China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356141&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356141&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356141&p=4
Comments like this will eventually go away...sorry for the annoyance.
Younger me learned a lot of problem solving skills and most importantly spent a lot of time learning how to read by playing RPGs and games that required lots of reading. My reading skills would not have been as advanced if i wasn't playing text heavy games that had a lot of plot like Square Enix games and the CRPGs of the time.
Modern games though are clearly designed to get you as addicted as possible and to play as long as possible to an extent that made the old school 90s RPGs grinds look tame and mild. (the grinds in those games basically existing to make sure you had to play long enough to not be able to return it to the store or beat it via rental)
Modern UX of games is designed so that you dont have to really read or understand the game mechanics even to be able to play and get into that feedback loop. To the point where when a game comes along like Dark Souls that asks you to learn the game systems to beat it, gamers go gah gah over "how hard" it is.
My friend group played Valheim a few months ago and it was spectacular (for the weekend anyways). It's a great game to lose your self in the environments and doesn't have any IAP rubbish.
Getting resources feels pretty grindy, and the abilities and leveling system feel lackluster to me.
Unless the genre is grindy, micro-payment games in which case... Consider not playing them.
It's just like real life. You aren't supposed to be the hero. You aren't supposed to have all the best everything and a million platinum.
You're just another cog moving through the world, easily replaceable. That's how it was designed. The problem is that, strangely, in a game, people can't accept that, so they'll spend 18 hours a day playing, but for some reason won't spend 18 hours a day working, even when spending 18 hours a day working at something clearly - undeniably - yields better results than playing a game.
That's on you. There are tons of amazing new video games with a good plot and a great gameplay. I'm not a huge gamer myself but the last one I did that checks those boxes was Horizon Zero Dawn.
> The notice also states that companies must strictly implement the real-name registration and login system in their games and not provide access to video games for those who are unregistered.
But nothing clarifying if they have drawn any distinction between online games that require a persistent connection to servers to function and “offline” games that are stand alone single player experiences with no online connectivity required.
Specifically,
> Online game providers can only offer one-hour services to minors from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, as well as on official holidays, according to the document made public on Monday.
> [...]
> The official said that parents and minors can decide on by themselves how long the children will play other games that are conducive to minors' growth, except online games.
Now I dont have time for anything and reflecting at that void space - it was filled with garbage - like running pokemon yellow 7 times in a row.
I remember I'd ask them if they wanted to study, or if they want to go hiking or do something IRL, but they'd always refuse and prefer to play some MMO and get high level loot there. Personally, the people I used to play some MMOs with were huge into merchanting and controlling the in-game economies, and I think there's a different complexity involved in running spreadsheets and following trends vs following what an addon tells you to press next. These guys were much older than me, and they taught me a lot about basic economics. Most games are designed to have people keep playing an endless grind, but purely focusing on in-game money and controlling the economy was not something the games would have designed by default.
I think by default, most young people would benefit (esp mental health wise) by having their video game usage cut down. As I grow older, it is insane how cigarettes or gambling aren't the only addictive things. Kids are exposed to it from a young age by trading their time for something meaningless. And I'd argue that people like you and me who feel they learned problem solving or how economies work (through gaming as kids) are quite rare.
A value-test I use is: “how useful/feasible is this activity if I don’t have a computer or similar technology that is predicated on significant infrastructure?”
Telling stories, playing physical games, making music (with our bodies, at least; humming, whistling, drumming, singing); these are elegant, as in = depth / complexity (per James Portnoy of Extra Credits, RE games).
That would discount most hugely important activities like, say, medicine. In general, I don't think testing against dependency on modern infrastructure is useful, except when you're preparing for a post-apocalyptic world.
Edit when I was about 12 I started playing the guitar non stop, I remember clearly thinking to myself this is way better than playing the super nes. I didn't touch games for another five years, I gave Goldeneye a go at a friend's house and reignighted that addiction.
That is really the main gist of it, women don't care much about video gaming and therefore society condemns it.
Men on the other hand will probably be way more excited about your skills and endeavours in a video game than your ability to play piano, you can listen to the best pianists in the world at any time but sharing stories and thoughts about games is something you need friends for. Evidence: There are tons of discussions about games and gaming everywhere, in youtube channels, outside classrooms etc, while basically nobody talks about how piano practice went. Piano is good to show that you are fit and attract a mate, it isn't good to make friends. And therefore piano is seen as a noble hobby while gaming is seen as a waste of time.
Even listening to music is seen as better than gaming, so the mastery or creative or productive aspects has nothing to do with it.
You're comparing achieving a goal to working towards it. It will take roughly three to four years to reach master's league on StarCraft for even talented people. Meanwhile, almost everyone can play the piano or the guitar well enough to impress laypeople after 2 years of lesser daily effort.
I don't see this. Lots of kids were forced to learn an instrument but I don't know many who plays an instrument well enough that anyone would want to listen to them. Sure people get a bit impressed that you can play anything at all, but it isn't like they find it enjoyable to listen to it.
> Getting into master's league on StarCraft is only impressive to people who play StarCraft
This isn't true, most gamers who are loosely aware of what StarCraft is would be very impressed. Like people read articles about starcraft pros and talked about how impressive/insane those were without ever playing the game. Being really good at any game at all will impress a lot of people and especially so for the more famous ones.
But of course they would just be impressed and end it at that. Similarly being able to play piano really well would just impress people, very few actually wants to listen to piano music as an activity. Piano might impress a few more, but I doubt it would make you more friends and conversations than being good at Starcraft, at least among young men. And if we instead take some more popular game today like Fortnite then 100% being good at Fortnite will be way more important for your male social life than being good at an instrument.
It's not true that few people want to listen to someone's music as an activity. Just go to most parties where someone can play the guitar or piano well and if there is such an instrument you'll see people play them. Happens very often in my friend groups.
https://everythreeweekly.com/2013/12/that-guy-who-brings-aco...
Another example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/76k1c0/guy_th...
To me it doesn't look like people appreciate them, at least not the men.
I'm sure some people try to force it and it gets annoying. Humans love being musical in groups though and always have.
> This isn't true, most gamers who are loosely aware of what StarCraft is would be very impressed.
"most gamers".
Q. E. D.
I think the difference is that a video-game is (as you said and viewed by me at least) as mostly consumptive rather than creative or constructive. I'm playing a game I know I'm dicking around and wasting time, the same as if I'm watching a movie or (even) reading a book for fun.
I'd say that some games are more constructive, like Minecraft or other games where you're building something or creating a story yourself... but I think what's being targeted is largely RNG lootbox online grind games. There's also an argument that top tier professional gaming isn't really that much different than being good at some other sport... and that's kind of an unfortunate side-effect.
The title is a bit misleading as there's no provision for 'offline' games.
Culturally for me... regulating media time seems like a parent's responsibility, and maybe this does give parents the tools to do that as the child could use their parent's account with their permission fairly easily.
I'd be against a similar thing where I live, but as I am not a Chinese citizen nor do I plan on living there, I can't say my opinion is worth much.
However, I think people are making this out to be much worse than it is as there's (for a long time) been a provision that children under a certain age can't sign up for online accounts (in the US) without a parent's explicit permission (with the implication that that the parent takes responsibility for monitoring the child's activity). This makes that implication more explicit as the child must use the parent's account most of the time.
This is one way of solving the 'online games have predatory practices against children / teens,' I don't think this is how I'd solve it, but again, not really my business.
For children, it’s common to participate in sports for way more than 3 hours a week, and yet the government does not feel inclined to involve itself there.
Allowing leisure time to be dictated by the government is not a good path to go down.
No matter the health benefits, allowing people to go down a suboptimal path that makes them happier is the essence of a free society.
The exception are games like Minecraft. But if someone builds a computer in Minecraft or finishes a beautiful build that can actually be captivating to people that don't play it.
It could be argued the primary goal of playing games is to make an experience that feels good.
Based on the popularity of let's play videos and streamers I suspect the legitimacy of both activities will converge.
If you spend tons of time learning an instrument, you will probably find yourself interesting in creating music. Maybe it's not going to be playing in a band, or recording albums. It might just be playing music around the campfire. But that is an activity in which you are producing something, bringing music into the world. I feel the same about any of "the arts". You're inherently going to be engaged in the act of creating something.
With gaming, consumption is more the rule. You play a level, a campaign, a story. If you create something, bring something new into the world, it is most likely going to be external to the game (like the posters who mention that they built websites and utils for their favorite games).
There are obviously exceptions on both sides. Games like Minecraft, Factorio, etc are obviously creative. Games like Roblox or Mario Maker allow people to create content and put it into the game. Game review videos, Twitch streaming, etc, allow people to build content with games at the center. These are creative/productive pursuits, and I think they have some inherent value (even if it's kind of a bummer that these creations are largely limited to being enjoyed within the game).
As an exception on the musical side, you could, for example, learn guitar exclusively through Rocksmith, and only ever use your guitar as a controller for a game.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using your free time to do "consumptive" stuff. I enjoy gaming here and there. I listen to music. I watch TV. But for me personally, I find that I get a lot more satisfaction out of "creative" activities.
One last point - you get good at what you spend your time doing. I tend to really enjoy games that ask a lot of skill from their players - roguelikes, tight platformers, Souls games, Doom on nightmare mode, etc. But when I finish a game, I no longer have any use for the skills I developed. Whereas skills I develop in the pursuit of something creative/productive can be used in all kinds of situations for the rest of my life.
