Following great public policy employed by China to make sure that citizens abide by rules of law, even the cyber world is non-exempt from the long hand of Chinese brutality (albeit non-governmental this time). Whereas in 1989 it was students protesting on a square, 20 years later it’s thousands of Chinese gamers protesting on a virtual square.

Recently a video game (MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game for those of you who don’t ctrl-c through life) named Hot-Blooded Legend was swarmed with a cyber sit-in. Administrators were forced to take drastic crowd control measures – “flying” protesters to empty parts of the online world, or dumping them out of the game completely – in order to clear access to the cities. It seems the protesters were incensed that the new game allowed players to use real money to purchase in-game items, which skews game play towards the rich and away from the average player – one with a lot of free time.

To illustrate that Hot-Blooded Legend is some serious shit to some, check out this moving story about socially retarded netizen ‘Chu Yu’:

“Eight years ago, this second-year university student registered the user name “Chu Yu” in the Hot-Blooded Legend game. For the next three years, he fought on in this virtual world. For his first year, he cut classes for one year as he played a knight, slaughtered monsters, got promoted, attacked cities and traveled around. In April 2003, he won a green necklace. While his fellow students were attending ancient Chinese classics class, he was screaming and yelling in the Internet cafe and almost smashing his keyboard. In September, he met the female Taoist “Xiao Xiao.” One late night during the game, they rode horses to the seaside to gaze at the blue water. He told her that they will go to Beijing to watch the Olympics. Then he took her into the city and bought her a purple Taoist robe…. (click here for more).“

The Dark Side salutes the no-bullshit policy of the game administrators. If the nerds still insist on disrupting the flow of cold hard cash, we suggest stripping the rugged knights of their armor and forcing each rebel to watch his cyber alter ego swallow (NSFW) defeat without the use of swords for a change.