China have ‘Gamified’ Your Life and It’s Frightening

China is one of the weirdest countries on the planet and I swear that they must have a weekly government meeting where they brain storm and there really are no bad answers or suggestions and one of these ideas was to have your life as a citizen ‘gamified’ and that is freakishly scary.

Instead of us explaining everything, we will give you a brief rundown and let the video explain things in more detail. To start with, it’s worth noting that the system is not mandatory now, but will be in 2020.

How will I be ‘gamified’?

The whole system is run partly by Tencent who own RIOT Games and have “interests” within EPIC Games and Activision Blizzard as well as Alibaba.com (China’s equivalent competitor to Amazon) and of course the Chinese government. Instead of monitoring your credit score like we have in the UK and US, where you can check if you’ve paid your bills on time, gone overdrawn and so forth, instead, it will measure other aspects of your life such as how obedient you have been as a Chinese citizen. This will include accessing information about you from social media such as sharing news stories that are favourable to China and therefore increasing your score compared to sharing bad publication pieces that would harm the worth of China as a country. To add to this, Alibaba will share information on your purchases such as if you are buying locally sourced produce and tools that are made in China compared to important goods from other countries which will have a detrimental effect as you’re not helping the Chinese economy.

Sounds bad right? It gets worse…

If you are a model citizen and are following all of the rules and have an amazing score, you’re onto a winner and will be the top of the town, but if you suddenly become friends with an old chum from school who posts news clippings onto social media that hurt the reputation of China, then your score will go down too. Not really fair is it?

It’s dubbed as Sesame credit and is quite scary as it uses the same mantra that we know and love from games but in a bad way. We see the whole republican/liberal/democrat stigma happen day in and day out in America and the UK and I can only assume that this will force people to be even more right wing which will have a negative outcome on the tourist industry to China among other aspects.

For the most part, the average citizen will not think much of this, but as it develops, it will become more mainstream and people will start obsessing over their score and this could lead to a lot of negative things such as violence, crime and the simple act of playing the blame game.

Would you like to live in a real-world video game like this? I know I wouldn’t.