Edit: I started rambling and forgot the point. With all of this said - I would never want the government to limit how I spend my time. That's a job for parents when you're young, and it's a job for your own sense of what makes you happy when you're an adult. These kinds of lessons aren't things that can be downloaded into you from outside. Realizations about what makes a person fulfilled tend, in my experience, to come from within.
Either way though, I agree that _watching_ sports TV is firmly in the "consumption" category.
I learned about contracts and hiring people when I was a 9 year old running a lobster fishing company with contractors haha.
With the right game there is so much opportunity for growth in transferrable skills. It would have been hard to motivate myself to learn about databases, creating backend services, using SSO for login, rate limits when you're trying to scrape mass amounts of data, validating inputs to guard against bad actors, reading api docs, etc all to help make more in-game currency by exploiting inefficiencies in the world market to make profits from trading or creating internal tools. I learned about chain of command, opsec, and dealing with HR within my "guild."
Minecraft also helped to that regard with creating mods & server plugins for friends.
Sadly I think these opportunities are decreasing with the shift to mobile gaming. How are you supposed to mod a mobile game? How are you supposed to open the game's jar file and overwrite some files when you can't modify the download from the iOS store? How are you supposed to play with spreadsheets on an ipad?
I can see how my unhealthy 8-9hr/day addiction during my teens could have turned out terrible if I was born in this current generation. Thankfully it built a good foundation for a career.
I don't get kids these days with being able to play mindless mobile games. The closest thing to a game I have on my phone to a game is AnkiDroid (spaced repetition notecard software).
I love gaming but I saw what early MMOs did and it freaked me out so bad I never touched WOW, but did play others such as Guild Wars, POE and such.
I had such fun with early MUDs and couldn't wait until real-time MP gaming was possible. When it got here it was immediately defied. Man Diablo 2 was so much fun, and I made so much money, I wish my kids could experience that, instead of games being shitty and costing exorbitant amounts.
Now it's all just a cash grab/casino/skinner box/insert evil
Ironically, depression is often caused by other underlying disorders (e.g. Autism), yet if the symptoms are met there will be a comorbid diagnosis, rather than saying that depression is just a symptom. It can be difficult to disentangle cause and effect for a lot of comorbid diagnoses, and also many existing treatments address symptoms rather than causes. So the distinction you are making hardly exists in the field at large (at this time).
As for the deeper question, "could an otherwise healthy person develop gaming addiction?", I'm inclined to answer yes. It of course depends on how you define "otherwise healthy", as I'm sure we could identify genetic risk factors for gaming addiction, and I bet they will correlate with risk factors for addiction, ADHD, etc. However I've certainly seen people who were functioning well but perhaps a bit bored at school/work or a bit anxious in social situations take a complete nose dive when they got hooked on the "right" game.
I'm curious if you would say the same thing about gambling addiction?
Edit: just to add I am 100% against anything like what China is doing. I think we need more resources to help those who are spending more time gaming than they would like, which involves recognizing it as a legitimate issue. I also wouldn't mind some restrictions on the tactics game companies can take to make their games addictive, although the details of that would require careful consideration.
It’s better to refer to hiking, etc as AFK.
Credentials: I grew up on 40+ hours a week of video games. I’ve played more than a year worth of screen time in World of Warcraft, I’ve gotten a Bachelors of Computer Engineering, and worked at Amazon for 8 years.
Meanwhile, I’ll tell you first hand, playing WoW from 16 to 19 prepared me more for being successful and getting promoted at Amazon than my 4 years of university.
I’m just letting the grand parent know that to get their point across better they need to realize MMOs specifically should be considered IRL and it’s better to use “AFK” or “non-digital” to differentiate in person interactions rather than “IRL”.
Specifically in the grand parent’s post, they ”blame” MMOs and gaming-abuse for their friends “issues”. However, it’s a more apt analogy to view over use of MMOs as a form of workaholism than to view it as a form of drug-addiction. It’ll help you to get them to find a balance.
And similarly I advocate a similar vocabulary switch from “IRL” to “AFK” to differentiate Zoom/FaceTime vs non-Zoom/FaceTime activities.
I would be completely oky with my kid binging on the latest Mario or Mario Kart. I would love to see them playing an RPG.
I dont want them playing Fortnite and other skinner box style games. They have teams designed to addict kids.
This probably sounds silly but i would be ok with a kid being "addicted" to something because its fun and enjoyable. But being addicted because a team of scientists designed it be maximally dopamine inducing doesnt seem ok to me. Maybe there is no difference at the end of the day.
But it feels like the kind of games that Nintendo puts out and the kind of games that EA puts out are VERY different.
I wish this wasn’t the case, but fighting a network effect is hard as a parent.
I wish this were true for me and GTA V. My friend and I really tried to do something in GTA V Online together this weekend with little to no success. I felt really stupid by not being able to play any mission together
We must not convince the law makers that video games can be beneficial. That puts the wrong emphasis on the conversation.
The emphasis must be, you have no jurisdiction when it comes to raising children. Your laws are invalid. Even if video games are detrimental, you do not decide what is the best interest for a child, the parents do.
Like you say, what is considered a parenting decision? Reasonable people can have a discussion about this.
But I'm shocked how many people seem to think A) the government actually should make parenting decisions, and B) that things like banning child abuse is an example of the government making a parenting decision.
Neither of these things are reasonable, and so the discussion about what qualifies as a parenting decision will also be unreasonable.
Although I have no doubt someone will show up and say that should be left up to parents too.
Even the US already does far more than that, like making alcohol illegal for minors.
Saying that video games is outside the jurisdiction of the government is NOT saying there needs to be no guard rails.
Further more, yes. There are a lot of bad parents. The people who would be installed as the benevolent parental decision makers for society would be the worst of all.
Providing lunch at something the child is required to be at by law is not a parenting decision.
Requiring annual physicals is not a parenting decision, nor a health care decision. However, requiring a specific treatment is both.
Alcohol consumption is a grey area, and a cultural choice the country has made. Why not make the driving age 14? 18? It's a question of maturity. But this is a poor comparison. While alcohol has an objective measure of physical harm (ie: LD50, a measurable and detrimental effect on developing minds), video games do not.
Listing these as examples is not a justification for the government deciding for a parent how much time their child can spend on video games.
And for disclosure, I think a time limit is a much needed societal thing. But the government must not be the one to make that decision.
That's the issue.
And if a parent really feels their kids deserve more video game time, they can always lend their own account to their kids, which would disable the mechanism, that simple.
The government can ask video game industry to provide enforcement mechanisms in the form of parental controls, which incidentally are quite widely adopted by most tech companies without government intervention in the West.
The timeframe when a parents have a say in children's activity is already limited by compulsory k-12 schooling. What's the difference?
The difference is there is a long tail of activities that a family might be engaged in during non-school hours, especially a weekend evening. This is something a government can't possibly fathom or account for in an overarching policy.
If a person chooses to have a child, they should be deemed to have enough agency to determine what's good for them.
If a State wants to be the nanny, why stop at video games? Why not prescribe precise caloric intake, meal times, study times, sleep times, extracurriculars, and more? Just an illustration of how absurd this policy is.
But in my opinion they should have just disabled this business model completely. It seems like they want to limit the inflow of cash but not by a lot.
I don't want to start an argument on the effect and difference of fiction books / tv to games. You point is effectively that those choices may be arbitrary, however games are much more addictive than those that you've mentioned. Realistically, I've seen kids play too much games whose grades dropped like hell, but few watching too much TV, much less reading too much novel. Games can be addictive and difficult to maintain, while the same can hardly be said to TV and novels.
I agree that government-mandated limit would be too much, and less preferrable than a government-mandated system that allows parent to set the limit. You would effectively be requiring game companies to acquire and collect information on the parents of the child playing the game.
I expect a government-mandated default unless with explicit written approval from parents which would seems still rather easy to circumvent for the lack of better ways.
Current technology means statements like this are not necessarily true (these are all referring to the same story, Chinese language link last):
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/08/tencent_facial_recogn...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/video-game-facia...
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Cr17TKWQ3XcuNzDw085OLw
> the new feature sees the company check accounts registered in adults’ names if
> they are playing games between 10:00PM and 8:00AM. The company will then run a
> facial recognition test and, if it identifies someone who is not the account
> holder, they’ll be booted offline. “Anyone who refuses or fails face
> verification will be treated as a minor,” according to a machine translation of
> Tencent’s QQ post.UK lets children drink.
It's not quite a "free for all", but anyway, I doubt it relates to the issue at hand.
Other countries don't have rules or don't enforce it, but the UK certainly does.
Source: I was an italian teen used to buy wine for my grandpa, but I could not get a beer at the supermarket in the UK.
There are a lot of games that fall into grey areas, possibly accidentally, and those are harder to deal with. Loot boxes and mmos are so obviously gambling that I don’t even know what to say
State mandating how much time someone should spend doing a particular activity is a totally different topic.
Even though I agree with the overall intention of this rule/law I vehemently oppose a state imposing such restrictions.
What makes that legally impossible in China? (edit or do you just mean hard to enforce? I thought you meant something different by "legally impossible", I may have misunderstood).
Kids can be sued for damages to others which ultimately their parents/guardians would be required to pay which doesn't exist in this case.
This is similar to how age restriction for alcohol is enforced in the US, interestingly, age restriction on alcohol consumption wasn't enforced in China, though made into law.
Look it's clear it's not their fault the parents are so busy and exhausted by the rat race they cant handle properly their only child they made under family pressure. The gov regulates the consequence of years of inaction while trying to fix the root cause maybe.
