Money makes the Web go around
There are two phenomena that I find particularly fascinating, namely money (don’t we all), and addictive behaviour (my last book was a biography of a drunk). Imagine my surprise when I recently found these two topic coming seamlessly together on the web in China.
Addictive behaviour is displayed by many web users, particularly in respect of gaming, social networking and on-line gambling. With Yidong Liu (a colleague visiting from China), I was studying the problem in Chinese children. We soon came across some reputable research that showed well over one in eight children exhibiting so-called Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD)!
So concerned are the Chinese government that they have been forced to act. The seven major games manufacturers in China have incorporated government-sponsored software in all of their games that prevents children playing any one of their games for more than three hours in any eight-hour period. Surely, even nine-hours game playing per day is too much. However, not satisfied, children have responded by swapping between multiple game identities every three hours, or they simply move on to a different game whenever they are closed down. One small-scale investigation of just 273 students at the East China University in Shanghai identified a clear correlation between IAD and poor examination performance: 80% of drop-outs were blamed on IAD.
On leaving school, having spent hours daily staring at screens, they have e-learned that this behaviour is normal. Then young men (it is usually men) enter ‘dead-end’ jobs, staring at yet more screens. In China, so called ‘gold farms’ are springing up, where they spend upwards of 12 hours a day in sweat-shops playing on-line PC games like World of Warcraft to earn WoW gold by slaying virtual monsters. This ‘gold’ is then sold on for real dollars and euros to cash-rich Western players who want to progress through the game without putting in the same amount of time and effort.
The appetite in China for PC games is enormous. To quote Richard Ji, an analyst from Morgan Stanley: “They have what I call the largest virtual park in China. And in China, the No.1 priority for Internet users is entertainment; in the U.S., it’s information. That’s why Google is dominant in the U.S., but Tencent rules China”. Q-coins, the on-line currency of ‘Tencent’, allows access, via their website QQ.com, to numerous on-line games across China, in particular the QQgame.
Every registered player is given a QQ-number, and with this Q-coins may be purchased using RMB Yuan. By June 2006, 549 million users were registered, with 220 million using their QQnumber at least once a week. Q-coins are used quite legitimately to buy the game-coins for use in other games. Winnings may be legally exchanged back into Q-coins, but NOT into RMB Yuan – the official Chinese currency. However, secondary markets for Q-coins have appeared, and a black Market in this on-line currency is thriving.
The Central Bank of China has even warned that Q-coins have the potential to become disruptive to the official currency!
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