Chinese censorship brings flesh to undead bones

What’s an undead scourge without skeleton warriors, right? What seems to be a simple matter of missing content (flesh, in this case) is now stirring up the healthy gaming community in China. We just received word that China has forced World of Warcraft’s undead skeletons to be fleshed out and covered with skin.

In an attempt to foster harmony in video games, the Chinese government has forced The9, China’s World of Warcraft provider, to cover up skeletons with new skin, essentially turning skeleton undead into zombies in a recent upgrade. The upgrade also removed player corpses (which are basically skeletons) and replaced them with virtual graves.

Said The9 about the incident,

This modification to undead characters is due to the requirements of Chinese national conditions and policies. These small modifications promote a healthy and harmonious online game environment and will not affect players’ enjoyment.

Some players are understandably upset about how even the virtual undead are forced to follow Chinese mandate, especially since it focuses only on Blizzard‘s World of Warcraft and affects no other games. For those of us who live outside China though, it does pose an interesting question: Would having censored content of this sort affect your enjoyment of the game? Let us know in the comments below.

What’s an undead scourge without skeleton warriors, right? What seems to be a simple matter of missing content (flesh, in this case) is now stirring up the healthy gaming community in China. We just received word that China has forced World of Warcraft’s undead skeletons to be fleshed out and covered with skin.

In an attempt to foster harmony in video games, the Chinese government has forced The9, China’s World of Warcraft provider, to cover up skeletons with new skin, essentially turning skeleton undead into zombies in a recent upgrade. The upgrade also removed player corpses (which are basically skeletons) and replaced them with virtual graves.

Said The9 about the incident,

This modification to undead characters is due to the requirements of Chinese national conditions and policies. These small modifications promote a healthy and harmonious online game environment and will not affect players’ enjoyment.

Some players are understandably upset about how even the virtual undead are forced to follow Chinese mandate, especially since it focuses only on Blizzard‘s World of Warcraft and affects no other games. For those of us who live outside China though, it does pose an interesting question: Would having censored content of this sort affect your enjoyment of the game? Let us know in the comments below.