In China, 'Fortnite' Penalizes Minors for Playing Too Much
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
By the time we get to an issue you take offense with, there's already going to be a precedent of censorship and restricted activity and you'll be screwed. To be clear, I can't stand microtransaction-packed cash grabs and I don't game at all, but I also don't believe it's the government's place to say how we should be spending out free time.
If a parent demands that a kid eats his veggies instead of the "burgers and ice cream" the kind wants, it's not necessarily suffering.
Or if you still consider it suffering, it's not like all suffering is valid and should be respected.
It's very easy to make everyone happy, giving them whatever they want all the time, doesn't mean its best for them. Not even if they're adults. Not only what someone wants might be bad for them, but what someone wants might also be bad for others (like someone "wanting" to blast his favorite tunes at full volume at 2am). In those cases it's best that they "suffer" not getting what they want.
Nice strawman. Chinese government censorship is not a "trifle".
> a relatively free society (which of course China isn’t)
You said it yourself.
* In the UK and other CW countries the police now come to talk to you about your tweets or even arrest you: https://reason.com/archives/2018/09/15/britain-turns-offensi...
* After gun control in the UK knife crime soared. Now they literally have knife control:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/13/britains-knife-control-b...
* Twitter now bans and deletes for "learn to code".
The reason parents jump on such meassures is that parenting is very hard. Everytime you make or enforce a rule you put some distance between you and your child. And while that's necessary it can be very unpleasant. Personally, we are not permissive at all but we are always glad for when some external circumstances forces what we think is best.
So there is a real danger that parents are tempted to delegate their parenting to the government because it's much easier and also because it absolves them of responsibility. Of course, that is a spectacularly bad idea.
The problem is that it is imposed on players without them having a recourse or the possibility to adapt the mechanism to their own benefit (like parents trying to curtail children's playing time, or if you want to limit your own playing time tonight because tomorrow you have to get up early).
It seems to me like the problem in China isn't that they have laws, it's that they're unilaterally applied by a dictatorship. But this idea seems fine. There's no censorship or restricted activity. Nobody's preventing anyone from playing Fortnite, they're just toning back some of its more addictive qualities after a set time period. It's not a fundamental human right to earn XP in Fortnite.
On the other hand, I expect minors to get creative at circumventing the blocks. "Borrowing" a parent's ID, for example.
I believe this started from World of Warcraft. I remember I was 16 when I started to play World of Warcraft, all kinds of regulation started to appear in this game, for example: needs to register with an adult ID card, adding flesh to skeletons, no longer gaining experience when you play too long for a day etc.
For China itself, I think it's just a typical culture resist, just like pop music in the 70s (It's actually a big deal if you try to listen to Taiwan pop music, but young people just love it).
But like other posts mentioned in this thread, it's far more a problem about how people think, just like Europe could probably do this as well. Parent themselves think kids playing video games is a guilt, much more than the government. It's pretty sarcastic that in China, typically parents spend more time on their smartphone. However back in the day, parents don't have time to play with video games because they have less time to be addicted like kids. So they tried to forcibly control their kid about playing video games without any consideration. There even quite some parents who send their kids to do electroconvulsive therapy, just like the movie "A Clockwork Orange".
I personally think the video game is not a problem. Most adults won't play video games all day long because they have their work to do, but kids in school just have to deal with senseless homework, without seeing any points of doing it. When I look back, I always think I should fight more with parents and school, and spend more time on things I like, homework is not cost effective anyway.
I strongly believe the society should fix all other things instead of fixing kids. The problem is, fixing kids just seems too easy than those hard ways.
[1] About electroconvulsive therapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin [2] A good movie about typical Chinese parenting: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3401962/
While the state taking away parents control over their children is bad policy when taken too far, IMHO it doesnt infringe on their rights. That would imply that one could have the right to control another person, which is not a thought Im comfortable with.
Parents absolutely have the right and even the duty to raise their children, a lot of which entails telling them what to do and when. If not even the parents have that right then the state, being a group of people, has even less of a right.
In most modern societies, we agree that children have limitations on the "people should be free to live their lives as they want" mindset. Otherwise, we'd be letting four year olds subsist solely on candy, hot dogs, and twenty hours a day of the Best of Elsagate.
We've traditionally trusted the compromise for that to parents. But parenting is hard. We're running on a mix of science and lore for a lot of it. Even beyond that, a lot of parents may not follow best practices, despite the best of intentions. Then add the too busy/doesn't care/actually incompetent parents.