I live in China, I m happy kids waste their intelligence and tuition fee on addictive lootboxes game, but mine, ill be way more strict than the government. No way he gets exposed to this kind of shit. Whatever it takes.
My parents threw the computer out when they saw me at 12 playing (addictive for the time but nowhere near what they have now) online games, which forced me to read because nothing else, well if that s what it takes, that s what it takes.
However, I think that the state imposing these restrictions is vastly superior to having parents impose the same restrictions. The amount of time a kid is allowed to play games should not be related to what family they happen to be part of or which parents they happen to have.
I’m not alone in this relationship with games, nor am I necessarily representative in my experiences. I’m sharing as a caution to others for whom videogames are all-consuming.
Healthier alternatives that scratch the itch for me are co-op games that aren’t great solo (I only play with close friends now, as a way to keep in touch and work together), tabletop RPGs like Mouse Guard, and physically exploring outside, as I’m thoroughly an Explorer on Bartle’s chart[0]. Also reading/listening to stories, playing music (another form of story that isn’t so far removed from our physical existence as videogames are), playing physical games/sports, drawing/painting (but not in Skyrim, etc :), and gardening, etc. I won’t bar my child from videogames, because they can backfire. Instead I’ll try to model healthy use of the pass-time as a brief mental gear-switch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
Games could do this as well as books. (And certainly not every book does it much). Occasionally games do. Mostly not.
It’s a hard work to maintain work/life balance while at the same time be a model for your children.
It takes A LOT of discipline and we all know how much discipline most ppl have..
The problem here is not the parent, its the work demanding 40+ hours per week and a society that means both parents have to work.
What will the games that exist to be so awesome that if you get to play only an hour a day that want you to come back again look like? Will they make sure that hour is highly enjoyable and engaging instead of grindy? Is that a more sustainable model for game devs?
At least its a change from the current skinner boxes....
Maybe it will just be stronger skinner boxes. "Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion!" or "Get X Bonus if you log in tommorow!" is probably what will happen....
Videogames should be social events. Not solitary escapes that cause people to become schizoids.
These hypothetical children have spent all day socializing at school- if that gets "destroyed" by a few hours of being left to their own devices, better stop them from reading and playing with Legos alone in their rooms too. Claiming video games ruin social skills because playing them is an activity performed alone is utter nonsense.
On one hand you can learn pretty much anything academic just by sitting in front of one. Quantum physics, history of Rome, food chemistry, and so on. Use it right, and you can really have access to a huge amount of knowledge that I never could as a child.
On the other hand, it is the biggest addiction danger in the house. It's legal for you to invite corporations into your home to try to persuade you to sit and grind away at some game, forever. You can waste your whole life in the comfort of your own Skinner box. All your opportunities to go and socialize with real people, out in society, you can just skip. What to exercise? Meh. Want a nice meal with family? Meh. Want to look at nature? LOL no.
Anecdote:
A friend of mine was playing very heavily for some time, maybe a couple of times a week. He goes into a café, sits down next to another fellow, who'd been there far longer: "oh hey man, I've been here for two days. My boss will get pissed off if I don't show up to work tomorrow. But Everquest..."
My buddy comes in two nights later, guy is in the same seat playing EverQuest. "Shit man, I got fired. He called me and told me. Anyway I gotta level up." At that point my friend got quite scared of the power of this stuff. Me as well, nearly 20 years later.
To cap it off, the dude's job was to be the attendant at another computer café. Yes. He could have just sat his ass at work and gotten paid for it, but somehow he'd lost his job by sitting at a different café and not finding the motivation to stop.
I was lucky. I am certain there are people way more obsessive than me.
I try to tell my extended family this but I can tell that they choose not to listen. Games are no longer what they were growing up and you have to make sure your kid isn't playing a glorified slot machine. I plan to build a machine and only install certain games on there for the kids to avoid this very trap.
Parents today just don't understand how pernicious these companies have become. They used to include a hot girl in each game to keep you interested and prevent you from feeling bored. Sure it was lazy but that's all it was, lazy. Now, you have games like Genshin Impact that have weaponized sexuality to the point where people are pumping hundreds of dollars to see more sexuality in the game. Hearthstone's card packs function identically to Skinner boxes. League of Legends teases you with the prospect of going pro in gaming despite players have a higher chance to make it to the NFL than make it going pro in LoL.
You can't mix people with a hardcore attitude with people with a casual attitude. It'll result in disaster every single time, without fail, in any endeavor, ever. It never works, no matter what, and no one is going to be able to make it work. You have to separate them.
What's worse, the ban system for League of Legends favors shitty people over the people who actually want to do well. Someone can intentionally troll, die 29 times in a game, have 0 kills, 0 assists, and nothing happens. When the other four players try to win, but get frustrated at this single shitbag, and then say something, they get banned... instead of the obviously troller catching an instant permanent ban to teach them a lesson.
1) On average, ranked players play at a skill level consistent with their rating. In other words, even if they have the skills to play better but don't, their rating should reflect this--on average.
2) For each individual game, there can be some variance in individual performance. Sometimes matchups are lopsided, and sometimes mistakes are made. Sometimes you're on the team that benefits, and sometimes you're not.
3) Trends are more useful than individual games. "Did I do better in the last game than the previous one?" is not always a useful question, so I'd rather ask "Did I do better in the last 10 games than the previous 10?" This follows from 1) and 2).
4) Morale affects the game, and my actions can affect morale. It's really easy and tempting to call out gameplay mistakes, but I think that only serves to hurt morale. If I still wanted to win the game, making my team feel bad hurts my chances. If I prefer to surrender, there are better ways to convince people.
So yeah, the reason I wrote this is because I've definitely had my share of upsetting losses, but I found that shifting my mindset helped me deal with it better.
I don't. If this were to be proposed in America I would view it as extreme government over-reach.
It is an extreme government overreach, whether in the US or China. It's an abuse of human rights. China is about one step away from treading into classic Mao Communist cultural attack mode.
The interesting thing about pursuing so much control, is that more control requires ever more control, it's a negative spiral. More oppression requires ever greater oppression to keep the system from rupturing.
Anyone championing this as borderline acceptable, those people have little terrifying monsters inside, little psycho dictators, yearning to violently oppress and control people. Societies are always filled with these little monsters running around trying to violently control people, they always have to be pushed back against.
In China's case, Xi is pursuing a new cultural revolution, as he sees fit to implement. One thing after another is being taken out, targeted.
They took out all traces of freedom of speech, years ago. They isolated the people with the great firewall, to restrict foreign influence, control domestic influences, and keep the people contained. They installed aggressive censors at all tech and media companies. They eliminated all independent news and media. They've further cracked down on all religion, religious expression, religious worship. They banished nearly all foreign reporting from the country. They banished all joke apps. They banished all gay culture. They're culturally cleansing the Muslim Uyghur regions. They implemented the social credit scoring system. They've entirely taken over Hong Kong and are proceding with wiping out its formerly independent culture. They've installed direct party control over all major private corporations, tech or otherwise. They've neutered all of their most prominent business persons, one after another. They've purged, vanished numerous prominent celebrities. They're in the process of banning all negative discussions of anything economic/financial. They're initiating an effort to prevent any consequential companies from publicly listing stock overseas, looking to increase economic control and reduce foreign influence. They're wiping out private education (classic cultural revolution move on education). They're about to flip to a digital currency, to further increase the ease and application of economic controls over individuals. This is the short list of what they've done since Xi took power, and they're only just getting warmed up.
It's a science fiction nightmare, set to become real. This gaming restriction is just one little drop in the ocean of what they're doing broadly, it's all moving in concert.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh... https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...
This comic sort of represents those childhood sentiments experienced today:
Please, PLEASE, please let's not derail this thread to "Dark Souls players are the REAL skilled players and the rest of you all are crybabies" or something? I get PTSD reading any DS player's "opinion" these days.
DS doesn't require skill. DS is brutal and semi-random on purpose so you sink the maximum amount of time to beat it. Not much skill is required there. You have to invest the time to learn the moves and their patterns. After that happens beating the boss in question just requires you to be in non-vegetative state.
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On topic: I too am with mixed feelings over this news but if this is going to stop the hyper-predatory mobile game companies from almost literally turning young people into zombies then I support the decision.
I worry what happens when inevitably they start saying "but CS:GO, Quake Champions and Deep Rock Galactic are addictive as well and we will prohibit them too!" but... we can't have it all at the same time, I suppose. :|
Really can't find a good balanced solution out of this jam. Can you?
There are tons of modern games (arguably the majority when you consider the size of the market) that are not skinner boxes.
If all you're looking at is AAA games and mobile crap, then sure. But there's more to games than that stuff.
The de-facto example of this nowadays is World of a Warcraft.
For those unaware, WoW charges you $15 per month play, as well as $60 every two years for the latest expansion.
This has resulted in a company that designs every last detail to be completed at the pace they determine to be correct, with a “story cliffhanger” at the end of each patch.
An applicable quote from one of the largest WoW content creators goes along the lines of “WoW used to be a game that made you want to waste your time. Now it’s a game that simply waste your time.”
If you can somehow get your hands on an SNES and FF6 cart, or (more likely) figure out how to get an emulator and ROM to your computer, no one will be the wiser. So, if anything, this will be a boon to older console games.
You do realize the term "quarter muncher" isn't a modern one right? We had plenty of those types meth-level-addiction games back in the early days of gaming too.
Of course, after a few requests a year and a bit ago, my wife had to give him an ultimatum: "I'm not going to come over here every time there's words. If you want to play this game, you have to read it yourself."
