Yet another hint that gaming is entering the mainstream – worldwide. My fiancee fell in love with Shanghai on her business trip out there, and watches a couple of blogs from the area. That’s where she saw this interesting tidbit.

Chao Ji Nu Sheng (”Super Voice Girls”) is the Chinese version of American Idol. Certainly nothing wrong with that, other than the blight which is Reality TV now having invaded all cultures except perhaps the African Bushman. And you have to give the Chinese credit for getting rid of the annoying guys and just putting cute Asian women on stage – it would be interesting to compare their demographics to ours, where AI is, at least anecdotally, a show that appeals to women and teen girls. But this is the part that caught the eye of my fiancee:

In order to understand the program better, there are…terms you need to know:

PK: Player kill, the term used by China’s online game players to mean games where you kill the other players. PK has been used on Super Voice Girls to refer to the knockout part of the show: after a round of singing, the competitor who gets the fewest SMS votes and another one who judges decide has made too many mistakes are sent to the PK Stage (PK台); one is eliminated in a one-to-one competition. In last Friday’s semi-final, Ji Minjia and He Jia were kicked out after two rounds of PK.

That, combined with the fact that the government felt they had to get personally involved protecting minors against the PK might tell you how pervasive that play style is over there. Still, are we far from a world where we hear Simon Cowell describe a double elimination round of AI as a ‘gankfest’?