[photopress:Silkroad_Online.jpg,full,alignright]There is a thought that a rating system for online games in a bid to protect youngsters from pornographic and violent images and potential gaming addiction to be introduced. Liu Qiang, director of the Internet culture office under the Ministry of Culture (MOC) told China Daily: ‘The content of some online games, which is considered harmful to children and teenagers, might be okay for adults, so we have to build a system of standards.’ The illustration shown here is of a game which might be a bit frightening but not harmful.
The MOC currently uses two methods to stop pornography and excessive violence in computer games: by going through production copies of the games with developers before they are released to the market, and by granting approvals to foreign games only if they are considered proper to be imported.
Liu Qiang said, ‘But online games are special: they are so interactive and are therefore always developing, which makes it difficult to regulate them.’
His comments were made during a forum on Internet culture hosted by the MOC and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
Peng Gongmin, a senior police officer in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, told the press last month that Internet games were responsible for nearly one-third of all cases involving school students that were dealt with by police in the province last year.
Also last year, Beijing police cracked a dozen ‘online mafia gangs’, after members of two of them, all teenagers, stabbed each other in the real world for rare ‘weapons’ used in a popular online game.
Shen Qiyun, a professor at Beijing Normal University, said at the forum that China has a higher percentage of child and teenage netizens than any other country in the world.
A report published in December by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China showed that 15% of netizens were under 18.
Source: China.org.cn