Apparently, it worked; he's about to go into Grade 2 but already has incredibly strong reading skills, including about a grade 2.5 reading level in French (we're English-speakers but he's in French immersion).
I didn't like how much Switch he was playing last year when the pandemic started and schools closed, but he wouldn't have learned to read nearly as fast if it weren't for Breath of the Wild. He seems to be well ahead of his classmates, and he's only getting stronger (and more independent as a result) as time goes by.
We're pretty particular about what games he plays, but the ones he's interested in typically have a substantial amount of reading involved (compared to, say, Doom when I was a teenager).
I'm excited that he'll be able to (if not willing to) play my old favorites; Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana, to name a few. I guess we'll see if he's interested.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
I fortunately bought a used Wii U bundle with a stash of games and controllers off eBay pre pandemic “for the kids” and I realized while playing with them that I far prefer them playing games than staring at the TV. We are talking and laughing and arguing and explaining the whole time during Mario. Kids TV shows just seem to send kids to this zombie state. I hadn’t considered the reading aspect of certain games.
If the government wants to go after game developers because their games are addictive that's one thing. Dictating to the players is a level of control free citizens should never experience. Although, in this case, citizens of China are hardly free in the first place.
How do we measure what level of control we have/deserve on our kids?
I'm not disagreeing, just arguing that there are cases where one could argue that the government is overstepping on how we parent our kids.
> parents to not leaving their kids alone in a car
Infringes on the freedom of the child to live or not endure conditions beyond what a normal person should endure
> sending their kids to school
The other questions start getting more into removing the freedom of the parents to choose at the expense of the best interest of the individual being affected (in the government's point of view).
There is a lot of academic material with well defined terms about these subjects. Americans will err towards individual freedoms rather than the government directing more than will European countries (and obviously communist countries; yes you can find specific examples to contradict this statement, it's a generality, an average of all policies). But Americans are trending towards more paternalistic policies over the last fifty years (Standard disclaimer: To those who will derive an intent out of this statement, it is not supporting or not supporting it, simply an observation).
A wonkish trick would be for the government to mandate controls with sensible defaults but allow parents to tune them I guess?
The government IS dictating game developers not to provide service to children who want to play outside of the said periods.
What you said is impossible to enforce.
LMAO. Even if you didn't mention it. Likely no one would think you married an underaged girl.
From the article:
> Previously, China had limited the length of time under-18s could play video games to 1.5 hours on any day and three hours on holidays under 2019 rules.
Is this actually going to be enforced somehow? And if so, how is that enforcement going to be different than what happened over the last two years?
You have mixed feelings a about what?
This is an absolutely insane government overreach and unacceptable.
Micromanaging what people can do with their time like this is 1984.
I grew up, sometimes skipping school and playing games all day, I still passed school, I have a good job in software and a healthy happy life.
I’d prefer the following question is asked, why do these kids require “spiritual opium”? Maybe living in a polluted authoritarian genocidal hell hole makes people want to escape reality ?
If they pick up reading and decide they like those endless fantasy series, is that better than playing a video game for the same amount of time? Why?
If they decide to watch TV or movies instead of video games, is that better? Why?
Should they spend that all that free time studying and doing homework instead? Why?
All the history lessons from games like Civilisation, Sim City helping you imagining a whole new world. RPG had lots of story telling.
Heck even MMORPG like World of Warcraft, you have to learn team building before any shit could get done. I often thought it as the ultimate leadership testing. Motivating people without any usual tools like promotion or salary rise.
Modern Mobile Games are bad. VERY bad. I would even argue it is worst than Social Media for kids. Some of them are designed to cause rage so your kids would rage spend to win. There is a reason why Nintendo thought it was wrong to do Mobile Games. It is simply not the type of games they want to be in.
I could go on, I have been ranting about Mobile Games for more than half a decade. Wishing Apple would do something about it. But 80% of all App Store Revenue coming from Games were too lucrative for them.
1. Sports. You practice, get good, compete.
2. Effort is rewarded. "Effort" is a very vague thing. It could be not dying/luck (roguelikes, Hearthstone), it could be clicking a button 1000 times. It could be problems (Factorio) or wiki games (DF, Stardew Valley). The reward is sometimes satisfaction (Factorio/chess), sometimes a movie-like denouement (FF), sometimes a thing of beauty (Civ, DF)
3. Socialization, e.g. Roblox, Minecraft, Among Us. Solve a problem together.
4. Actions lead to consequences, e.g. D&D, Reigns, AI Dungeon, The Sims.
The last one is the "purest" form of gaming, in that it's a medium that only games can do well. But it's also the hardest to do and difficult to make money off.
I'd hope that this kind of restrictions will lead to China making more Type 4 games. Hopefully games that can lead to a satisfactory conclusion within 2-3 hours like the average movie.
5. Games that are about providing a certain experience: walking simulators, horror games, casual adventure games, story focused games. Here there, effort is often not really a focus at all and while you could say that you are "rewarded" for simply playing the game that is stretching it and could be applied to any game that is enjoyable in some way.
6. Puzzle games - here the challenge itself is the reward but unlike (1) the challenge is problem solving and not competition.
Of course like any genre system real games will not fit neatly in one of these categories but have aspects from multiple of them.
> The last one is the "purest" form of gaming, in that it's a medium that only games can do well.
Yeah no. While the interactive medium is a great tool for showing consequences, it is not required. Meanwhile many things in the other categories also benefit greatly from it.
> Hopefully games that can lead to a satisfactory conclusion within 2-3 hours like the average movie.
I wouldn't really want to hold the "average movie" as something games should strive for. I'm all for cutting down on grind, 2-3 hours is a really short time to learn complex mechanics or get immersed in the world and characters.
Few game designers aspire to make a game that's done in 2 hours and worth $8.
Chess is a bloody complex game and you can play a round to full satisfaction in 15 minutes. You have your complexity, but it's enough to enjoy yourself 3 hours/week.
Most movies will immerse you in the world and the characters well within the first 15 minutes. Today, you have something like Fallout 4 where it takes an hour from customizing your character's face to leaving the vault.
I think Adam Cadre's games are a great example: http://adamcadre.ac/if.html
What separated the Interactive Fiction from Adventure genre was that IF was more on interacting with the player's actions. You could achieve a goal and unlock endings, or just explore. You could get a full story well within a couple hours because the games are designed to avoid you from getting stuck. Adventure games were plagued with resource management and metagaming; once you remove the unnecessary grind of puzzle solving, you get a denser game.
On the other hand, my numerous hours spend playing WWE Attitude and Goldeneye probably wasn't exactly expanding my horizons.
I'm a new parent so I'm not sure how I'm going to navigate this myself but I assume the above will guide my own rule-making.
I similarly have mixed feelings as well, but for slightly different reasons. I've read about studies that say that musical training (which is often believed to translate to improvements in other cognitive aspects of life) doesn't actually correlate to said improvements, and I suspect that the same might be true for games (e.g. solving game puzzles doesn't necessarily mean you get better at school math or whatever)
This line of reasoning is also supported by research on correlation between games and violence (i.e. the consensus is that no such causation relationship exists).
All of these suggest (to me) that gaming is just its own activity without much impact on life other than opportunity cost itself.
However, there are some aspects of gaming that can affect overall well-being, specifically aspects related to repetitiveness (e.g. grinding). Repetitiveness is something that does come up in a lot of disciplines (e.g. its soothing effect in autist kids, or repetitiveness as tool in the context of meditation, etc).
The "addictive" aspect isn't necessarily a bad thing either, IMHO. Games are, almost by definition, supposed to be engaging. But that addictiveness may come in a form of trade-offs, for example, back in the day of grindy RPGs, delayed gratification was basically the entire point of grinding. The one aspect that I think is justly vilified is monetization strategies that tie to addictive elements of gameplay (especially the gacha variety) and this is something that I'd actually commend China for trying to address via regulation.
For example, to improve your reading skills you need to practice reading. If a game is providing reading material and motivation to read, it will improve reading skills.
Games can also drive motivation in other areas. In the early 90’s when I started computer gaming, you actually needed to know how to use a computer and understand them to some extent. Half the time I spent gaming was spent figuring out how to get the computer to do what I wanted which lead to a life long interest in technology. Sadly, like the parent poster mentioned, that is probably no longer a thing.
Arguably, writing video games and novels would seem to be more useful way to improve skills. That's how I got started in programming at all.
However, video games just doesn't seem life changing at all compared to all the things you could do.
A great way to help a child read throughout their life is to read to them every day, enjoy stories together and apart, and not to push too hard in any direction (they may enjoy different things, no problem). Asking open-ended questions helps, too, with time to consider and respond.
As a child, I simply wasn’t interested in novels and enjoying playing games would be a prerequisite to having the motivation to write one.
A lot of people learned english via games
I remember the old days of "extended memory" which meant you needed slightly different configuration files for each game. That meant if you wanted to play a bunch of games, it made sense to learn how to write a bat script to config according to what you wanted to play.
You also had a terminal which gave a "computery" vibe, like you were doing something serious, because why else would the interface be so austere? Command lines are like magic incantations, and some people are just drawn to learning how they work.
Nowadays that entry route is gone, there's not much peeking below the OS desktop anymore on something like a phone or tablet. On desktop it seems like Steam just abstracts away everything else that you'd care about, though I'm not a heavy gamer anymore.
Thankfully, this led to a great decision when he upgraded -- his old machine became mine. If I broke it, well, that was my problem, and I should learn how to fix it. Cue ~10 year old me learning about the Windows / DOS boot process.
