China limits under 18s to 3 hours of gaming per week
theguardian.comTo me, oppressive. Whatever their aim is, surely it depends on the game.
Quite sure I learnt a lot from Civilization's tech tree @ 10 years old.
An offline game though of course.
That's less strict than my parents' limits, but I find it really odd that the state is exerting this level of control on what people do with their own* time.
*this may not be a valid assumption
This all makes sense if the people are seen as property of the state
Does anyone more familiar with the matter know if:
- It includes mobile game
- It's actually enforced or just a guideline for parents
- What's the end goal here?
1.5 hours daily sounds very reasonable to me, but 3 hours weekly is so little it doesn't really strike me as reasonable. Although to be clear the state telling it's citizen how much video game time they get sounds very distopian to me.
It's all gaming platforms.
It will try to be enforced, through their social id (everybody in China has one, and it's already used for payments, and logins). There will be workarounds, at least for some platforms.
For instance nobody can stop you playing old games, games you bought on gog etc.
But I do expect bigger publishers like Xbox, PS, Steam, Epic to support this if they want to remain in China market.
I think 1.5 hr a day is a bit much. My kid gets 5hr a week of online games max, as long he has done his chores, but no more than 2hr in any single day.
On occasion we play some games (like Civilization or Xcom, or some old adventures) together and that doesn't count towards limit.
And I agree that it sounds distopian, but I wish western countries would recommend (recommend and not force being the operative word, and make sure all platforms have options to set this up), limiting online everything to children.
> Previously, China limited the total length of time minors could access online games to three hours on holiday or 1.5 hours on other days.
Does anyone know how well the previous limit was enforced/how easy it was to evade?
And a whole generation suddenly has reason to resent their government more than their parents.
Prohibition didn't work out well elsewhere. I see a new underground
I can't imagine anything more harmful to minors than being exposed to even more communist propaganda, which is what this new restrictions aims to do.