The state has an enormous vested interest in the next generation coming out well-skilled and socially balanced. But they can't put a child development expert into every house in the country 24/7. They've had to trust parents who are spotty at best at their job, because there were limits on how they could intervene.
For the first time, we have wildly popular entertainment products that phone home and do remote work as part of normal operation. This makes a technical intervention possible in a way they couldn't do with prior moral panics (TV, comic books, bawdy novels).
In some ways, this is actually a tame and tolerant way to deal with the fear of gaming abuse. They're not saying adults can't have games, or even that kids can't-- just restricting usage when you reach a level that implies they're sacrificing something else (school, sleep, or family life) to make the hours. I wonder if a future evolution of this would integrate into directly the schools and the social credit concept-- if you can play Fortnite II: Electric Boogaloo 14 hours a day and somehow maintain straight As, it will let you, but bludgeon your character when your grades slip.
I bet in a few generations people would start asking questions like "if it wouldn't be the state, who would raise our children?".
Joking aside, it's not the state's role to raise our children. It's only role should be to make sure the kids are not abused and that's it.
If the kid is old enough, in their teens, they might drain their bank account which was to be used as a college tuition/cost of living fund.
We regulate gambling for good reason. Some of these games, with loot boxes and leveling, manipulate people using known psychologic techniques to make them get that dopamine hit by getting little rewards.
You're missing how industry practices can become manipulative and abusive because they are chasing short term profit for themselves and not long term societal benefits. Regulations come into play to ensure that our society does not suffer due to excessive greed/profit creating manipulative or abusive situations for consumers.
Just because China seems to be willing to regulate to the benefit of their overall society this time in a way that isn't harmful to people's rights (only minors and limited penalty), does not make up for their horrible human rights record and their ongoing abuses.
I say this as an American who was probably a bit too hooked on a few video games as a kid, playing 6-7 hours after school most days on one game in particular through highschool.
An automatic opt in for minors, with an optional ability for parents to opt out their kids, seems like a slightly better way to go if you want parents to have more control over this policy. Behavioral economics says you should allow people to opt out, but by default they should have the policy applied because it takes time and effort to opt in (e.g. opt in vs opt out in policies for organ donation in countries around the world, opt out policy leads to much higher organ donation rates)
What is most highly problematic about this policy is that this system is using the Chinese system of having to identify yourself online and their continued monitoring of you and all your activities, grading them and judging you. It is huge human rights issue in regards to ability to make your thoughts known - political or otherwise. If they implemented it in a way that doesn't use that Chinese social credit system, then I wouldn't have any issue with it.
Why not? "It takes a village to raise a child", they say. The state is the embodiment of communal action.
> It's only role should be to make sure the kids are not abused
Where is the line between abuse (where the state should intervene) and simply neglectful or poor parenting (which can be very damaging)?
It is absolutely a bad thing, even if you think the end result is a benefit - that was my point.
Separately, the laws against gambling are similarly infringing upon basic human rights to free association and free communication/expression.
Secondly, restricting minors from certain acts is very common in most countries because they aren’t old enough to know better.
It is very common in western countries to forbid stores to sell alcohol and tobacco to minors. Would you argue that the store owner’s rights were violated?
Selling alcohol and tobacco aren’t expression, authoring and publishing creative works is. Please do not conflate the two.
All governments restrict certain behaviors: alcohol (dui, public intoication, etc.), drugs(prohibition, prescription only), gambling.
Now, it’s fair to say that doing those, and doing them as much or as long as you like, is an inalienable right-like “expression”-is absolutely a position you can take. But all countries seem to agree that we shouldn’t do certain things, at least not to excess.
It makes me curious whether having the rare festival allowing the activity might make it easier to get everyone not to do it the rest of the year.
But Christmas now is pretty different.
I was born at the wrong time.
If they didn’t protect this in the United States, your iPhone would have an FBI backdoor in it as of the last iOS update. It does not, because there are some people in the US who still believe that the government does not have the right to serve as your product manager or editorial board.
They do it faster and at larger scales than ever before. There is hardly time for even experts to react to what they are seeing unfold, forget governments.
In the past the only thing that did damage this fast was disease. Anything moving "too fast" through a population without anytime to understand the negative effects should be treated the same way we counter viruses or nuclear chain reactions - with control rods and quarantine periods.
If you've been through a public education system you've already received social and cultural values from a government.
This is control by an authoritarian state, not by parents. But you already knew that, didn't you?