Vietnamese Government Restricting Online Games
The Vietnamese Government has decided to cut off internet access to businesses and prevent the advertisement of videogames online in a move to restrict people playing online games. According to the state-run news source Vietnam News, the government has moved to stop videogames being played after “a public outcry about [online games'] negative influences on the youth.”
The measures include licences for online games being suspended, advertising for online games have been banned and internet cafes have had their internet cut off by ISPs between the hours of 11PM and 6AM, gaming prime-time.
This is all part of a law which aims to crack down on games which feature “violent, gambling and pornographic content”, according to the government-run news source. The law is due to be submitted to the government in August, with the restrictions thought to be in place until the end of the year.
According to the website 70% to 76% of primary school children play online videogames on weekdays, with 100% of the surveyed saying they played on weekends. Videogames have been blamed for a rise in crime and truancy by young people, as well as fears over videogame addiction.
The government has asked videogame creators to have their games put through a standard ratings system based on their content. Some have already done this and the ratings range from “below 6; 6-11; 12-15; 15-18; above 18; and ‘unsuitable for all ages’.” There’s also, according to Vietnam News, a move for “electronic IDs”, which seems to indicate a universal log-on system which would help “manage internet usage”.
Vietnam is a socialist republic state, with the Communist Party of Vietnam being the ruling and only legal party in the country.
News Tags: censorship, law, legal, Vietnam
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Sounds like we need to go back to Vietnam… Just kidding!
Sucks to be a gamer in Vietnam. I guess communism and gaming don’t mix well together.
XD lovin’ the red scare sentence at the end
@TheGeek: Most things and communism don’t really go together. This doesn’t surprise me as much as it makes me just facepalm.
@Hawkeyed One: Well, what they make illegal and what actually takes place is completely different. Torrenting is illegal and its not like i have utorrent right now torrenting a score of movies, because that would be wrong.
The fact of the matter I can hardly blame them, looking at America from vietnam, you see a authoritarian government with a ecnonmy built upon going to war. The military industrial complex is so strong that America has to go to war, or finance wars at the least every 10 years or so.
And of course games have never been banned in western contries EVER. I’m not pro communist, just the utter fail of most people failing comprehend what communism actually is in theory and as a concept and that doesn’t mean super authoritarian totalitarianism, is epic.
+1 Turtle.
@Generic Purple Turtle:
I probably phrased that wrong. What I meant is that most communist countries have a problem with freedom of information, which is either good or bad depending on how you slice it. I have no problem with Socialism as a theory (socialism is the theory behind the economics of most communist countries), but I do have a problem with the government basically owning everything, as in Communism. We could argue over semantics all day long, and I have, but in the end I have to say that I respect the idea of “Communism” and in an ideal world, it would be a perfect economic system (everyone pools their money and everyone gets what they need, and you give ‘em extra spending money for whatever), but fact remains that people are either greedy or lazy, and hence it doesn’t work in practice the way in which it works in theory.
Tl;dr, I like the idea of communism, just not the practice.
@Hawkeyed One: The very fact that you said “everyone pools their money” shows how oblivious of the concept you are. Communism, has no currency. And if you read Lenin (I haven’t read any marx I’ll be upfront) he stresses the decentralisation of power and democratic leadership, but voting on specific policies rather than for any leaders.
But again you have to realise that when communist governments are democratically elected, they don’t last long at all. Vietnam, didn’t even get to have it’s election, it was clear the communists were going to win, even with all the money and goods America was pooring into the economy.
People critise Castro, but forget that before him, there was a dictator, he was just a right wing dictator who did what the west told him, so we just conviently forget that.
This isn’t to say censorship is good, or even justified, but it is to be expected as long as America continues to overthrow left wing governments, and it still happens today. The most recent events that come to mind are venezuala. Hugo Chavez was democratically elected and since then the media have called him a nazi and said that they were being opressed freedom of speech (The irony being that pretty much everysingle newspaper was owned by one millionare or another and everyone was writing about how they were being oppressed). Then he was kidnapped and they tried to force him to resign and had some businessmen become president. The Coup failed within 2 days, but the constant resistance to reform which he has tried to do over the last 13 years or so, has forced him to suspend parliment and rule, temporarily hopefully, and pass laws, without consultation. The reason why there are such authoritrian regimes is because itself a product of our own ridiculous and often misinformed critism of rule. Along with many double standards asking for things our own governments don’t subscribe to.
Gah, that was longer than expected…. But yeah I also don’t think socialism “works” but whilst reading the under cover economist and finding about things which companies do, it makes you doubt whether capitalism also “works”. For example IBM released 2 identical printers, (the hardware was the same), but to ring more money out of people, one was programmed to be slower than designed. They then charged extra for the one that printed faster, but cost no more to make.
Intel did something similar with their processors, only they activaly had to change it to become slower, and in the process made the “cheaper”, slower one, more expensive to manufacture, purely so that they could sell the faster one for more. There should be laws against that kind of stuff, but of course there won’t be, partially because it is almost impossible to prove, and secondly any action that honest politicians will try to take, will be lobbied so much by billionare corparations with enough on the line and enough disposable cash to make sure non of those types of laws get through.
Gah!!! That was again longer than expected…..