Battlefield 4 Banned In China 380
hypnosec writes "The Chinese government has officially banned Battlefield 4, stating that Electronic Arts has developed a game that not only threatens national security of the country, but is also a form of cultural invasion. The country's Ministry of Culture has issued a notice banning all material retailed to the game in any form, including the game itself, related downloads, demos, patches and even news reports. According to PCGames.com.cn [Chinese language], Battlefield 4 has been characterized as illegal game on the grounds that the game endangers national security and cultural aggression."
Re:First Shot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's ok China... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ok China, you can ban the game just keep in mind that millions of BF 4 players are enjoying the game on Chinese manufactured equipment. Irony anyone?
Umm, since their intent is to prevent Chinese from getting ideas, and they do like the revenue from manufacturing computers for the rest of the world, and would probably prefer that other countries' youth wasted their time on games instead of studying, then...
No, that's not ironic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony [wikipedia.org]
Re:China has a point (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'd be alarmed too (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost fooled me... (Score:4, Insightful)
The voracious supporters of democracy and freedom in the West are more radical and virulent than 20th century International Communists when it comes to spreading their ideology. China has every right to to be concerned, especially when bringing "democracy" and "freedom" to the rest of the world means bombing campaigns, land invasions, and subservience to Western central banks.
Wow, for a brief moment there, I thought that you weren't condoning censorship. Good use of the halo-effect/devil-effect in making the East's censorship look justified by calling out the West's evils. Uncensored corruption is of course bad, but censorship doesn't suddenly make the censors' intentions or methods a good thing. Let me simplify: Censorship = still bad.
Re:Americans surrendered in Vietnam (Score:2, Insightful)
Americans surrendered in Vietnam
Actually no. The US left as part of a peace agreement [wikipedia.org] which the North Vietnamese violated by invading and conquering South Vietnam with tanks and infantry divisions. Just another case of communist aggression and lying.
Indeed... because communist aggression and lying looks so different from capitalist aggression and lying....
Really; your argument doesn't hold together. It's just another case of aggression and lying -- governing style doesn't even have to come into it.
Re:cultural aggression (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely right.
Even here in Canada, we're seeing an emergence of increased cultural aggression from the US and many American companies are trying to bring their American values to Canada. Traditionally, we're valued our social programs, healthcare and unemployment benefits as a cultural force that has helped us to provide better governance and lifestyle to the vast majority. The American (corporate) values are really starting to push the view of letting the aggressive superstar individual succeed and everyone else fail. I'm sorry if anyone is offended but today's American values tend to let the entire middle class suffer and hurt the lower class significantly. The old adage that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor has been tilted to the extreme in today's economic reality.
Don't get me wrong - I love the US. But they tend to think that democracy and capitalism are one and the same and that's not true. People don't exist to serve artificial constructs like corporations. People exist to help serve and better the human race and too often we forget this as we struggle in our daily lives. I want my children to live in a better world than the one that I grew up in and I don't see it happening today. The US concept of democracy has been perverted by corporate interests and aggressive corporate lobbying. Candidly, I think the world is a more violent, aggressive and dangerous place to live in today than it has been in the past. That being said, it's still better than anything coming out of the cultural toilet that is the Middle East, China and Russia.
Re:I'd be alarmed too (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything you said is true. There's just one thing to add:
The problem with a million man army is that you have to feed it and once we cut that off, the Chinese have a million starving, trained men with guns.
Pray that they're in your enemies territory at the time.
Russia won WW2 through their burned earth strategy, but it cost them their industrial base and contributed greatly to them losing the Cold War.
Re:China has a point (Score:2, Insightful)
The voracious supporters of democracy and freedom in the West are more radical and virulent than 20th century International Communists when it comes to spreading their ideology. China has every right to to be concerned, especially when bringing "democracy" and "freedom" to the rest of the world means bombing campaigns, land invasions, and subservience to Western central banks.
Only on Slashdot does this get +5 insightful... If this were the USA doing the censorship instead of China, the slashdot commenters would be screaming of tyranny. When China does it, censorship is cheered on as fighting the encroachment of the USA and western influence.
Re:First Shot (Score:2, Insightful)
> They already did
> At least twice.
Those comparisons are not equivalent. Not even close.
Games and Movies are people's Imaginary Friends (Score:4, Insightful)
China is smart to do this. People are far too shut-in these days. Look how much entertainment has expanded and filtered in the niches of everyone's lives. It does not always have a positive effect on individuals (does the news even bother to cover stories of MMORPG recluses any more or is it now to be taken for granted?) and therefore nor does it always have a positive effect on populations.
Consider the effect that a film like "V for Vendetta" has had on activism itself. The iconic Guy Fawkes mask and the anonymized approach to public activism leaked directly from the film into peoples' lives, who took it seriously and decided to implement it in a fashion.
Consider the effect that video games have on what you decide to talk about with people when you're out shopping, or at work, or at school, just "hanging out", and so on. For many people, about the only people they wouldn't talk about their video games with would be their parents, who would grow weary of the subject and try to divert them to something "more productive". And that HAS to be a dwindling case, considering how many life long gamer are now parents of kids old enough to game passionately.
People fall in love with "weighted companion cubes" (despite the dead bodies inside). [youtube.com] People spend a great deal of time meditating on whether the cake is a lie or whether there is no spoon.
