MMO Forces Gender Proof
Aurora, a subsidiary of Shanda, now has a policy that requires those who play female avatars to prove they are real life females via webcam. Seriously. In their MMO, King of the World, they’ve banned all accounts with female avatars on them pending the aforementioned proof. Holy. Crap. If this were in America, there’d already be massive lawsuits flying. Interestingly enough, players with male avatars do not have to prove their gender. There is nothing even remotely good about this idea, even if there is a stigma about homosexuality or transgender role-playing in their country. It’s an affront to MMORPGs–after all, doesn’t that stand for Mostly Men Online Role-Playing Girls? Credit for that goes to someone here at 38 Studios, but I won’t give the name unless authorized. 
Joystiq is calling bullshit on the story after looking into it a little bit more, but they’re still waiting on an official response. As they said, given that it’s a publicly traded company, a move like this would be terrible business sense and horribly impractical.
This seems like a recipe for abuse. Exactly HOW do you prove you are a biological female on a webcam? I’ve seen some pretty convincing cross-dressers where you couldn’t tell. Is there a need for the female to disrobe in some way? I can picture a bunch of geeks sitting around thinking up ways to get girls to strip on a webcam for them… Doesn’t sound real to me, either.
Seems like more than a little much to me.
[...] now, you may have read about the following news snippet: Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen game [...]
What’s getting lost in all the reblogging of this story is that we’re talking about China. This government is one of the worst violators of human rights in the world. In case anyone’s forgotten, they have no problems torturing and killing people who break the law.
So while all this seems outlandish and funny to Americans, there’s a real potential for nastiness. This is an oppressive government trying to come to grips with the inherent democracy of the Internet. I’d expect things to only get more absurd, and dangerous.
The potential economic implications for China with things like this, pricing structures for games, and all the other whacked out stuff they do could be pretty bad. Bleh.