China's Bizarre Gaming Culture transcript

It's hard to deny that China is a very controver the greatest country of all time. Yes, the organ trade is questionable. Yes, a bunch of old people go missing every year, but did you know that they have the biggest video game economy in the whole world? NetEase, the company behind Marvel Rivals and Where Winds Meet, could buy Rockstar Games twice and still have billions of dollars left over. So, yeah, when day turns to night in the middle kingdom, it's recorded that half a billion people out of China's population dabbles in video games.

However, something or somethings caught my attention. What's up with all these bans, disproportionate levels of PC gamers, game addiction boot camps, boot legs, boots in general, and unrestricted government authority over what goes on inside of these video games? China is a very unconventional country in great and disturbing ways, and as such has one of the most diverse and chaotic video game rabbit holes ever. And it all started in the 1970s.

And in the '70s, China had $0. So, while Americans were getting their brand new Ataris and arcades, people in China were deep in the economic and political trenches with an estimated 770 million people earning under $1.90 a day, which is [ __ ] crazy considering China's population was still in the nonuple digits at the time. With most of China looking like this and this and this and this and this, there wasn't really any opportunity for people to play video games since times were so desperate that it became a symbol of status to simply own a bicycle, and even cars were seen as unheard of for the average Chinese citizen, obviously.

Fortunately, by 1980, China had made significant progress towards leaving the deep end left by Mao Zedong. So, the first wave of arcades were finally able to see the light in urban China, and by the mid to late 1980s, arcades became commonplace. But China still wasn't completely caught up with the West, and especially Japan, who was leading the video game market after the United States' historic video game crash fumble.

Unfortunately, for companies like Nintendo to import consoles into China in the late '80s and early '90s, they were forced to pay a 130% tariff on hardware. So, not only did a lot of companies not want to sell their systems in China because of that paywall, but it was also expensive for China's general population to buy entertainment hardware like that. And when I say expensive, I mean that a brand new Famicom, the Japanese version of the NES, it came 2 years before the American version, a brand new Famicom would cost an average Chinese family 1 month worth of labor, and that's if both parents were working.

Thus began the great bootleg renaissance in China that took the console market by storm. Without a doubt, the most impactful console in China was none other than the infamous Little Tyrant, or as it was known in China, Xiao Ba Wang. The Little Tyrant was basically an NES emulator console that ran these multi-game cartridges, all the games saved inside of said cartridges being pirated, of course. The reason why it became so massive in an era where the NES had already lived its prime was because one, China couldn't experience the NES in its prime, China looked like this, and the console was like $40.

It was a massive success. I mean, it held around 80% of China's console market at the time, and it was able to stay afloat as a product because China had abysmal copyright policy, so pirating and bootlegs wasn't just popular, but totally normal. Eventually, to bypass copyright infringement and justify the Little Tyrant's existence, future iterations came with a keyboard, and the console was advertised as a study [music] system.

It could even be found in schools because it was equipped with programs to teach English, typing, programming, among various other subjects. But that doesn't mean the Little Tyrant didn't have its own hits. Who could forget the 1993 blockbuster classic Somari? Somari had soundtrack, Somari had artistic direction. Okay, for real though, something weirdly impressive about this random bootleg rip-off is that it's a clone of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis while still being an NES game.

So, things like the soundtrack are so comical because the NES's sound inferiority screws every track up, but for some reason, the developer Hummer Team just doubled down and didn't alter anything to work around the console's limitations. But I can't even hate on these. A lot of the early Chinese bootleg market was computer tech black magic. I mean, look at The Legend of Zelda: Triforce of the Gods. This is virtually a one-to-one copy of A Link to the Past, a 16-bit game for the Super Nintendo, a significantly more powerful brick of hardware than the NES.

Yet because most of China was still running Famiclones in the '90s, a team of hardworking developers somehow managed to port it backwards to a previous console generation. But it wouldn't be fair to talk about the unconventionally innovative bootleg industry in China without acknowledging the many original great works of art that came out of the '90s Chinese video game market. A lot of RPGs inspired by Dragon Quest and Fire Emblem came out on early computers running MS-DOS, like Empire of Angel, which is a fantasy RPG where you play as a heroic woman with the task to stop a brewing war in the vast empire.

