Peking University Now Offers Controversial Video Game Course

To the surprise of local news, Peking University became the latest Chinese school to offer a video game course.

Enrollment was at capactity this past week for Professor Chen's first weekly class which will include such topics as history of game development, game industry regulations, and "healthy game psychology".

During his first class, Chen told his students that video games need to be respected. "Whether you view them with love, indifference, resistence or with suspicion, video games have grown to become one of the most important pillars of the entertainment industry," said Chen, who would also argue that "no matter how you look at it, this (course) is a necessity."

Simply put, the reason is money. A lot of it.

According to the "2017 China Game Industry Report," the Chinese video game market was worth 203.6 billion yuan last year, an increase of 23 percent. As Chen explained to students that he says will likely go on to work in the field, the video game industry had already eclipsed the film industry by three times in 2015.

With so much at stake, Chen revealed during a video interview that the best school in the world for teaching video games right now is the University of Southern California (USC), suggesting China must do its best to keep up with USC's ten video game courses.

And yet, Chen admits that teaching a video game course in China has its own specific set of problems. "I didn't make this course to overturn tradition or to be provocative, it's not for that reason," said Chen, explaining that the course's chance for success is slim. "This course is an experiment, much in the same way it is a test of courage and a challenge."

Despite being a worldwide leading market, video games have a bad reputation in China due to their perceived influence on its children.

With video game consoles banned for over a generation, China's youth gravitated towards "internet bars" as an affordable place to play popular online PC video games such as Counterstrike and League of Legends. But when parents and media raised the alarm over this corrupting influence, internet bars were stigmatized, and the word "internet" became a social taboo.

In 2008, China became the first country in the world to classify "internet addiction" as a clinical disorder. Covering everything from binge-playing online games to excessively chatting on online social media networks, "internet addiction" became the umbrella term to describe someone who displayed anti-social behavior and favored the internet and video games instead of devoting their time to studying.

In order to heal the approximately 24 million people the Chinese government says are afflicted with this disorder, some Chinese parents have sent their children to "internet boot camps", a place where video games are thoroughly criticized for being "utterly meaningless."

"I'm totally against online games," said Xu Xiangyang, who charges RMB 36,000 a year to look after a patient at his treatment facility for internet addiction just north of Shanghai. "They completely ruin a person's health. They leave an individual with no means of earning money or supporting themselves."

Other internet addiction experts say the problem is getting dire. "According to official statistics, 67 percent of juvenile misdemeanours are committed by internet addicts that idolise the mafia and have difficulty differentiating between reality and fiction," said psychiatrist Tao Ran, who runs an internet addiction treatment center in Daxing, Beijing. "I fear the trend will increase, because the problem is especially grave in China."

China's internet addiction boot camps have run into grave problems of their own. Patients complain they have been admitted against their will by their parents and are treated with techniques that include shock treatment. The latest of a string of deaths associated with internet boot camps happened last July when an 18 year-old patient died days after being admitted to an Anhui facility.

What this all means is that China is the one place in the world where a parent can pay to have their child admitted into a specialized facility for video games that will teach them either how to be part of a lucrative industry or to completely stop using them -- depending upon where they are sent.

As different as they are, these places really aren't that different from each other.

As part of his course, Chen has one basic requirement he asks of his students.

"I recommend people to not play garbage games," said Chen, echoing the very same sentiment other Chinese video game experts have made.

Images: CampaignAsia.com, EastDay Sports (eastday.com), Intel.com

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