China’s Minor Gaming Ban Isn’t Just Excessive, It’s Out Of Touch

Last week, China announced they’d be implementing new measures, limiting children’s gaming time to 1 hour a day on weekends, or three hours a week.

This largely fits with the Chinese government’s ongoing framing- that gaming was a social ill, one that minors needed to be protected from, lest they grow up to become Fortnite streamers or something.

They’re not entirely wrong- there’s a lot to worry about with unregulated gaming. It feels like every month there’s a story about a kid who either damaged their health by going too hard on a game, or worse- spent all their parents money because of insufficient supervision around in-game transactions.

But is going full on government regulation the way to go? We spoke to people about this.

Letting Parents Be Parents

Steven Wong from ASUS, a parent and gamer, also brought up another issue- a 7 year old playing Roblox and a 17 year old playing Bravely Default are very different gamers, so subjecting them to the same rules would be a problem. Instead, Steven says we should be letting parents limit the hours.

“I think the game time / date restriction should be decided /fall on the hands and responsibilities on the parents instead”, he says. “Its the parents whom should be controlling their children’s game time instead”.

He also brought up another issue, which was with the hours themselves:

“An hour on weekdays sounds good to me instead, weekends probably, parents need to loosen up a little on the game hours”, he says. “Pretty much subject to the age group though”.

Considering gaming is much more than just Honor of Kings, the three-hour-a-week limit seems asinine- Yakuza: Like A Dragon literally doesn’t start until the 4-hour mark, with an entire Chinese gaming week dedicated to just walking around Kamurocho on New Year’s Eve and the other such events at the start of the game.

There’s also the problem with more live service-type games: these games practically punish you for not logging in every chance you get, so an hour a day for three days is going to have cascading effects. Gacha games with limited banners like Genshin Impact practically feed off of FOMO, so don’t be surprised at an uptick in unhappy children, only having 9 hours over 3 weeks total to farm for Raiden Shogun.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we need a government commission to look into the average healthy gaming session per genre. Instead, Steven’s solution is simple: Just let parents parent.

“It would be ridiculous if their govt is to full take control on this, it’s a personal thing after all. And I wonder how will the implementation will be. Perhaps collaborating with the network, ISP providers or even game publishers (servers) to implement a cut-off system once the time to game has ended?”, he ponders.

Of course, ultimately he stressed that it should just be a parental decision, rather than a government one. He also expressed support for South Korea’s method, where parents can set the hours for gaming

“Just get parental control / permission when kids sign up for something like an online game”, he says.

That being said, he also acknowledged that such a feat would be difficult, as you’d have to balance the wants and needs of both parents and kids.

When asked about setting limits based on genres, he says it should be done in “a subtle manner”.

“Not too obvious, else young gen kids will bising (make noise) about it”, he says. “Hard to strike a balance between kids and parents though”, he says.

From The Perspective Of A Former Curfew Kid

Of course, gaming has been around long enough that China’s rules almost seem too familiar. For a lot of us the only difference between China’s new laws and the ones we grew up is is who’s doing the curfew.

Kashif, one such curfew kid, says he grew up in a similar environment.

“Growing up, I could only play on weekends, never on weekdays, and only after all my homework is done, after they checked my bag”, Kashif says. “and i always needed to do work from 9am to 12.30pm every weekend”

And that kind of gets in to the crux of people’s reactions to this- ultimately, a laughably strict curfew is nothing new. Many former kids were used to their gaming habits being scapegoated as the root of all evil, the only difference now is the person implementing it’s access to military force.

So Where Do We Go From Here

Gaming, at its core, is a good industry. Its given a huge boom for creatives- with art and design skills more in demand now than ever. That being said, there is also a need to mention that not all games are equal, and some action needs to be done about games that target vulnerable groups, especially if it’s bad enough to get the word addiction involved.

The idea to ban kids from playing video games isn’t new- like I said, anyone who grew up in the early 2000s is familiar with the concept, even those of us who had to walk half a kilometer just to get to a cybercafe if we wanted to game. The point of outrage here is that it’s a government doing the banning, not a concerned parent or even a school.

I think one thing a lot of parties failed to consider is the children’s agency- that is to say, no child ever really just sucks up a ban and takes the L. Just like how kids would sneak out of school to go to cybercafes (and bring a spare change of clothes when uniform-wearers were banned), these kinds of policies need to take into account what kids would do to get around it.

For one, all a parent would need to do to be the cool parent is simply let their child use the parents’ account instead, instantly skirting any curfew. That’s like, the best case scenario of rule-breaking.

On the slightly more dangerous end, they could secretly log in to said account, which would also mean accessing any payment options. Unless the kid were hopelessly hooked on something like FIFA or Fortnite and willing to blow money on it, this is still not the worst outcome.

A hypothetical worst outcome instead would be children reaching out to strangers instead, potentially putting themselves at risk. For as great social media is all it would take is one unfortunate algorithmic line-up and kids desperately looking for a way to play their games would be right in the crosshairs of someone who could appear as a savior to them.

Weigh that against the risk of, what, bad exam grades? and the fact that parents have no input on this suddenly feels super disproportionate.

Should kids be allowed to do all-nighters? Hell no. But a more measured response should definitely be considered.