But the game only features female warriors, so instead of scrapping with dragons and goblins like a traditional fantasy role-playing game, it's just other women. It's an original and comical early satire on RPGs. And other than this, there were a ton of other legitimate video games often developed by Softstar. Now, I assumed that Softstar, judging off their newer titles, wasn't doing too great post-'90s Chinese gaming.

But they actually rebranded in January of this year and are making billions of dollars selling electrical equipment. So, uh good for them. But outside of plagiarism and economics, in the '90s, the general public in China grew to dislike video games as a concept and claimed it was harmful to the youth. Due to China's previous one-child policy, a lot of children would spend excessive amounts of time on these new gaming systems because they didn't have a lot of other sources of instant entertainment.

So, parents began to grow concerned over how beneficial these study machines truly were. Things like the campaign against spiritual pollution, which was a movement initiated by the conservative people within the Communist Party of China, spoke heavily against anything that could be deemed as foreign influence, which of course video games fell into as they, like any source of media, are forms of art that have the power to criticize international politics.

Okay, fast forward a little bit. Woah, the internet. Gaming's reputation in China was always on the decline with the leadership of Jiang Zemin, who was the head of the Chinese Communist Party from 1989 to 2002. Jiang believed the World Wide Web would be a great tool for reshaping China's future economy, but also considered the internet and video games to be, quote, "political, ideological, and cultural battlefields." I consider the internet to be more like political, ideological, and cultural purgatory, but it's important to take into consideration that civilian faith in government is extremely high in China. >> Was that Beijing? >> So, the values of governmental authority often bleed into the opinions of the general public.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer from 2022, roughly 91% of China's population trust the government, while only 39% of the United States trust theirs, which has since dropped to around 33%. I I couldn't tell you why. So, with that perspective came the early stages of internet censorship in China with the emergence of the Great Firewall in 1997, and later on the video game console ban in 2000 as a result of parents not being able to handle less swagger of their gamer offspring.

And in China, education is like the most important aspect of a child's life. I mean, the National College Entrance Examination has the power to change a whole family's class, so gaming was definitely not what parents wanted their children to prioritize. The console ban was, by government control standards, relatively loose. So, even though the manufacturing and importing of console/arcade machines were prohibited, game retailers still managed to sell them illegally, often in broad daylight, especially outside of mainland [music] China.

That said, prices that were already high went way up. So, even though you could buy a console if you really wanted to, it wasn't very financially ethical. You know what is financially ethical? Gaming in a cafe for under $1 an hour. So, yeah, ironically, following the console ban in 2000, which was established to save the youth, China saw their biggest year in gaming up to that point through the birth of internet cafes.

Also, fun fact, Google got blocked across the whole country for 2 weeks because of a trending flash game called Slap the Evil Dictator Jiang Zemin. So, I guess he didn't really like that. From the years 2000 to 2002, PC game cafes grew from around 2,000 to over 110,000, and they of course continued to pop up throughout the country long after the initial startup era. Games like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 with Chinese army mods were huge in PC gaming cafes alongside other classics [music] like Counter-Strike and StarCraft.

But arguably, the game that influenced Chinese gaming culture the most was Legend of Mir 2. The main factor about Legend of Mir 2 that changed gaming in China forever was the fact that it was free. But it wasn't free. Even though China was much more prosperous in the 2000s than it was in the '70s, there was still a large amount of people that was not going to drop a fair sum of money to legally own a game. >> [screaming] >> So, the game being free to play and then transitioning to a subscription-based service once the player semi-left the low levels was a brilliant way of capitalizing off people that didn't want to pay initially, but then had to if they wanted to keep playing their favorite game.

Legend of Mir 2 also kicked off the first wave of gold farming in China, which only increased the popularity and appeal of MMOs even more. Gold farming is when you rot your life away grinding in-game currency in an MMO and then selling it for real world money. In 2005, it was found that China alone had 100,000 farmers. So, games like Legend of Mir 2 and later on Warcraft and Fantasy Westward Journey exploded in popularity and influence in the big C.

