Author: Hu youtian
In the 1980s, although the slogan of "anti-communism and anti-Russia" gradually became popular in Taiwan Province with the economic development and the international situation, the traditional Confucianism combined with modern nationalism and the college entrance examination "one test for life" advocated by the Kuomintang still dominated the society. Emerging video games, which were called "electric toys" in those days, have also been regarded as a scourge that hinders corruption and teaches bad children.
After the appearance of video games, the history of a synchronized demonized game in Taiwan Province began slowly.
After the martial law was lifted in 1988, "nationalism" failed, but the doctrine of further education was still very strong. At that time, the "electric room" (arcade hall) was often described in TV and newspapers as a place to hide evil people, not only cigarettes, gangs, gambling, but even drugs. For example, it is reported that the boss of the electric room put amphetamines (a central nervous stimulant, the structure of which is similar to that of methamphetamine) in the air conditioner, and cooperated with the overwhelming anti-drug advocacy in that year (including TV dramas, TV advertisements, campus publicity and newspaper topics), which further amplified the panic and hostility of parents and quickly surpassed the "billiards room" (also known as "billiards room", which is called billiards in the mainland) as bad teenagers.
These notoriety are not all wrong. In the 1980s, as a by-product of the "economic miracle", the folk gambling in Taiwan Province was fierce. Apart from the most powerful "Cafe de coral" (relying on the underground Mark Six lottery and various variants of the "patriotic lottery" issued by the authorities), there were also various gambling video game machines. At first, it was imported, and then the powerful local electronics industry quickly pirated mass production, not to mention poker machines, slot machines and mahjong machine. One of the most popular models is "Little Mary", which looks more casual. You can play with a coin from 5 yuan or 10 yuan (the price of a pack of snacks or drinks in that year), and the biggest prize is 50 or 100 yuan, depending on how the shopkeeper sets the small prize.
By the end of 1980s, "Little Mary" had flooded the whole island, and it was spread all over the grocery stores in the streets and lanes. All the children ate it, and many children lost a lot of breakfast money and pocket money on it. As for the serious operation of the electric room, there are many ways to mix and match the general machines and gambling machines. It is said that as long as the black and white lines are well cleared, it will return to the capital very quickly, which is undoubtedly a profiteering industry, and all kinds of vicious incidents are of course indispensable.
The next picture shows that the police seized the coins eaten by this machine, with 9600 yuan (source: Taiwan Province Apple Daily).
In 1988, the film "A Great Joy in the World" portrayed the strange current situation that everyone’s music flooded Taiwan, and Chu Ke-liang, Shengli Zhuo and other leading actors played it to the bone, because in reality they were so crazy that they lost to a debt. The opening song of A Great Music in the World is written and composed by Chen-Nan Tsai, based on the seven-character tone commonly used in traditional folk songs, with a lively and funny modern arrangement and a cheap female voice Echo. Although it is not a stunning work in music, it is extremely competent as the theme song of the film.
That’s beside the point. I went to primary school around 1990, and was influenced by propaganda, so I subconsciously felt repulsive to the electric car outside, and irrationally thought it was "chaotic" and didn’t want to get close to it or ask about it. Intellectually, I hate the smell of smoke, noise (at that time, the amusement park stereo was very loud) and spending money, so I would rather play computer and Nintendo at home, and I am a little complacent about being disciplined and able to play.
My brother is four and a half years older than me. After I went to middle school, I had more experience in playing video games outside with my classmates. I remember that he proudly told me about various racing games. The real feeling and feedback of holding the steering wheel was really beyond the reach of home computers and PCs. However, I couldn’t play well once or twice, so I didn’t regard playing video games outside as a cool thing like people of his age, a little rebellion in adolescence.
Of course, not all electric rooms are chaotic. From the 1980s to the early 1990s, there was a large electronic playground in the basement of SOGO department store on Zhongxiao East Road in Taipei. My parents took us there several times, where smoking was banned (although it was still very noisy), gambling and video games were not allowed, and many parents and children had fun. The image was relatively good, and it seemed that they were free from those bad things. However, only a few stores were able to wash away the white with the fashion sense of "department store" label. It is said that in 1996, the number of motor rooms in Taipei reached its peak, exceeding 30,000.
Here, instead of checking this statistic in detail, let’s just say a scene that can make everyone feel more vivid — — A cram school Under the doctrine of entering a higher school, since childhood, few students around me haven’t made up their lessons. The most intensive cram school area in Taipei is Nanyang Street near taipei main station, which of course has become the first-class war zone in the electric room. It is said that there was a whole row behind Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store. Some middle school students, because they want to play video games outside at night, tell their parents that they want to go to cram school, and their parents are happy to pay for it when they see that he is motivated.
