The past month has not been an easy one for China’s gaming community. After a Chinese newspaper described video gaming as ‘spiritual opium’, the country enforced curbs on game time for youth gamers. The horror. We have some absurd memes to mark the absurdness of this whole situation.
1. Are you serious right now?
Labelling video games as drugs? That might be a bit of an overkill, don’t you think?
Especially at a time when gaming is actually being viewed as something that is giving many affected by lockdowns across the world an escape.
Be careful what you wish for. Ban video games, and you might just see youths using real drugs.
2. Oops…
3. It’s set to be a long year…
We all know that beautiful feeling during the school holidays when we have hours to burn in front of the screen. This sadly won’t be the case for the schoolkids in China. Our heart truly goes out to all of them.
4. Some people just want to watch the world burn
The branding of video games as ‘spiritual opium’ has led to a Tencent free fall in the stock market. But they weren’t the only victims. Worldwide, share prices from the likes of Ubisoft, Activision, Electronic Arts, Zynga all fell between 3 per cent and 9 per cent. Oof.
5. On the bright side…
But we don’t want to end off our Meme Monday on a gloomy note. On the flipside, everyone can look forward to Spider-Man: No Way Home hitting cinemas in December after its EPIC trailer came out this week. Doc Ock be looking mighty fine.