It's important to note that Fantasy Westward Journey was developed by a company called NetEase, and they also acquired publishing rights for Warcraft in China in the far later 2000s. NetEase and another company, Tencent, that you may know for PUBG Mobile, Honor of Kings, and other enormous mobile cash cows are the two game development superpowers of China. And they have basically set the standard of what successful video games from China look like.

This. It's kind of interesting looking back on Chinese video game history and seeing just how much it bleeds into the modern market. And I'm not saying that every modern video game that comes out of China follows this trend, that would be obscenely racist. But what worked in the Chinese market before definitely continues to work today. China has a very large whale culture and it always has. The term whale refers to people who spend thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars on video game microtransactions.

Often the way that free-to-play video games are designed in China is to appeal to the whale crowd, so that if you can spend thousands of dollars on the game, you can and will very much be rewarded for it. As typically the most powerful god-tier players in these games are those who have spent the most money. Now, there is of course a spectrum on just how slop these [music] gotcha whale games can stoop to. Genshin Impact, for example, is often ragged on by the general public.

If you say you play Genshin Impact in most video game communities, it's on sight. But as a game with gotcha mechanics, it is way less predatory than a lot of alternatives because it doesn't have mandatory PvP. So, you can get caught up with the story without spending a single dime. Now, of course, pay-to-win mechanics exist everywhere. Elon Musk didn't slip his way into the government last year by progressing the campaign and games like Red Dead Online are way easier if you're sitting on thousands of gold bars to buy powerful weapons.

But in Red Dead Online, a level one player can still kill a high-level player if they land a few headshots and with a decent amount of grinding can even match their rank. Eastern gotcha culture tends to blend a variety of evils from number-based power levels, gambling, and limited-time bonuses that separate the rich from the normal people. And it's interesting that the extreme implementation of these mechanics are all a result of early free-to-play gaming in China that resulted from economic uncertainty.

And along with that style of gameplay came that economic uncertain style of advertising that made a lot of Chinese clone games so popular in the '90s. And that marketing technique is still pulling in racks of yuan today. Genshin Impact is an original title with original characters and an original story. I think I haven't actually played the game. Is Genshin Impact original? Uh, maybe. >> But before the game came out, its trailers resembled Breath of the Wild in a suspiciously familiar way.

Now, Genshin, like I said, is original and isn't Breath of the Wild aside from having a similar art style and being open world, but other titles have been completely shameless. Marvel Rivals is another free-to-play Chinese game that has a massive community and it got that crowd mostly from people who already liked its main competitor Overwatch, but didn't like the way Blizzard has massacred its legacy. Free-to-play games with heavy microtransactions that are popularized by being similar to other successful video games is Chinese gaming's PK fire.

Justin, why are you being so cynical? NetEase and Tencent primarily make free games. It's a miracle that so much content is already on the table for people that want to play these video games. Okay, Wherewinds Meet is a free-to-play open-world adventure game that has every mechanic ever. It's basically a cauldron of every single open-world AAA title loosely mixed into this one product. There's open-ended climbing mechanics, but your character clips everywhere.

There's stealth and witness mechanics, but they usually don't work. The waypoints for missions don't reward you for exploring the open world and only react to you actually touching the waypoint. Hence the moments when I progressed the level, but then have to go back to touch the marker. Another time in a story mission, I went back to a previous area and my character repeated the same line she said before because the dialogue was tied to the literal spot on the level.

So, there's another level below. I never imagined such a place inside the clinic. >> I think that Wherewinds Meet has a serious identity crisis. It's an MMO, but you can really only progress through the single-player. It's a AAA adventure game, but there's a ton of menus and cutscenes that halt the flow of gameplay and make you sit and watch your character do things like how old computer MMOs were designed. Beyond all of this, the UI is just so so [ __ ] And it's clear that trying to make the game mechanics work together was NetEase's second priority under trying to implement microtransactions.

