China lets loose on games with further banning rampage

THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA is continuing its headlong crash into the modern age of internet gaming with the country banning several more violent games and demanding developers edit out violent content in new ones.

The Ministry of Culture which is responsible for overseeing all videogames sold in China has banned Hitman 2: Silent Assassin and Painkiller and has ordered MMORPG developer Object Software to remove its Player vs Player system which rewards players for killing other players, something the MoC terms "unhealthy" according to Interfax China.

This comes at the same time as World of Warcraft players in China are launching an online protest concerning the three hour restriction which the Chinese government has placed on online games. According to the new rules, players cannot stay online in a videogame for more than three hours, and developers have been ordered to build in systems to their games to ensure that this rule is adhered to.

The actual deployment of the system may take a long time, but meanwhile the Chinese government continues to ban and censor videogames left and right in an attempt to maintain the country's traditional censorship stranglehold on the media. µ