I continue to be obsessed with the social and political implications of video games - in America, but I've started to get interested to their implications in China. China has a game called Legend of Mir II (frequently called Legend2). It's what's called a MMORPG - Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. That means that thousands of people play it simultaneous on the internet, meeting up with each other in the virtual world and talking to each other. It's basically a virtual world where people meet to communicate and collaborate. At given minute, Legend2 has approximately 600,000 concurrent users online (and sometimes more than a million). Legend2 has over 20 million monthly subscribers and is owned by Shanda, the largest Chinese online entertainment company. The company has over 140 million subscribers across all of their games. By the way, that completely dwarfs American MMORPG numbers. There's a great book by two harvard professors called "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever" by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade. It's about how video games shape decision making and business strategy as a generation of gamers are now in their 30s and becoming management and decision makers:

"[The authors] base their claims on an exclusive survey of approximately 2000 business professionals. That survey, say the authors, provides the first data showing a direct, statistically verifiable link between digital games and professional behavior in the workplace. The authors express their analysis in clean, crisp prose devoid of jargon, making it accessible for non-gamers, especially non-gamers who are managers. "Gamers believe that winning matters," Beck and Wade contend, and gamers also place "a high value on competence—wanting to be an expert in the first place"—all of which makes the video game generation, estimated by the authors to be some 90 million strong, an influential force in the work place. The book touches on a handful of other ways in which gamers differ from non-gamers and provides suggestions on how employers can take advantage of their unique values and skills."

It all begs the question - what implications does China's enormous gaming community have on political activism and free speech? on government and free enterprise? The revolution will not be televised.