Last week, Kotaku reported that China banned a game for recognizing Taiwan as being a sovereign state. I mailed this news to a friend of mine, who is a nut for Championship Manager (which is, btw, probably the most popular game in the world that you’ve never heard of). His thoughts were good:

Interesting… This is indeed a strange one… Especially since Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet all have national teams and are affiliated with FIFA in real life. I don’t see China ever pulling out of the World Cup because of this…

Also, just because a region is granted a national team does not mean it is recognized as an independant nation state, take Wales or Northern Ireland for example. This is not the United Nations, this is football (though football is arguably far more important).

Most amusing about this is that Football Manager has not even been released in China yet as the game has not been localized. This means that the Chinese Government’s ban is strickly in regards to pirated versions… Must be the first time ever that China has cracked down on piracy…

Heh.

Working with China is always kind of wierd. When with my startup, I was pitching Hollyworld, a social game based around the movie making set. A chinese publisher was intensely interested, but wanted us to make changes to the game to avoid any problems with the Chinese government. The problem was not the western capitalist bent of the game (which was, of course, a social game in circles of conspicuous consumption), but rather that our game was built upon user-created content, and players voting on good content and bad content. Apparently, democracy is a non-starter in your Chinese video games as well.