The Mandatory Anti-addiction System

My first time engaging with Anti-addiction system was in around 2008, after the World of Warcraft has been introduced to China for about three years, and caused many ‘youth problem’ as what has been reported by the main-stream media. And the most important is the system is mandatory, in the China Daily, also notes that four online game companies had their operations suspended because they did not have such system installed in their software.

Along with anti-action system, another system is also required by Chinese authority, the Real Name Registration Regulation. They are trying to officially connect the fantasy and reality! It asks MMO players, or any other online game now, whether it is a casual game or not, to registry with real personal information, such as name, residential address, national ID and etc. As the authority claimed, the information will only be used to identify whether a player is above or under 18 years old, and also will be a way of identification when players claim loss of their account and virtual properties.

Once again, these two systems are all claiming their aim is to ‘protect’ youth from being addiction to online games. The system will automatically stop the character from gaining experience or trading items within the game, and etc. after amount of time is passed, if it detects the player is under 18. However, to my opinion, it will only cause more problems than reducing them. Since it is not forcing the player to go offline, therefore, they can still roam around online doing nothing, or, killing each other just for fun, especially in the PvP mode, simply they got nothing else to do. This anti-addiction system actually has done a great job for isolating the violence out of its usual context!

Moreover, this system has no any restriction on adults, which in another word, if you are adult, or, after you becoming an adult, you are OK to addict to the games!