No PKing for Minors in China

Although the Chinese government is actively encouraging the growth of its online game development industry through investment, they've taken the bold step of banning all minors from playing online games in which players are allowed to kill other players (PKing). According to an article on Interfax China, the Ministry of Culture believes that games with PK content lead people to spend excessive amounts of time playing, and are harmful to children. They intend to enforce this policy by requiring players to enter their Citizen ID Card numbers before being allowed to play. This will have a significant impact on many games currently available in China, including Counter-Strike, the Lineage series, and World of Warcraft, all of which feature some sort of playing killing. Perhaps worse, "Chinese authorities have also ordered online game operators to install timing mechanisms that would automatically log players off of online games once they had exceeded a set number of hours of continuous play." I assume the bright side is that sweatshops full of children making running shoes for export should not be affected by these new policies.