In summary, we should encourage kids to play games, but make them harder to install and more prone to break your operating system, because it makes kids smarter.
When it boots successfully and can connect to the internet we then move on to helping them do any daily task they once did on Windows or MacOS, including gaming, art, schoolwork, etc on the new system.
Most choose another distro eventually once they know how to patch any software when needed, but some stick around and go on to develop operating systems themselves.
Many are doing very well in the industry today.
> Ooh, if I LH the mouse driver and allocate a little more EMS it should work, but don't forget to load DOS=high,umb!
That being said, people rarely discuss technical skills as a benefit of gaming. Things like resource management are more often brought up. Maybe there's some benefit to games in that respect, but I suspect most people learn about resource management within the context of games and very little of that is transferable to the real world.
This isn't to say I'm opposed to using games for education. I have certainly taught concepts in mathematics using Minecraft. Yet it does take a higher level of awareness of what you are trying to learn (or teach) than going through the mechanics of playing.
*32 bit and protected mode (ring3) support was provided usually via DPMI, an interrupt service managed by a TSR (daemon), or VCPI, a more complex privileged system. Some DOS extenders could also provide this functionality for their own binaries, notably the very popular DOS4GW.EXE, the Watcom dos extender. Yes, the name of the file reflects the physical address limit of i386 systems, 4GB. (note that when working with linear addressing, the max addressable range is quite superior due to the paging mechanism).
I'd put in the same category the edition of saved games to change your amount of money to FFFFFF or the epic shenanigans required to setup a LAN party.
For one thing, now there are fairly easily reprogrammable boards that can do things like power motors for which you need to learn real programming just to start, even if you're using an example.
I am worried that a level of comfort with computers that we may have due to being there during the evolution will be gone, I certainly learned to type over 120 words per minute by playing a MUD, far more important than my actual honest-to-god typing class. I think-type, which is a result of endless text conversations and emails.
Are those fundamentally important skills? Why? At some level if they are skills which are needed there will be a reason to learn them.
Look at the 'casual' games which are optimized via AI to hold attention and trigger repeat use. It may not be much of a stretch to consider these drugs for the human visual/rewards system rather than videogames. And these attention-grabbing tools are only getting better as we collect more data and develop better algos.
Eh. No, that's not quite how that works. If you look at north american elementary school level reading, you may notice that books are often categorized by levels. Some of this has to do with complexity of sentence construction, some has to do with vocabulary, and some has to do with subject matter. The gist of the educational philosophy around reading is that one doesn't get better at reading by plowing through reading material at high volumes, but instead one needs to gradually level up by going through materials of appropriate complexity. One specific problem that teachers look for - especially in kids that advance quickly - is "skimming without understanding", for example (i.e. reading words/sentences phonetically, but without understanding their meaning/context).
Game text is usually not structured with any didactic value in mind (other than maybe appropriate usage of furigana in Japanese in consideration of target audiences). A lot of game categories don't even require any reading beyond recognizing words (which is somewhere between kinder and 1st grade level reading skill)
Also, even in games where text actually matters, you're typically spending a large amount of time doing other things (killing monster or whatever). In addition, the notion of games-as-reading-material ignores a fairly common phenomenon: a lot of people simply spam `A` to skip over dialogues - and even get stuck on one-off gimmicks that rely on reading the text carefully for instructions or clues.
To be clear though, practicing pre-acquired reading skills can help in the sense that repetition legitimizes, but IMHO that's a bit different than improving beyond a current level, and not necessarily all that different from what you get from reading cereal box/shampoo labels or reading comic books.
It fails to train you in actually synthesizing speech though. So you need a structured approach as well, similar to what you describe, to fill out the many other facets of learning.
But it's still insanely valuable to do so.
reading things likely makes you better at reading things
I have some insight into language learning myself, having had both positive and non-positive experiences. On the one hand, yes, games and movies did help me pick up english vocabulary, but this is because I also studied english from an early age in school, the fact that English borrows vocabulary heavily from romance languages (with which I am fluent), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that I've immersed myself in it quite deeply during my teens, often preferring to read and write in english. Ironically, though, learning through entertainment media left me with some curiously weird learning gaps. For example, I only learned in my 30s that "down" (as in Final Fantasy's "Phoenix down") refers to a type of plumage and not some weird in-universe usage of up/down/left/right.
Now contrast this experience with this: As a kid, I also learned Japanese (though not to the same extent as english, let alone the extent required to master it coming from a romance language). At one point, my dad brought over some Japanese RPG games from a business trip to Japan, and while I did have basic schooling on hiragana/katakana, the teen-level kanji from the games was way over my head at the time, and I ended up learning virtually no Japanese from those games (I had to quite literally sit down to actively study kanjis to make any sense of what the game text said). I also consumed quite a bit of anime and not a whole lot stuck with me either, due to a lack of what I can "active practice" (i.e. my exposure to the language was mostly on a as-needed consumption basis, with little to no active effort to write or speak).
In short, I do think games can help nail down stuff you've learned elsewhere, but upleveling language skills from games alone is very difficult.
For what it's worth, that's not at all what I'd consider a weird gap. As an educated 40-year-old native English speaker, I think it's possible I've gone my entire life without speaking aloud the word "down" in the sense of plumage. I'd only expect a non-native speaker to know it if they spent some time focusing on animal terminology.
Id imagine pillows and bedding are where most people use this word.
> Also, even in games where text actually matters, you're typically spending a large amount of time doing other things (killing monster or whatever). In addition, the notion of games-as-reading-material ignores a fairly common phenomenon: a lot of people simply spam `A` to skip over dialogues - and even get stuck on one-off gimmicks that rely on reading the text carefully for instructions or clues.
This is a consequence of modern gaming trends and by no means an issue with video games themselves.
There are a lot of game categories that provide or even require extensive reading. We don't have to accept _all_ games a beneficial; it's not like we use magazines and tabloids to teach reading comprehension either.
There are games where killing monsters isn't the primary goal, or even if it is a significant aspect of game play can be averted by finding alternative solutions, usually through the in-game lore.
Deus Ex was a great example where several bosses could be entirely side stepped by reading emails throughout the game (though to be fair, only a few of them actually required _reading_ the email as opposed to simply discovering it). Arcanum is another that if you pieced together enough of the backstory and paid attention to the dialog you could talk the final boss down. There are even more out there, as you mention, that offer hints to puzzles and gimmicks, some of which even present it as a riddle ensuring you read and understand the text rather than just found it.
Sure, a lot of people will skip these things and save-scum or post on message boards to get the answer, but that's not much different than CliffNotes everyone used.
If you want to use video games in school do the same thing we do for books: Select the games the offer quality reading and evaluate based on comprehension rather than completion. You can even require students submit save files to verify they took the reading path.
I do, however, want to specifically call out the learning value of an R-rated game: if you are learning to read from it, that says absolutely nothing about age-appropriate didactic value of the game. At that level, the game ought to be making you solve quadratic equations or something along those lines for us to even begin entertaining the idea that they may provide any actual didactic value.
To be honest I don't find this argument particularly convincing.
In fact, the very thing we beg for is an increase in the money supply. We are hoping for inflation. Meanwhile in the real world everyone is scared of that inflation thing. My latest project is literally pumping NPC vendors with basic resources to create money out of thin air to generate inflation. The paradox of creating money is that it makes people work and end up doing more "productive" work.
Is there anything that actually scales linearly? I thought the law of diminishing rewards applied to pretty much anything you do.
Come to think of it, quite a lot of things in life scale like this. Software development being among the well-known ones for this audience - e.g. if you'd be given only a 30 minute window for writing code during a day (or even a couple such windows spread out), you'd likely not even open the editor, as there's no point in even engaging with the task in such short window.
I'd go as far as saying that, in order to realize the most non-enjoyment value of a game, you not only need long enough sessions to fully engage with a game - you need long enough sessions to get bored with the game. But, that may be impossible with modern gambling-for-chindren-but-legal style of games.
You can imagine this as an "S-curve" model of value, where with games, the point most people consider "too much" for a kid is barely on the ramp-up part of the curve.
IMO, the interesting part of many things in life comes after a significant time/difficulty spike. Think of music, art, programming, athletic performance, etc.
Old school games had basically an entire novel embedded inside of them worth of text. 10 year old me wanting to read all of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger got an easy novels worth of reading in. Getting 10 years old to WANT to read is HARD. Anything that encourages that is good.
Modern games dont have that text, and even when they do they have voice acting to get around it. Games like Chrono Trigger and old school Final Fantasy are rare and dont get made as much anymore unfortunately. Its all gambling boxes.
Stationeers does much better.
What sort of games have you been playing?
Modern games come in every possible variety, and as soon as you look outside the likes of Fortnite you're swamped in story-heavy games, if that is what you want. The Atelier games, for example. Certainly those have voice acting, but not everywhere—and if that's a problem, pick the Japanese VAs.
Sure, are some games like Disco Elysium, Pathfinder Kingmaker or other D&D-style games, which are big walls of text with minimal voice over, but let's be honest, those games are targeting middle-aged people, not 10 year olds.
The games kids are playing today involve very little reading.
To me, there's nothing sacred about text, it's just a medium.
If there were no correlation, then is the perception of in-game abuse such as sexual (and other) violence, or milder sexism and "bro" culture exaggerated (including misogynism)? Is the view that there need to be more inclusivity (of many sorts) in games then unsupported?
I see people wanting it both ways (from both political spectrums).
It either affects us, so we need to be conscientious about what we put in there.
