Gamers make terrible credit decisions. This headline sponsored by oppression.

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Being in the West, you may not have a lot of experience with Alibaba or Tencent. Think of Alibaba as China’s Amazon.com, and Tencent as China’s Facebook. That should give you an idea of how big the companies are in the world markets. Alibaba and Tencent rolled out a consumer credit scoring system earlier in the year that takes social and political interactions into account along with your spending habits. Not only do your actions effect your ability to borrow money, but the people in your social network influence your rating as well. The theory being that if you hang out with a bunch of risky people, your risk as a debtor likely increases. People weren’t jazzed, but they accepted it as the price of doing business with Alibaba. That’s changing. China’s government announced a plan to adopt this system for the whole country by 2020. Beyond the social pressure aspect of the system, critics are finding fault with some of the actions that lower a person’s score.

Gamer? Strike. Bad-mouthed the government in comments on social media? Strike. Even if you don’t buy video games and you don’t post political comments online “without prior permission,” but any of your online friends do…strike.

Sorry, gamers. You’re typically too busy grinding levels or unlocking doodads to be considered a safe credit risk. And don’t get me started on how much you spend on DLC and microtransaction boosts.

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