Cultural differences: how China's games console ban has affected its gaming culture

The other night I did something I haven’t done in years: stayed up till 3:00 A.M., drinking beer, eating pizza and playing computer games with a friend. The game was that steaming turd of games, Gears of War: Judgment, which is worse than any other game in the Gears series. But it did the job because it had the one thing we needed, split screen co-op. It hadn’t occurred to me how long it had been since I played split screen until I realised how much fun I was having,

Brothers in arms (and pizza and beer)

Frank Cutie (no, that’s not a pseudonym) and I ran around chainsawing locusts like monster lumberjacks. We stole each other’s kills and jostled to see who could get the most headshots.

When shit got real, we had each other’s backs. We took down raging red locusts with synchronized firepower, or one of us used the mortar whilst the other covered him. Even in a limp game like Gears of War: Judgment, it was fun because you are with another player who is having as much fun as you are.

At one point, Frank decided he was going to kill a massive, shield-wielding bastard with only the cleaver. It took a dozen attempts, but in the end we did it! We even high-fived. Without irony.

Epiphany time!

It wasn’t until the next morning when I woke up to stale pizza smell and a carpet sticky from spilt beer that I had a sudden epiphany. China is missing this part of gaming culture. Let me be specific: China is missing split-screen-in-your-living-room gaming action with fellow nerds.

This is largely due to China’s fourteen year game console ban and the fact that game consoles have always been prohibitively expensive. Whatever the various reasons, the end results are the same, gamers here aren’t playing games together in the way that we remember.

Can you imagine a world without Smash Bros, GoldenEye and Halo?

This boggles my mind. Can you begin to imagine a world without these games? As a kid, I remember playing two-player platformers with friends on the Super Nintendo, and taking turns on a tough single player game. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of playing Golden Eye and arguing whether using Oddjob was cheating. (It totally was.)

Even as an adult, gaming dominated my university life. We had Wednesday night Halo sessions with pizza and illicit substances, and I managed to wangle a job working with games in a local department store. This gave me access to some games days before they hit the shelves.