A cram school is a place where all kinds of students from the front school to the back school gather, from those who have the strength to volunteer for the first three years to those who just come to let parents spend money to buy peace of mind, so there are a lot of dragons and snakes in the electric room around them. If you want to appeal to the pain points of parents and teachers, take an evidence that video games are poisoning teenagers, and just take a shot at that place.
Middle school students play video games under the pressure of the entrance examination, and college students are left unattended (of course, some people play less because they are left unattended, so they no longer have the sense of resistance). In 2016, I saw a speech by the political commentator "scum text", recalling that the student autonomy system was implemented in the boys’ dormitory of National Taiwan University, so he was in college for 4 years, and there were "large electric rooms, comic book shops and billiards tables with more than 6 tables" in the boys’ dormitory.
Here, the accusation of "teaching bad children" is no longer applicable, because my alumni are doing this with full consciousness, and many of them later got a place in politics, each contributing to the downfall of the Kuomintang from outside or inside. This is another chapter of "those who steal the hook will be punished, and those who steal the country will be punished."
Get down to business. Why was 1996 the highest peak of the electric workshop in Taipei? Because that year, a "Zhou Ginseng video game fraud case" was exposed: Zhou Ginseng, who runs dozens of gambling video game shops, paid bribes to police and prosecutors for a long time, amounting to tens of millions of yuan, which was called "eating ginseng" in the circle. The number of people involved in this case was as large as the police earthquake, when the news was very big.
Taking this opportunity, Chen Shui-bian, then the "Mayor of Taipei", promoted the revision of the Rules for the Regionalization of Land Use in Taipei in 1997, which included a "1000-meter clause" that showed his lawyer’s skill: anyone who applied for a amusement park license must have a storefront more than 1000 meters away from schools, hospitals and libraries. When this 1-kilometer circle is drawn down, only the suburbs and mountains are left, which is equivalent to a complete ban. So arcade halls quickly disappeared in Taipei.
Gambling is basically banned in Taiwan Province, so it is not controversial that gambling video games are banned, but the general arcade is also implicated. In fact, the public is not ignorant of this. We young people also think that gambling video games are played by middle-aged and elderly people, which are not attractive to us in terms of gameplay and can’t compete with those exquisite and exciting fighting, action, shooting and racing. We grew up with these things, and we are also easy to accept complex role-playing, strategy, adventure and other game types on home computers and PCs, which the previous generation did not understand and were not interested in. The non-gambling game that can be eaten by all ages seems to have only Tetris in mind.
In short, it is clear to everyone to distinguish which games are harmful, but many people want to ban them indiscriminately. In those days, Chen Shui-bian did a brilliant job: he didn’t bother to distinguish the types of machines from the good and the bad, and he didn’t carry the political notoriety of one-size-fits-all (after all, he attached great importance to young people’s votes), but used the "1000-meter clause" to make a radical effort to achieve the de facto ban effect.
As for the task of distinguishing game machines, it was left to the legislature, which did not produce results until January 2000 — — According to the Regulations on the Administration of Electronic Game Fields, there are three kinds of game machines: gambling game machines are defined as "entertainment" electronic game machines, general games are defined as "educational" electronic game machines, and there is also a kind of "steel ball machines", that is, Bai Qingge or various small steel ball machines. Of course, this classification method has a lot to complain about, and it has also caused all kinds of dissatisfaction and inconvenience when it is implemented later. For example, when Ma Ying-jeou and Hao Longbin were mayors, the popular music game machines such as "Taigu Daren" appeared in the underground streets of taipei main station and many shopping malls. I am not sure about the supervision, but I have seen that some manufacturers posted their own music machines and used such names as "training machines" when applying for registration with the government. As far as I can remember, no one clamored that the "electric room" was back. How can I help it? Or: Why can’t other types of non-gambling arcades all come back?
Why is this happening? We’ll talk about it later. Let’s talk about 1997, the beginning of the decline of arcade culture.
According to the usual routine, parents, teachers, social elites and other groups should be happy and applauded at this time. Young people, especially arcade enthusiasts, are depressed and hate Chen Shui-bian, and then the profit-seeking operators are still unwilling to give up and continue to operate underground.
However, the development of the times is too fast, and it can always surpass the routine. Zhou Renshen’s case and the ban of arcade hall have little influence on the development of video games in Taiwan Province, because another similar product has appeared and taken over the market seamlessly. This kind, you should be able to guess, is the Internet cafe (Internet cafe, called Internet cafe in mainland China).