For example, in Wherewinds Meet, you can host parties on your own boat if you spend $40,000. And there's a ton of outfits, too, that can be unlocked through playing the game, but mostly it relies on gambling. I know it's free, but aren't video games an art form? Shouldn't the number one priority be trying to make a game that's true to itself and not trying to fit the checkboxes of what makes something an open-world action-adventure game for the sake of selling cosmetics?

You compare this to other open-world games like what I was talking about earlier, Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild doesn't need to give you a bajillion icons and notices telling you where a waypoint is or that you just got 12 million XP and can spend points. It embraces its own charm by leaning into letting the player explore the open world and find the neat little things that make Hyrule worth venturing through.

I love that when the enemies stop chasing you, they're like, "Man, whatever, man." I love that there's silly little puzzles scattered around the map and I love the long moments of silence that respect your ability to appreciate them. You can open a wooden chest or you can slap it with your sword and it'll drop whatever was in it. In Wherewinds Meet, you'll open a chest and then text on the side of the screen will tell you what you got.

In Breath of the Wild, you can combine a variety of items, throw them in a pot, and see what happens. In Wherewinds Meet, you open a menu and then suddenly you have food. Breath of the Wild isn't perfect. It doesn't have every single mechanic ever and it's certainly not that flashy of a game, but it doesn't need to be because it knows how far it needs to push itself in its own genre. Stalker 2 is an open-world game that has a lot of waypoints, but outside of the map screen, they're all crammed in this one convenient map bar.

And as for flashiness and power levels, the player's ability all depends on the player's skill. Stalker 2 isn't perfect. In fact, a lot of the time it's [ __ ] Why can I not jump over this thing? Because my stamina is low. It is the most accessible ledge and I died to an anomaly. But it's consistent and knows its place in its genre. In Stalker 2, when I struggle, I just need to lock in. But in Wherewinds Meet, you'll encounter so many quests that start, but then you'll need to back away from them because the requirement to play them is 30 levels above where you are.

Now, you can argue that these are paid open-world games and Wherewinds Meet is not. Unturned is an open-world zombie survival game where you need to loot houses, get better weapons, and survive in the online apocalypse. There are cosmetics that you can buy, but they're far from shoved down your throat and the game itself is what makes it appealing. Now, I know this segment of the video probably makes me sound like Wherewinds Meet's number one hater.

But with the sprawling market that China has achieved over the years, obviously people are going to want to play these video games and therefore be online. There are a ton of restrictions built into devices there where minors around 16 to 18 get 2 hours of screen time a day. Ages 8 to 15 get 1 hour and under that you're limited to 40 minutes. Now, to be honest, for the young children, I'm just going to come out and say this is good news.

I have seen way too many neglected kids handed a device and left to do whatever they want all day every day and honestly, I think that is way more cruel of a punishment than government-ordered restrictions. But past 8 years old, I think it's up for debate. Along with these restrictions comes the nighttime ban, which doesn't let any minor access technology from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 in the morning. So, when I first read about the military-style internet addiction boot camps for minors in China, I had one question.

How? How do these boot camps exist with so many restrictions? How do people even bypass these? Well, internet addiction boot camps have existed long before the recent era of online age restrictions, which are part of Xi Jinping's increasing push for internet safety in China. That said, you can get around the face scan sometimes prompted before opening a video game by showing a picture of an adult relative. And if you know their ID number, you can always drop that, too. even a black market in China where you can rent adult IDs to your heart's content.

So, there are loopholes. The new laws on internet access aren't at all why there aren't as many reports on the anti-internet facilities anymore and actually shed light onto how international access to information within China is handled after massive scandals. So, a lot of reports come from before 2020, but that doesn't mean that internet addiction boot camps don't exist anymore. Whenever something comes out like a teenager being murdered within one of these facilities, that obviously looks really really really bad.

So, the CCP makes sure that things like this get out as far and in between as possible. So, for example, internet addiction boot camps don't operate under the boot camp title anymore and are known as special training schools or something of the sort. Which honestly might be a good idea because if my parents told me I was going to a special training school, I'd be thinking, "Oh, hell yeah, I'm going to be Hokage shotgun." Oh, [ __ ] Additionally, companies are expected by the government in China to manage negative information about them and prioritize success.

