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Week 8

Young Teenager system

Game for young kids.

Chinese government does not allow children under a certain age fully access to it. It seems impossible to check every players’ ages, but it is possible in China. Every Chinese citizen owns their unique ID number, and this number has the information of place of birth, day of birth and gender. An anti-addiction system was designed to restrict the gamers’ ages by checking the ID numbers. This system is aimed to restrict the game play time to 2 hours in week days for people who is younger than 18 years old. Also, teenagers cannot play the game between certain hours (9 p.m. to 8 a.m.). There is an agreement of privacy listed to be signed when people start to play Lol. Also, teenagers’ accounts, in Lol, can also be linked to their guardians though Wechat, a widely used social media owned by Tencent. In China, culturally people believe that studying is the main task of teenagers, and less gaming time is effectively helpful for teenagers’ eyes health.

Week 9

E-sport

E-sport in colleges

In colleges, e-sports major has been established since 2016, and been recognized and approved by Chinese Ministry of Education department. The establishment of professional gaming education system is a tendency of gaming industry in China, and the procedure of talents of e-sports and gaming design will be systematic.
Because of the recognition of professional game players, some of them have become influencers. Some of the gamer has become millionaire and they are only around 20 years old. Last year, Lol Championship Finals had approximated 100 million viewers. The idolization of e-sport players was pushed by their fans. These fans created a community to share content with like-minded others, and they also recreate content by their passion. Some of these fans become part of gaming industry by editing game videos, some of them find their love in-game and in this community, and some of them become activists who give pressure to Riot and Tencent for a better welfare in game. Even though protest in China must be approved by government, online protest is not necessary to be approved. Chinese players, therefore, protest in-game for their essential needs of human rights

Week 10

Distribution mode

Chinese sever has a different distribution mode of gaining more profit in League of legends. Lol is a free game, the only why it can earn money is to purchase outfits for champions by purchasing Riot point. Even though player can also purchase champions by Riot point, they can also purchase those by playing more games. Outfits, however, can only be purchased by real money in most cases. In Chinese sever, when some special events happen, player can buy chances to draw a lottery to get some limited edition of skins. In China, Tencent owns the distribution channel of Lol, so Tencent combined Riot point with Q-bi, the currency used in Tencent services. The ratio of Q-bi and Chinese currency is 1 to 1. Players who want to own limited edition skins will charge thousands of Chinese Yuan to buy hundreds of lottery “tickets” to draw skins from pool.