When you add in a dimension of possible political opinion and conflict to an immersive game, it also adds those political opinions and conflicts to the discussion. With things in China as bad as they are right now, in many districts, it would be a bad idea to entertain people with some game depicting "the day after tomorrow" sort of mayhem that no doubt many of them wish was real today.
Because that is what they would be talking about around the water cooler, or out shopping, or while stocking the coal cellar, or while cooking, or at school. Especially the at school part, that's sort of what China's mostly concerned about. Remember it was students who were active in Tiananmen Square.
Every day, in the United States, I shake my head in shame at how many people are operating in their daily lives on a level of cinema fantasy running through their heads. It's not that they watch too many movies or that the content of the movies is wrong somehow, it's that they take what they've watched far too seriously and for whatever reason they've also adapted it to fit their self image and their perception of what their life actually is.
It's easy to defend these people as "needing heroes", and "needing to be heroes", and so on. But it's not easy to defend people who aren't aware of their surroundings and who aren't concerned with real events and real consequences in real life, no in any sense of the word "defend". And plenty of people -- who don't have self-image and self-esteem issues, or who aren't trying to take reality escapism to a whole different level -- enjoy their hero sagas and their epic struggles as things separate from real life. It's not those people that draw my concern, it's the growing number of others who get completely absorbed and proceed to live in a psychological bubble composed of entertainment imagery.
Case in point, "thug life", which is a cultural mainstream even in neighborhoods where there's no threat of actual gang activity and where there are plenty of opportunities for a better life. It's even a mainstream with little white upper class girls in grade school who obviously aren't going to cap anybody and if they wanted to count stacks they could learn accounting and investment from their millionaire parents. There's something lacking in someone's life besides monetary value and secure social networks, when they emulate being a thug ostensibly in pursuit of money and social standing, even when they have ready access to plenty of both.
It's expensive to get a rich man's money, but, it's cheap to fill a poor man's pockets.
Re:First Shot (Score:5, Insightful)
The Chinese were invaded by Western powers in the recent past, so you can see why they're touchy on the subject. They're pissed about the opium wars, and they're pissed at the exploitative and heavy-handed behaviour of the West up to the point when they left. At the summer palace near Beijing there are signs everywhere showing you what it was like before it was torched by the French and the English. They don't forget this shit. The cultures gelled less in China than they did in India. At least there was some cross-cultural understanding in India (especially early on). There was fuck all understanding in China from the get-go. Literally the first thing the English did was piss of the emperor and each side looked down upon the other.
Whilst it's not a competition and there are no "winners", culturally, violence is arguably more alien to the Chinese than it is to us Westerners. Whilst both Europeans and the Chinese have had their share of internal fighting and bloody revolutions, it's only us Westerners who have a long history of violent, expansionist, imperialism. Westerners destroyed almost all of the native culture in the Americas (in the Andes almost the entire native population was wiped out) and Australia. We've also fucked up huge swathes of Africa, the English committed plenty of atrocities in India and had no qualms about getting the Chinese hooked on opium. Our meddling in the Middle East after the first world war has left a legacy of violence and social problems. We constructed the state of Isreal, which has been nothing but violence and trouble. We've been building economies and riches using slave labour for millennia. Vast quantities of wealth poured in the UK, and other European countries, from slave plantations (a lot of it sugar).
Re:First Shot (Score:5, Insightful)
After unification by the Qin about 200 BC the country itself has remained more less the same size. If you want to call that a "large empire" then go ahead. From my perspective it's a large country. Yes, there was violence inside China for centuries: my original post says this. But there's been at least as much inside Europe and individual European countries. In China, most people speak the same language and are happy to consider themselves Chinese. They don't feel like they're part of "an empire." The obvious poo in the pie of course is Tibet, where China undoubtedly behaved in a violent and heavy-handed manner.
My post is no attempt to justify China's "modern brutal oppression." All that I'm saying is that it's no worse than what we've done to our own people or our neighbour's people. In fact, quite a lot of the very shitty stuff we've done is in living memory. Yet we seem to pretend it didn't happen and call the kettle black (as the over-rated post I replied to is doing). That is what the Chinese think when they see statements like the post I replied to.
You what I said by distilling it down to "yes the British did some nasty things over a hundred years ago. It's quite clear my post is about much more than that.
Re:First Shot (Score:4, Insightful)
You didn't read the request, did you. He said "that takes place in our time". The first ga,e is a civil war re-enactment. The second link game also does not take place in the modern world.
What he's asking for is a game where large numbers of players are tasked with a mission to, for example, successfully capture the White House and take the President as prisoner, killing lots of US soldiers along the way. That's much harder to find, though I think in some of the Call of Duty games you can play the part of the Russians and attack the US. That's not the default mode though.
Oh yeah? What about Capitalism? (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Here's a brief overview of the last 10 year just in 1 country - almost 2.5 million in iraq alone.
I hate dumb motherfuckers such as yourself who paint the west and capitalism as not as bad as communism. Has Communism killed 2.5 million people in the last 10 years in 1 country?
The kinder gentler communism you wish for was supposed to happen in iraq, instead 2.5 million people died.
I have a secret for you: Communists and Capitalists are the same thing - in the end it's whatever the bankers can play the people off each other to believe and then psy-op that concept to control people and enslave them.
You have a lot of learning to do about the nature of reality.