According to the retrieval data, the first Internet cafe in the world was born in Britain in 1994, and the first Internet cafe in Taiwan Province, Supernova Internet Cafe, was set up near Taiwan Province University not long after (the specific time is to be tested). At that time, online games were not popular, and Internet cafes only provided internet services and simple snacks, or services such as fax, photocopying and scanning. Later, around 1998, a "strategic master" opened in a prime location of Zhongxiao East Road, with an hour’s worth of 90 yuan NT dollars. At that time, the most popular games were Starcraft and Age of Empires. By 1999, there was even "Starcraft".
I remember that the strategic master opened on the second floor of the Apollo building, near Lane 216 where the MRT was loyal to filial piety and dunhua station and the food group gathered, and now he is a dentist (taken on June 18, 2018, when I went home for business, I took a photo by the way).
I was in high school for three years, from 1998 to 2001, and experienced the all-round rise of Internet cafes. Our classmates called going to Internet cafes "connecting", connecting after school, connecting with cut class, and connecting when I was tired of studying at night. A group of common classes in Class 947 and Class 956 attached to our Normal University gave themselves an muddy number — — "4567 Brigade", Lin Linli of our class once played "CS" with others and won a championship in a certain competition, winning tens of thousands of dollars. Later, we connected with him and really couldn’t beat him at all.
Internet cafes have been opened one after another, and the price has quickly dropped to around 30 an hour in 50 yuan (in other counties and cities, it is as low as 20 yuan). Even the "OPEN Billiards Gymnasium" near our school has entered a batch of computers to serve students from many schools, so that you can pick a pole (play billiards) and connect at one time. Lynn is also very strong in pole-picking. He said that he usually picks poles with his father. This enlightened parent should have played a lot when he was young. By the way, the middle school attached to our normal university is the top three volunteer schools.
So what if arcades are banned? There are also home machines (formerly known as "TV games"), which were not banned before, and now they can’t be banned. Even if parents can keep their children away from playing musical instruments, they can’t keep them away from computers, and computers are taught in schools. Maybe there are still many people in the countryside who haven’t touched computers, but in Taipei, it should be said that every school and class can find a bunch of computers that are more powerful than teachers, and they can use various means to break the ban of computer classrooms, fill them with games, and even play online on the local area network. The computer class in our first year of high school is even connected with Quake, or play King of Kings on MUD.
Special recommendation: The Adventures of Dank and Scud (Riad. PK. edu.pl), a 1997 Quake comic book, was written by Michael Houston. I saw the report in Computer Player that year and went after the serial. This ancient webpage of 21 years ago is still there today.
What is the "1000 meter clause"? You can control the game machine, but not the computer. Computers can also be used to do business, and the electronics industry is the strongest industry in Taiwan Province, which can’t be simply demonized like arcade, home computer and billiards. For us students, since computers are serious things, going to Internet cafes is not as guilty as going to video games or pool rooms, or the psychological burden of being labeled as a bad teenager.
This is also due to a good start made by strategic experts. It is located on the second floor of the prime location building, with clean windows and no smoking. Moreover, every computer is equipped with headphones, which will not disturb others. At first impression, it will not be as dirty and noisy as those small electric rooms before. In particular, "no smoking" is very important. Smoking or not is an important label to distinguish good students from bad teenagers. Although I ask myself not to discriminate against smokers, I always hate the smell of smoke. There is smoke in the pool room and the old electric room, so I don’t want to go, but I am willing to go to the Internet cafe.
Happily, in those few years, the problems of teenagers racing and gangs were common social headlines. Many of us have seen heavy machines (heavy motorcycles) for dyeing hair whizzing by near our school. If you look at them more, you may be yelled at by people in the car: "What are you looking at!" -Yan, with the pronunciation of xiáo, with the orthographic word "?", is transliterated from Minnan language "semen" in Mandarin. However, after the rise of Internet cafes and online games, racing people seem to disappear and play games instead.
Of course, so many locomotives and gangs are still there, but they don’t make trouble in the real world. As a result, after getting rid of bad labels such as racing family, heavy locomotives have become sunny. After all, heavy locomotives are an important means of transportation in Taiwan Province. When I was in college and held a high school reunion, the most common thing people talked about was motorcycles. The most impressive news was that a group of college students took a motorcade up the mountain to play, and they were cursed by their grandmother who opened a grocery store on the mountain. The grandmother’s swearing was very fluent, and the students were greatly admired. All of them were humbly taught, saying that they would come to scold her next time, and grandma told them to pay attention to safety. Even swearing has become so warm. Although it can’t be said that this is the direct effect of video games, we can read a lot of intriguing atmosphere evolution from the pasting and shedding of all kinds of "labels".
