Internet games make news in China. The growth of game companies here is a great financial success story, though it’s one that’s often overshadowed by hand wringing articles about Internet addiction, sex and violence in games, and efforts to censor content and shape gaming behaviour. This month TALK asks some more rudimentary but much less common questions: who is playing these games and what are they getting out of them?

Beijing-based data analysis firm Cnzz.com estimates that nearly two thirds of China’s 338 million netizens play Internet games. In 2008 the industry earned RMB 20.8 billion, just over a quarter of revenues worldwide, and second only to the United States. By 2012, Internet games in China are projected to pull in RMB 41 billion and make up half of the global market.

There’s no question that online games are wildly popular here. But why so wildly? One answer is that games give young Chinese opportunities to succeed that are less apparent in the real world.

 “There’s a certain escapism in having an altered personality that’s able to accumulate things and do things, these fantasy type things, that you can’t in real life."

Acquiring items of virtual worth is an especially popular part of games here. Happy Farms is a basic resource management game that allows people to grow and steal crops. It became such a compulsion for some players that employees have been fired and relationships have broken down over it. A Nanjing man named Xiao Ke broke up with his pregnant girlfriend when she failed to manage their online farm.

It’s not just goods like crops that people acquire in Internet games. Psychologist Dr Tao Ran, who runs an Internet addiction camp outside Beijing, last year told The Christian Science Monitor about one patient who had accumulated 68 virtual husbands.

Most people in China, of course, don’t have such compulsive attitudes to games. Yet Jon Niermann, President of EA Asia, says, “I think that the assets you get in the virtual world is very appealing here.”

 “There’s a certain escapism [in having] an altered personality that’s able to accumulate things and do things, these fantasy type things, that you can’t in real life. This is where the money’s made on these games too, right, because you’ve got the free download and then everything’s item sales.”

“You level up and you buy – for us in a FIFA game, if you want to run faster you buy particular shoes, if you want more stamina you buy a particular sports drink, and it helps you beat your competition and enables you to be more competitive. I think there’s a status component in the real world, and people like to win.”