for people to play games instead of respecting the death of a horrible and repressive dictator like Jiang Zemin. But that should be left to each individual's own judgment. Their own free will. Besides, what's the point of a social credit system if you don't give people the opportunity to lose it?
Ludwig would never want to live under the Chinese Communist Party, and neither would you. He sees absolutely no contradiction between that statement and then supporting the re-election of Democrat Party Senator Raphael Warnock the Warlock on the exact same day, and you're probably dumb and lack critical reasoning skills if you do think there's a contradiction there. (That's not a strawman. These kinds of imbeciles exist.)
Remember how mainland China implemented scary bans on minors (under 18) playing online videogames, enforced by dystopian privacy-violating surveillance on game-playing devices? And, reportedly, parents within mainland China thought this was a great idea because now they don't have to parent their own children, but the Chinese Communist Party can do that for them? Must be very boring being locked in your house without access to videogames during the government's totalitarian zero-COVID policy. But, hey, adults can play, at least.
Well, not anymore. According to reports, all of the online game servers residing in mainland China were shut down today in “honour” of former Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, who died last week. Earth is a better place without this very bad guy around, between his sweeping away of the Tiananmen Square incident, his very antagonistic posture towards Hong Kong and Taiwan, and his absolutely brutal, genocidal treatment of the religious minority group Falun Gong.
But with regards to the gaming, that means no one in mainland China—adult or minor—could play online games on December 6. Now, I myself wasn't planning to play online games today either, between my work as a prince of Koopa Kingdom and following the Georgia run-off election results. (Looks like Raphael Warnock the Warlock won, just as I advocated for!) But I made sure to play—I mean, work—at least a few shifts of Salmon Run in Splatoon 3 upon reading about this news. You know, just to express my freedom to choose whether I want to play videogames on a given day or not. I don't want a government forcing me to not be able to do that!
And this isn't equivalent to Queen Elizabeth II dying and a lot of things shutting down in the United Kingdom as a result. A lot of businesses gave a day or more off for their workers out of choice—often the wrong choice, but their choice nonetheless. The Chinese Communist Party just flipped a switch on their game operators (which are really agents of the Party) by force. The United Kingdom didn't turn off access to their citizen's personal leisure products. Nintendo chose to release their Nintendo Direct an hour late. Sony delayed nothing. They chose their responses and it wasn't forced.
You may think it's inappropriate for people to play games instead of respecting the death of a horrible and repressive dictator like Jiang Zemin. But that should be left to each individual's own judgment. Their own free will. Besides, what's the point of a social credit system if you don't give people the opportunity to lose it?
Ludwig would never want to live under the Chinese Communist Party, and neither would you. He sees absolutely no contradiction between that statement and then supporting the re-election of Democrat Party Senator Raphael Warnock the Warlock on the exact same day, and you're probably dumb and lack critical reasoning skills if you do think there's a contradiction there. (That's not a strawman. These kinds of imbeciles exist.)
This is only tangentially related (because China, as far as I'm aware, has quite a large stake in mobile gaming,) but I was sad recently when I learned that Nintendo was shutting down Dragalia Lost for good. I'd wanted to try that game for a long time but never got around to it. I really don't like it when that kind of thing happens, when I can't try something like that anymore.
ReplyDeleteIt's already shut down, so yeah.
DeleteI don't think you missed out on much.
I don't know how much the citizens of China actually like their leaders, or how much they actually know about them but this would piss me off if I played online all the time.
ReplyDeleteFor just one day, everybody else on the internet actually had a chance to win because they didn't have to deal with the really good player with a foreign name. Or at least, not as many of them.
The really good players are Japanese.
Delete