Internet cafes, of course, are not without the criticism of moralists, but in Taiwan Province society at that time, the conservatives have been suppressed by liberals in a broad sense in the struggle for the right to speak. Although there are still many conservatives, they are hard to convince and lose momentum, just like the old Kuomintang. Politically, Lee Teng-hui is engaged in localization and educational reform, and he is relying on post-modern pluralism to replace the traditional Confucianism represented by the old Kuomintang with modern nationalism. In other words, Taiwan Province can no longer preach the slogan of "studying for the rise of China" to young people. That’s why it seems that there are no longer demonized games in Hongkong and Taiwan Province ── it’s not that adults have awakened and their prejudices have been eliminated, but that people who hold this opinion have lost their voices and will be covered up if they call them occasionally. Therefore, it should be said that the moralists in mainland China are relatively happy, and there is still a national justice that can be used.
Adults are then left with pornographic and violent labels and "addicted to games — Can’t read well — Can’t get into a good school — The economic reason of "I can’t find a good job" can demonize the game, but if we want to talk about the economy, once the game industry becomes bigger and the traditional channel of further studies and job hunting becomes more and more difficult, then the chain of blame will be broken. Of course, the game industry is not a savior, but anyway, everyone has no way to save the economy in Taiwan Province, and some of them can’t be implemented. However bad the game industry is, at least it is being implemented, and there are many achievements that drive upstream manufacturers. Therefore, from the utilitarian point of view, the game can’t be said to be a legitimate industry ── although it is also tired and hard to earn. However, it is precisely because the game industry is far less cool than playing games, and even worse than other industries, and public opinion is mostly sympathetic and contemptuous, so more and more people are willing to admit that games are legitimate industries. This makes no sense, but this is the reality. Therefore, no one wants to argue about what kind of game machine the music machine should be. It depends on when the law will be amended, and then another result that takes public opinion and administration as the main considerations is inconsistent with the actual needs.
The above has not talked about pornography and violence. To this day, there are still many parents’ groups who, in the name of protecting children and teenagers, attack all kinds of games and advertisements with soft pornography or violent elements, and every time they can get a certain space, they have their political energy. However, the reality is that I want to be thorough here: most of us who pay money love pornography and violence. There have been many dialogues and debates in this regard, but no matter how we argue, the basic bottom line in our hearts will not change, that is, "I don’t want it" and "I want it", so no one may be persuaded. Everything on the surface is just thinking about a plausible statement, but in fact, everyone doesn’t want to care about these superficial articles.
"Can we let these things flood in order to make money?" This is a powerful cross-examination, but if repeated too many times, it will easily lead to an irritating sincere answer: "I think so" or directly call him "idiot". It is true that many people neglect their business because they are addicted to games, but if you want to hit the whole game industry with this point, you will get a choking voice: "Don’t delay the game if you fail in education." "People who are addicted will be fascinated by others if they are not fascinated by this."
Addiction is indeed a problem that should be discussed, but we don’t want to come to a conclusion that we don’t like, and we are afraid that after reaching a consensus, we will be used by unreasonable annoying people to pressure me, so we would rather keep this confrontation without dialogue. Even if we really want to discuss it, we must make sure that he is one of our own, that we are really here to solve the problem and not make trouble, and then be careful not to let this result be used as a handle. Therefore, our personal wisdom will grow, but it is difficult for the group.
Problems in Taiwan Province can often not be mediated through rational communication and debate, but disputes can be transferred and abandoned through various deviant means or violence from outside. Those who have the means show their magical powers and exploit loopholes, and they get what they want. Those who have no means, just let them do what they want. The electric room was covered by the "1000-meter clause", and so was the generation of Internet cafes. By the time the iPhone came out in 2007, this was especially true after the boom of mobile games. In recent years, elders have also started to play games with tablets, becoming children one by one, and our generation has grown into the backbone of society. Time is the greatest violence, and no one can survive it.
We can often feel that human beings are like isolated islands from such a cold world. We struggled to connect each other with culture, and now games can make us feel connected and warm each other. I think, if we want to seriously talk about why there are fewer demonized games in Taiwan Province now from the emotional level, it is because people can more and more understand this lack of identity and the comfort that games can bring in this detached network age.
2025 年 7 月