Or it doesn't affect us and it does not matter what we do in-game (violence, sexism, etc.)
There's an apt outcome of the analogy too. It's likely the grapejuice is better for you before fermenting it, oh and the grapes themselves are better for you than removing all the fiber and the physical bulk that can help satiety.
I feel the same way about games. They may have positive effects over a null control (like sitting and staring at the paint on the wall), but reading a physical book is probably better for reading skills than an RPG.
Flow state increases retention and positive benefit, and flow state is often a function of motivation (fun), and more importantly, level of challenge. The benefit games have over nearly every other medium of experiencing a concept, is that the level of challenge is highly personalized.
If you spend a lot of time in one area of an RPG trying to comprehend the plot and thus solve the puzzle, it's still fun because you are moving around and performing more interactions and gathering small bits of context. Compare that to if you are stuck trying to comprehend one page of a difficult book as a 7-year-old.
Playing games allows our brains to catch up to complex concepts through (simulated) movement much the same way as going on walks allows us to process a difficult problem or complex system that is on our mind.
Also worth adding to this thread that motivation is a feedback loop mechanism. If you're super stimulated by these slot machine like games, you're not going to find the long rewards of completing a book a week/month a very "motivating" option. So it's also worth looking at the motivational damage these things do to a person and how it's eliminating the motivational possibility of doing something of higher value. Cue the "dopamine detox" part of the internet.
> is that the level of challenge is highly personalized.
I agree and this is a good observation, which maybe can be had IRL, but i agree that it can be easier implemented and more granular in the digital realm.
However, people aren't robots, and can't spend 100% of their time doing things which are strictly beneficial. Sometimes you just have to relax and do what you like. Further, not all worthwhile activities truly benefit you in some measurable way. All those "play Mozart for your child to increase his intelligence" CDs were completely fraudulent. And by extension you could claim that listening to beautiful classical music does not actually really benefit you. But of course beautiful music is one of the best aspects of life. The only difference I would say is that it seems impossible to become addicted to classical music in the same way that someone might become addicted to video games.
In this sense, I agree with the parent that video game addiction is the greatest concern here, and is a direction video games have been moving in for a long time. It's interesting that he mentions very easy gameplay mixed with behavioral feedback loops. I can get QUITE wrapped up in Dark Souls, but I am never just playing it on autopilot. It's too hard, and requires too much of my focus. It's not to say that it's necessarily all that difficult, but I can't just zone out. If my mood is wrong, if I am impatient, if my focus is poor, I will play badly. This is explicitly not the case with addictive gameplay-loop games which approach television-levels of sloth in the sense that you can play them indefinitely with any amount of focus.
No one ever stopped me from playing soccer for 5 hours a day when I was younger, and in high school sports practice was a 3 hour minimum.
This restricts game play to 3 hours per week. That means essentially you can’t play video games for leisure … while at the same time you are forced to do a minimum of 40 hours a week in education (normal school + cram school + homework).
If you can only play a video game for 25 minutes a day, you might as well never play.
I probably allow my kids too much time with screens, but the flip side is that, if they don't have screen access for a few days, they don't really care. They'll read some books or play outside, no big deal. I get wary of setting hard limits on their screen time, because (knowing their personalities) they would then never accept if they didn't get that time for whatever reason, and constantly be trying to make sure they get their screen time, rather than the current state of affairs where missing their screens for a day or two doesn't phase them one bit.
All of that taken together means the odds of 'screen time' being a productive endeavour are IMO much smaller than they once were. If the overwhelming odds are your kid is going to be sucked into a skinner box for the duration of their screen time it seems prudent to put limits on that which might limit the damage being done.
Of course none of this is a substitute for knowing your kid as an individual and tailoring conditions to what's best for them, versus any kind of blanket rule stuff.
My nephew was the same way, it’s not better or worse than how we grew up just different. What people forget is escapism is normal behavior. Games, TV, Radio, Music, even Books have all been blamed for the younger generation not being productive except fun is also useful. Watching hours of TV doesn’t seem like a great use of time, but the 3,001th hour leaning a musical instrument, woodworking, or whatever has serious diminishing returns. Kids don’t actually benefit that much from doubling down on what adults think is important, just look at all those Asian countries that don’t turn hours of cram school into massive economic advantages.
It's also not something only I think, but I don't have a good resource at hand. Questions like this are always disputed anyway. When books came out they complained about the youth wasting their time reading books! (so much to the "reading a book is so much better" comment above.)
Half an hour is also completely unreasonable for playing most games. It rules out playing the good games, leading them to play the pay2win gambling bullshit. If the kids are very small, ignore what I write, but if they aren't think twice about this.
You see that observation echoed in the context of alternative strategies, as described on https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-teens-video-game-rules-limi... for ADHD (whether that exists does not matter here, in any case the strategies listed there are not limited to it) for example. I read better sources, but I don't find them now, probably just some random articles with some experts attacking a majority position (that screen time limits are good) that I thought convincing, like they pop up sometimes.
I place TV at the absolute worst of the spectrum, so I don't have one. In addition to the tendentially trashy content, it is also typically used as babysitter, which contributes to the factor.
But there are also lots of interesting stuff to do with a screen; most importantly, they can be done together.
Same can be said about TV programs.
I watch Bluey (and only Bluey) with my one year-old daughter, and have genuinely learned wholesome, positive parenting techniques from watching this family of cartoon dogs interact.
That's not to say that there isn't a whole lot of garbage, but, like all media, TV programs follow Sturgeon's Law too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
Aside from watching movies every once in a blue moon, they only have access to specific games (all of which fall in the educational category), so no endless content feeds and no micro-transaction BS.
At one point, they got into one game enough that they'd demand daily screen time, but then the novelty wore off and they stopped asking.
Most days, they just spend their play time doing other things and screen time doesn't even come up.
Unlike some games however I can't drive using only the minimap...
Fun fact, there has been recent research to show that the "glass of wine during a meal is healthy" is entirely a myth; _no amount_ of alcohol is beneficial to overall health [0].
- being middle to upper class (can afford a glass of wine daily)
- having good self control (drinking one glass of wine a day instead of many)
which are both good health outcomes
I don't buy it. At worst, the negative health effects of alcohol are on an exponential J curve. Negative health outcomes like the risk of cancer is very small up until a rather high amount of consumption (4 drinks per day?) and only then outweighs the cardiovascular benefits.
Regardless, like meat consumption, I have no desire to give up drinking in moderation. I think that with this, like with everything, one has to weigh their enjoyment vs the potential for harm.
I remember playing Betrayal At Krondor and Albion - story-heavy RPGs - understanding maybe 10% of words in any particular dialog or description :)
Additionally games train trial-and-error approach to technology which is why I think almost every software developer older than 30 that I know started as a gamer.
Nowadays it's a different world and I'm not sure games have such effects anymore, because it's much less demanding entertainment. They work out of the box, are translated into your language, affordable so no need to mess with virtual drives, keygens or copying cracks over game files.
Especially in an era of "quarantine at home" - online gaming can be a very social activity and a way to make/grow friendships and play with others.
(Obviously I think getting outdoors and being active instead of staring at a screen all day is probably even better, but that is one benefit of games over just "grinding")
> correlation between games and violence (i.e. the consensus
> is that no such causation relationship exists).
On the face of it, this can't be true in all cases. Even Radio can be used to incite violence. A much less imersive medium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
"Rwandan radio station which broadcast from July 8, 1993 to July 31, 1994. It played a significant role in inciting the Rwandan genocide that took place from April to July 1994, a and has been described by some scholars of having been a de facto arm of the Hutu government."
Games influence culture. The modern permissiveness to "punch a Nazi" has been very well conditioned and permitted. Often in games. "Nazi" can be easily redefined to include modern political opponents, at anytime in the future.
I feel that the connection between violence and violence in games is far more subtle than a direct connection.
Video games are not real life but the thoughts and feelings we have when we play games are real. When we experience anger, sadness or joy in a game, all of these emotions are real for us.
When we have experiences pathways are laid down in the brain through the process of myelination and these pathways get reinforced over time by having the same experiences.
When we hit, shoot or kill something in a video game and get feedback, sound, visual or music, our brain starts to become conditioned to those experiences.
Our brains are plastic and flexible in that they can learn that hitting, shooting and killing, being violent can feel "good". It is possible that this can happen even being completely unaware of it happening.
If you make games, and there is violence in your game, I would seriously take a moment and consider. Is this violence in the game really necessary? There are many other options for different types of gameplay.
Lots of unchecked assumptions. I'm only taking issue with the music assumption. Do you have a counter to the studies you have read?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326140244.h...
Knowing china's history, it doesn't seem too far fetched and sounds like we're slowly evolving into an episode of black mirror.
That's not how improving through games works at all.
The things you understand through games are much more general than the surface of the gameplay. Total War (or Starcraft) won't teach you anything about commanding armies. But if you're observant enough it will teach you a difference between level-1 versus level-2 strategies. It will definitely teach you about the impact of timing on execution. It will show you complexity, risk, loss aversion, and how battles are usually won or lost before the first shot is fired. All these are useful things to experience so that you are better equipped to deal with them in real life.
What's even more important, the games will show you how YOU relate to these intangible concepts. How loss averse are you? Do you naturally tend to maximize win or minimize loss? How easy it is for you to abandon a pre-established plan? These and more are insights into your own nature that are not easy to get.
Finally, the multiplayer games will show you the human nature. You'll understand, for example, that different people play for different reasons, and just this understanding alone was worth all hundreds of hours I put into M:TG. I guess that most of the multiplayer insights are also available through participation (and/or managing) a regular sports team but I would have never been able to join as many of those as I had gaming teams.
