Applaud Xi Jinping: New game about Party Congress goes viral
For those feeling overwhelmed by all the coverage about the ongoing 19th National Party Congress in China, take a deep breath and relax for a second. And then get ready to tap. Tencent, the same company behind WeChat, has released a mobile tap-game that turns the Party Congress into a bit of fun. The game, called 'Clap for Xi Jinping', places you among the 2,300 delegates in Great Hall of the People during Xi's marquee speech on Wednesday 18.
When you start the game, a short clip of Xi's speech plays before a prompt to start a three-second countdown appears. Once the countdown hits zero, you have 19 seconds to tap your screen as fast as possible, with your taps translating to claps.
At the end, the game shows you how much you clapped, the percentage of players you out-clapped, and the collective number of claps that the game's player population has tapped. As of writing, players have tapped the game more than 1.2 billion times since the game's release on Wednesday 18.
We've done the maths. Let's generously assume that every person listening to Xi's speech in the flesh can clap three times a second. It would take the 2,300 people in Xi's audience about two days of non-stop clapping to clap 1.2 billion times.
Two days isn't bad. But, we can only assume that the longer the game is out, the more people will clap, and so the longer Xi's audience will have to forgo all food and water to clap.
In reality, state media Xinhua reports that President Xi Jinping's three and a half hour long opening speech to the congress on Wednesday 18 was interrupted 71 times for applause and cheers. They also tracked what exact sentences triggered applause.
Want to applaud Xi Jinping's speech yourself, or just see how fast you can tap/clap? Try the game on your smartphone by scanning the QR code below.