Tencent, for example, hey, I know those guys use AI and workers to mass downvote or even delete criticism and accusations on how they operate. So, reports from victims and journalists on the treatment in these places have naturally become scarce since the recent giga crackdowns on internet censorship. So, I've thrown the boot camp word around a lot, but what does that mean? What are and were these places before they supposedly became less strict, but are still kind of [ __ ] up?

But credit where credit is due, definitely less strict now. Fun fact, China was the first country to consider internet addiction a clinical disorder and it's taken very very seriously. So seriously that the boot camps meant to cure it are often times run by ex-military personnel who bring the spiritually washed teenagers back to the real world by having them wake up early, do various intense exercises in a multitude of different therapies.

In the early days of internet addiction facilities, there was a lot of suspicious practices that went on within the walls such as forced medication where the staff would use flashlights to check if the patients actually swallowed the unnamed pills, followed up by electroshock therapy, which is when you're put under anesthesia, a controlled loss of consciousness, and electric currents are run through your brain to give you a temporary seizure that is supposed to recalibrate your senses.

This kind of therapy needs to be done right and it's unknown just how safe these experiments were because if done wrong, it can do more damage than good, which is why professionals often use ECT as a last resort for treating people with disorders. Fortunately, ECT isn't used in internet addiction institutions anymore because of huge crackdowns that happened in the late 2000s and early 2010s. But that doesn't mean there isn't still a trend of horrendous conditions that these young people were and are put under.

Because the people that run these places hate the internet and video games and believe them to be nothing but a hindrance on somebody's potential, there's a lot of aggression that goes into getting the message across. There are many many cases of people who are beaten in these boot camps or punished by being put in a dark room, sometimes for multiple days in a row. I mean, people most of, if not all of the time, are brought to these places without consent or because they were tricked into going somewhere else by their parents.

The forced ideology on what the internet is and only is being pressed on these people every single day is nothing short of psychological manipulation. And the crazy thing is a lot of the victims sent to internet addiction institutions aren't even that addicted. Some parents consider 4 hours a day to be an addiction. So, there's a lot of questions to be raised on when does using the internet become an addiction over a hobby?

To be fair, these boot camps and psychiatric facilities did kick off because of various incidents that painted video games in a bad light in China. In 2002, a group of four teenagers burned down a two-story internet cafe in Beijing because they weren't allowed in. This fire killed 25 people and injured 13 others. Considering this was the deadliest fire Beijing had had in over 50 years, this caused a wave of panic among the public on just how important these video games were to children and how far they would go to play them.

Among a handful of other horrendous incidents, like a kid who had a stroke in an internet cafe after playing Honor of Kings for 40 hours straight, there were even cases in the later 2010s of people who committed real-life murders for various in-game benefits across different titles. Personally, I believe that [ __ ] up people are going to be [ __ ] up and it's unfair to claim that one outside factor is what causes somebody's deranged behavior.

But, because of the suspicion over how influential games are over people's real-life actions in China, there are a lot of censorship laws regarding the contents of what can be seen in video games, like how there is a no tolerance policy on blood and gore. Aside from that, the censored games are mostly left the same regardless if you count or don't count video game violence. I think that this rabbit hole is so weird and interesting to get into because of the many random restrictions and factors that play into why Chinese gaming has the reputation it does and why a lot of AAA games from there carry the same principles and mechanics.

But, it's just so freaking sus sometimes. Like, yeah, the boot camps are grim. Yeah, the bootlegs are funny and impressive. Why does Tencent own an anti-cheat software that has access to all of your files and stays on your PC even after the game it's linked to is uninstalled? ACE is always open and because of its mysterious excessive disk usage has been reported to speed up your SSD's lifespan. Genshin Impact launched with a similar kernel anti-cheat model.

And while that's already kind of questionable, why is it a law that any and all user data is required to be transported straight to the CCP upon request? What? But, what do you think about China's place in history and video game culture? Let me know in the comments below and I'll check them out as soon as I possibly can. Thank you so much for This video is misinformation and subscribe now. And subscribe now. And subscribe now. >> is misinformation and subscribe >> This video is misinformation and subscribe