TLDR: Games guide the player to instinctive understanding of categorical truths that underpin the simulations, and that is only possible through countless repetitions of similar scenarios* in different contexts. This is the true value of gaming.
[*] I'm not talking about grinding here[**], but playing same or similar games many times.
[**] although grinding can teach one about how seemingly small process improvements somethimes add up to a qualitative break ... and sometimes not. Figure out the best way to do a cow level run to learn more!
I’m not talking Catan or Ticket to Ride. I’m talking medium to heavy euros or war games.
Google translation of the first entry:
> Strictly limit the time for providing online game services to minors. Since the implementation of this notice, all online game companies can only provide minors with one-hour online game services from 20 to 21:00 on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and legal holidays. At other times, it is not allowed to provide online game services to minors in any form.
http://www.gov.cn/flfg/2010-06/22/content_1633935.htm
translated form deepl: "The online game referred to in this method refers to the software program and information data composition, through the Internet, mobile communication networks and other information networks to provide game products and services.
Online game online operation refers to the business behavior of providing game products and services to the public through information networks using user systems or fee-based systems.
Online game virtual currency refers to the virtual exchange tool issued by online game operation unit and purchased directly or indirectly by online game users using legal tender in a certain proportion, existing outside the game program, stored in the server in the form of electromagnetic records and expressed in specific digital units."
You only provide a single player offline game once. And you don't provide any service over information networks outside of the download and updates.
Now, I wonder what qualifies as an online game service. If I play correspondence chess over email, would the email host be running an online game service? If someone modifies the Battle of Wesnoth network code to run over IRC messages, would the IRC host be running an online game service? (What about decentralized network game protocols?)
Lots of legal grey areas to explore, like with Phil Zimmerman putting the PGP code in bookform. I'm sure you could find a way to game online without relying on an online game service.
1. Law does x 2. HN commenter: what about x+y? what about x-1?
The answer to your decentralized chess is that no one would care if it broke the rules or not unless millions of people were hopelessly addicted to it and it warranted a second look.
Your average Zoomer is not interested in decentralized chess or any other gaming service that requires only an intermittent internet connection. I can see local network mobile MOBAs becoming a thing but I'm sure workarounds like that would be eventually squashed as well.
Thanks!
> The answer to your decentralized chess is that no one would care if it broke the rules or not unless millions of people were hopelessly addicted to it and it warranted a second look.
Ok, so you'd have a online gaming vacuum for all <18 gamer kids of China. Don't you think someone would make a game or two run over IRC (or SMTP some other protocol) if it meant capturing that entire market? Then it would be millions; and then perhaps authorities would care, and then perhaps herpaps an IRC server could* be "an online gaming platform", which would be interesting and peculiar legally, is what I'm saying.
(What really distinguishes / categorizes something as a game network protocol as distinct from written human language, legally..?)
* Hell, you don't even need to circumvent the defintion if you can get around it technically.
In this as in many things, big central institutions are much easier for a state to work with.
It's simple, Every MMORPG or online-game requires a license. The government can fine your company for violations. If you run games through email or IRC, pray your underground game network doesn't attract attentions.
btw there are tons of "grey" area online game services in China.
Also, imagine influx of games for services to handle.
Ah, fortunately they planned for that way ahead of time.
Sounds like it could be kinda fun (nostalgia for me)
I don't look back very fondly upon the days when I grinded playing online PC games in a room alone, even though I had a headset and a chat box - that feels more like wasted time.
It's purely personal of course, and I know people who feel differently, but if gaming takes a step back toward anchoring itself in the physical realm, I'm all for it. The arcade heydays of the 80s sound awesome.
It's a big double standard to call their flavor of restrictions "authoritarian", while being ok with (or even strongly in favor of) our flavor of restrictions, even though the two are objectively similar in nature.
Since you mentioned the great firewall, I think it's interesting to bring up some perspective I've heard from various Mainland Chinese people: that many of them thinks western media brainwashes us (think the thing about Olympic photo coverage of Chinese medalists) and many condemn westerner take on social matters (the US' handling of Covid, for example, is seen as a "proof" that the our infatuation with freedom has severe failings). I've even heard someone once say that "American egos wouldn't be able handle Chinese opinion if the firewall was lifted, because it's a voice 1.4b people strong - intellectuals, trolls and everything in between - who disapprove of American ideologies".
To be clear: I'm not attempting to inflame, I'm merely bringing up what I heard from their side, for your edification. My advice is to be careful of using loaded terminology such as "authoritarian"; you don't own objective truth, and humility might go a long way in dispelling animosity from both sides.
I’m not aware of any such research done into the effects of playing video games more than three hours per week (though would be interested to read it), so there’s a good chance that this is more than “government looking after the wellbeing of their citizens” in the same way as restrictions on the other things you mentioned.
The other major factor that was mentioned was addiction. I'm not sure there are studies on this, but at least anecdotally, a lot of people seem to think it is a problem.
Some other comments are also mentioning that this is more a restriction on companies providing services to underage audiences, and we do have a bunch of legal restrictions on how companies are allowed to interact with children; see COPPA.
I'm really shocked by the somewhat puritanical take on video games at hacker news of all places.
Keeping games available is as much of a decision as limiting them. Why do you think picking the former option requires extensive research and the latter doesn't?
Number two even if there weren't, by your logic you could justify restricting anything in the entire universe by stating that there isn't sufficient research.
A.k.a. we don't know what long term ramifications may be caused by extensive winking, so will be restricting to the amount of winking you can perform to 50 winks per day.
The parent comment suggested there isn't, and the reply I gave was modulo this assumption. If you say there is extensive research, give it to the parent comment.
> by your logic you could justify restricting anything in the entire universe by stating that there isn't sufficient research
You do a strawman argument here, your interpretation of my argument is self-servingly absurd.
The parent comment wanted to discard one of the alternatives because there's too little research. I objected saying that if there's not enough research, this makes the two alternatives equally favorable (not that it strengthens the other alternative!).
Our restrictions came about through a democratic process (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...), not because our supreme leader decided he knows what's best for us.
Not sure where you're coming from with calling the two situations similar. They're obviously entirely different.
> My advice is to be careful of using loaded terminology such as "authoritarian"
How is that a loaded term? What other word would you use to describe the Chinese government?
A democratic process where most of the people affected weren't allowed to vote.
The USA has lobbying, which is seen by the rest of the OECD countries as a legalized form of bribery. This allows regulated industries to corrupt and otherwise influence the regulation of their own industry. The USA might very well have similar restrictions to China on say prize boxes in video games if not for the outsized effect of industries on legislators.
The US also has a history of actual disenfranchisement and state legislators gerrymandering away the influence of a large minority of votes for Congress.
The effect is that the US actually has a complicated system of perverting the democratic system, whereas the Chinese system doesn’t even try to appear democratic, thereby appearing at least more honest about what it is.
Anecdotally, I think there are far more significant issues with US democracy than lobbying given that legislators still largely seem to do what they campaign on, lobbying-influenced or otherwise, and voters elect them in almost universally accepted elections. If the disconnect were between the expectations of voters (from campaigns, etc.) and actual legislation, I would be more inclined to place further blame on lobbying, but I'm not sure that's the case. I wouldn't say lobbying isn't a problem, obviously.
There's no perversion of government caused by lobbyists. On net balance lobbyists are beneficial - and sometimes they're all that stops a 20-something Legislative Aide from drafting a terrible piece of legislation which the Member only faintly understands.
I know all of that sounds distasteful to some people, but the alternative is not the utopia they imagine - it's Chinese authoritarianism.
I don't think so. Poor people have no lobby. Families have no lobby.
(I'll just talk about lobbying, not political donations, which is a related but separate issue.)
The organizations with the most lobbying spending are the US Chamber of Commerce (politically right, but not necessarily representing the very wealthy) followed by the Open Society Policy Center (politically left, but not necessarily representing the poor).
Most lobbying comes from industries of some sort (e.g. realtors, hospitals, farmers, coal, manufacturing, unions, education, etc). The legislation these groups favor will often disproportionately benefit the rich, but they tend to benefit rich and poor alike within that industry. For example, the farming industry may favor subsidies that benefit both poor and rich farmers.
As an example of industry working against the wealthy, the life insurance industry is the main group lobbying in favor of estate taxes (a tax which only affects the wealthy).
I'm not aware of any lobby groups that are specifically for the interests of the wealthy. However, politically right groups largely fill this role (the distinction being that right-wing fiscal policies are broader than just cutting taxes for the rich).
This thread is debating whether we should be appalled at China for this law, or whether it's morally similar to some of our own laws (like banning drinking and gambling for minors). Bogwog suggested the difference is we banned minors from drinking democratically, while China's "supreme leader decided he knows what's best". The parent to Bogwog's comment suggested they're similar and we're holding China to a higher standard (possibly due to our biases).
As you say, in both cases children under 18 aren't allowed to vote. That seems like a similarity between here and China. If children could vote here, that would strengthen Bogwog's argument.
(If it makes a difference, I'm against governments restricting minors from playing video games more than 3 hours per week. But I also don't think democracy is what would make it okay.)
A lot else could be said about this. Just to list a few possible objections to the democracy argument:
- It's kind of easy to just throw the word "democracy" around without actually establishing why the law is just and good and moral. For example, if a democratic country decided to ban Muslims, would people think it was moral and justified?
