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The Matrix doesn’t have you

"In China's hottest online game right now, players encounter a "system" that executes a seductive control. Though unseen, this "system" is omnipresent. It a virtual yet real monopolist. "Not a leaf moves in this kingdom if I don't know about it." The voice of Pinochet, former dictator of Chile, echoes softly though this virtual world." (Cao Yunwu, The System)

Around christmas-time articles about the popular Chinese MMORPG 征途 Zhengtu Online circulated on Chinese websites (they supposingly got a userbase of several million, and a net income of US $39 million in Q3, 2007). The issue didn’t seemed to be all that interesting at that moment, but it reached several large US-blogs like Kotaku around new year, and thus was getting more and more coverage in the past days. Before leaving comments scattered here and there, we can also discuss the issue here, right?
The original article by Cao Yunwu – which is quite positively received in the western blogosphere (Worlds in Motion: “absolutely fasinating”, Kotaku: “it’s a really, really great article”) – featured a critical report about how players of ZT Online were taken to the cleaner’s by its business-model. It raised some hubaloo, but only after it was wiped from the Internet suddenly, making people wonder if this was all a publicity-stunt by ZT Online’s company Giant Interactive.

Go read the article “Gambling your life away in ZT Online” yourself to get the full picture, Danwei has an english transcription.   

While the article is intriguing and – besides being a bit lengthy – quite absorbing, it uses a cheap trick to build up its enthralling atmosphere: it consecutively uses the term “The System” (which is also its original headline) as a way to describe the game and its controls:

“In China’s hottest online game right now, players encounter a “system” that executes a seductive control. Though unseen, this “system” is omnipresent. It a virtual yet real monopolist. “Not a leaf moves in this kingdom if I don’t know about it.“ The voice of Pinochet, former dictator of Chile, echoes softly though this virtual world.“

This technique builds up images of a faceless orwellian ...well… system, controlling all of its members in ZT Online and their wellbeing and freedom of speech. If you cut to the chase, the whole report is about power-gamers, who are paying through their noses in their arms’ race by Giant Interactive’s business-model for ZT Online. It’s important to use the term business-model here: Gamers like Lu “The Queen” Yang are not engulfed by the Matrix or something similar. They chose to play a game with a specific business-model, on a market with plenty of competition and choices – both Western and Asian (even if Southern Weekend (南方周末), a popular tabloid in China puts it in a somewhat xenophobic reaction: “‘Chinese gamers are an unwelcome species on European and American servers,‘ said a game manager who once worked on World of Warcraft… For those ‘pedantic’ European and American gamers, Chinese players are like fearsome pagans. ‘European and American games do not encourage unlimited superiority of power; they put more of an emphasis on balance and cooperative support.‘“).

The whole coverage pinpoints one important issue though: nowadays, the majority of massive online worlds declare themselves as “free to play”, even though you eventually find out in the end, that without spending additional money, the game keeps you at the status of an expandable decorative extra for the premium members around you.
Just to make it clear: when we are talking about Coobico is going to be free, we are not talking about that free, we mean the other free, like in “free of charge”.

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