Sex sells videos games, or does it?

Gaming in Vietnam has been thought to have a negative impact on local youth. The local government has passed tons of bills to limit people from playing video games, especially online games. One of the more recent ones passed prohibits children under 18 from playing games for more than three hours at a stretch.

(See: The Filipino media’s hate for gaming, and why that’s wrong)

The media’s perception of gaming

In Vietnam, it’s common for the mass media to throw stones at the gaming community. Most mainstream media in the country reports only on the negative effects of video games. It’s easy to find articles that cover “bad effects of playing video games”, or ones that are headlined “violent riots because of online games” or “students quit school to play games”. It’s hard to find positive articles.

Fortunately, things are changing now, and people are becoming more aware of the benefits of playing games. More and more gaming tournaments, events, and conferences have been organized in Vietnam. As a result, more good articles about games appear. Sadly, this situation has been too good to remain true.

Garbage in, garbage out

About ten years ago, an agreement between Chinese company Kingsoft and Vietnam’s VNG changed everything.Vo Lam Truyen Ky, a MMORPG game that later became one of Vietnam’s most successful online games, arrived in the country.

VNG’s massive success became the first stepping stone for Chinese games to enter the local market. Right now, about 85 percent of Vietnamese online and mobile games are from China. But with more and more Chinese games coming to Vietnam, the quality has dropped. Most of the games available are of low quality, and gamers don’t think highly of them.

This is where the Vietnamese mass media sees a chink in the positive armor the games industry has built for itself. Publishers have to do perform marketing and PR tricks to attract new users so that they can compete against the many similar games floating around. One such trick is sexual content.

Nowdays, lots of games are marketed through the use of attractive women and videos with suggestive content. For example, an MMORPG called Sat Thu Truyen Ky is about the war between good and evil. Its marketing material includes a video called “the differences between good girls and bad girls”. A quick peep and you can see that the content of the video is totally irrelevant to the game.

Does it really work?