- Maybe the commenter feels democracy justifies it because the people (indirectly) chose the law. But in this case, the majority (people over 21) are placing restrictions on a minority (people under 21). That's a possible failure of democracy: a majority can abuse a minority, even if the minority is overwhelmingly against the proposed law.
- On top of that, most of the people being restricted (people under 18 or 21 depending on which law and which state we're discussing) weren't allowed to vote at all. They can't choose representatives in Congress.
- The comment overstates the difference between the US and China and makes it sound like this law is solely the whim of a dictator. While the US is certainly much more democratic than China, the US isn't completely democratic, and China isn't completely undemocratic. China has elections (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China). Video game addiction is a popular concern in China. South Korea democratically passed a similar (though less severe) law restricting video games for minors. This is a position of the communist party, with a lot of public support, not just a personal whim of Xi Jinping. (People exaggerate how much China is ruled solely by Xi Jinping instead of the party as a whole. Xi is powerful, but he can be replaced by the party and he's only been leader since 2012, and no person governs alone.) Meanwhile, there are many reasons why US politics don't always perfectly reflect the will of the people.
Just to add another layer to this, the somewhat cynical take is that - at least in the US - the system is actually a republican democracy, meaning that even people over 18 don't typically have a direct voice in the matter. At best people can do things like write to their representative or organize protests, but most people don't bother, and even if they did, representatives may not listen (either because your elected representative belongs to the opposite party as yours, or because they are detached from reality or they don't consider your concern a priority or they are being swayed by lobbyists etc)
Something that people don't seem to realize about China is that CCP values are supported by a majority of Chinese people.
> What other word would you use to describe the Chinese government?
I strongly suggest getting out of your comfort zone and go talk to some mainland Chinese people (preferably not the living-in-america ones). You'll find that they describe it with words like "unified" (which, for record, I also consider a loaded term).
Even in the US, a good chunk of the population always disagrees with whatever is the political topic du jour...
All I'm saying is that a bunch stuff happening in China does have a sizable amount of public approval, even if news articles make it sound like no one could possibly want it.
As opposed to good old fashion American indoctrination.
If we think about those two ideologies, one could flip your "is it possible for it to not be unified" to "is it possible for it to not have freedom" to illustrate the inherent ideological bias in the question. It may seem like an attempt at being inflammatory, but consider that for vaccines, for example, many people actually believe that we shouldn't get to decide against medical recommendation.
I posit that neither ideology is necessarily superior, given that empirically we know of both good and bad outcomes for both sides (e.g. your argument about their lack of freedom of speech vs theirs about our botched covid handling due to "freedom" SJWs)
And to reiterate: I do think "unified" is a loaded term: it implies everyone should be on board with whatever the CCP decides, because it's for the "common good", when in reality that's not a belief held equally by everyone. (Incidentally, it also implies that the US is functionally stuck on inaction due political bickering, a position that I find somewhat accurate, especially on matters of public welfare, e.g. healthcare reform)
Personally, I think always coloring things with one ideology doesn't work because each topic is different, hence my suggestion to seek different opinions outside of our own echo chambers.
Typically when a person says, 'that policy is authoritarian', they are making the claim that ~'that policy can only practical be made and enforced in an authoritarian political system, where political power is withheld from the masses'.
So in this case the implied claim is that the only reason the CCP can get away with limiting video game hours for those under 18 to 3 hours a week is because of their system of government is authoritarian, where the masses do not have practical say in the policy.
This also implies the commentor does not think the masses in China would choose this policy for themselves.
edit: remove accidental double negative
1. It was claimed that the the China policy is authoritarian, but the U.S. policy is not authoritarian, because the latter is a democratic government.
2. It was claimed that any reported approval of the Chinese government by the Chinese population is irrelevant, either because the report is fake or because the people are manipulated or “brainwashed.”
> 1. It was claimed that the the China policy is authoritarian, but the U.S. policy is not authoritarian, because the latter is a democratic government.
I think my above point offered a method to resolve this miscommunication by giving a more complete description of what is often meant by 'that policy is authoritarian'.
> 2. It was claimed that any reported approval of the Chinese government by the Chinese population is irrelevant, either because the report is fake or because the people are manipulated or “brainwashed.”
I think there is a similar miscommunication here that can be resolved, but I am not interested in delving into more topics currently.
You can be in a authoritarian democracy, say Iran which is a theocratic republic which obtained that status through a legit revolution, overthrowing what used to be a dictatorial, but fairly liberal society under the Shah.
That's clearly anecdotal because I worked and lived there for a year recently and what you said is only what *some* of them think.
I have spoken to many people, particularly those who are yonung and educated, who don't think like what you have said. Many people are also very eager to speak to foreigners about their governments and, in some extreme cases, they openly criticize their own for exactly the same reasons that much of the HN crowd probably would. Also, I was just a regular worker who wasn't anyone's boss, and I spoke to them in Chinese.
I'm not interested in debating against anecdotes with more anecdotes, but I think what you said is not the whole story of "their side" and is potentially manipulative even if it wasn't your intention to be.
I also don't think "authoritarian" is a loaded word, it's just an indication of how likely or unlikely someone is willing to work with others openly. The important thing is what to do to fix it, hopefully, together, after realizing what the issues could be, not toning in down and making everyone comfortable with some illusions in the first place.
I've had co-workers who were really harmonious river crab, and some that were very non-harmonious grass mud horse...all in the same team. Outside of work, I didn't really talk about politics at all, it just never seemed to be that important beyond a lunch topic.
China was going in the right direction under Hu, if only because Hu was a weak leader. The authoritarian uptick really came back with Xi, and now that Xi has basically become president for life, it is really reinforced. It is a bit disheartening to see China move to being more liberal to more authoritarian all in a few short years. The trend probably won't change for a generation or two.
That's what I thought before I went there but it turned out to not be the case. What I am about to say is anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt.
I actually worked in Beijing. The work I did involved both tech companies and students, and I took the time outside of work to mingle with the locals at restaurants and shops. The amount of people who don't agree with the government was generally "surprisingly" high across all groups.
I should also point out that I never took the initiative to talk about politics, so in all cases it was either people being curious about the culture outside of China or, presumably, I was an outlet for them because I was clearly not affiliated with the government in any way.
I'm just going to leave it at that because anything I say past this point are even more subjective opinions.
Politics eventually comes into play, but it was more likely we would talk about the Great Firewall, or some kid getting arrested by the party police during a rave, things like that. Politics came into play when there was some heated event, like the South China Sea dispute, that someone (usually more nationalistic) was really passionate about in the moment.
Seems you imply that the right direction for China is having weak leader, which historically it was disaster. That aside, lots of the ugly things on China you heard like airpocalypse, corruption, inequality and weak governance expanded steply under Hu, so there's that.
Right, that's why I said "Many chinese".
What I'm reacting to is the general tone that the CCP just forces draconian measures down everyone's throats as if no one could possibly ever agree, but also not dare speak up. What I mean is that the characterization that the whole populace just puts up with crap is a bit inaccurate because there are in fact supporters, just like there are both supporters and detractors to controversial government decisions on this side of the pond.
As someone else pointed out, these initiatives get passed precisely because there's enough support for it at some relevant branch of government, rather than being some sort of dictatorial whim of the party leader. And this process doesn't strike me as being super different from the way our democratically elected representatives bring up new bills.
No offense but I used to do this and I now think of it as a means of lying to myself that I have covered myself from the "edge cases" that don't support my obviously non-neutral arguments.
> And this process doesn't strike me as being super different from the way our democratically elected representatives bring up new bills.
This is the reason that I disagree with the rest of what you said.
There are no democratic elections in China, and the people who often end up making decisions for everyone else are selected and groomed to do that *according to the party's values* early on in life. What that means is that you won't be making any decisions in the first place if they feel that your values and motives do not, or have a chance that they will not, align with the part's interest.
So who gets in? It's people who are truly patriotic (and probably getting exploited for that), people with the relevant lineage, or mostly people who are just in it for career progression, power and money because the states control so much that you just simply can't advance without being part of the party.
In non-authoritarian countries you often have some means of recourse, including putting pressure on the government with media, if the government screws up. You can't even disagree with the CCP to begin with because the means of communication for most people are censored by the government. There are literally laws that the government can punish you with even if you just remotely disagree with the government.
Most people just want to live a normal life and value their assets and family above all. The country is generally growing well economically, so there are no real reasons for them to risk what they have in exchange for some intangible idealistic things that they have never experienced. This is literally the citizens self-policing themselves because control is deliberately built into every layer.
It is super different.
People literally do not dare to speak up, it's not anti-CCP people making up antagonistic stories.
> because there are in fact supporters, just like there are both supporters and detractors to controversial government decisions on this side of the pond.
I'm sure there are in fact supporters for pervasive control and surveillance in the name of protecting children and society. However, at least on "this side of the pond" we can oppose it without fearing any repercussions from the government. I can trash the policy all I like on any social media platform I want, I can write opinion pieces and submit to newspapers, I can organize groups to oppose the policy — all without fearing repercussions from the government. Can you do any of that under the CCP?
Get a piece of paper, divide it into acceptable and unacceptable, write down the things that fall into each category that align with your core values, then come back to read your arguments.
If you don't think there are any contradictions, great. If there are, perhaps there is nothing wrong with "the general tone" that you find problems with.
To try to address the root of your objection: the main difference IMHO is the idea of disagreeing/activism being based on notions of arbitrary freedom vs the one-way-or-highway approach being based on a notion that there is such a thing as "what's good for you". I think there are good and bad examples of both approaches/outcomes, both in this thread and various recent news topics (e.g. your point about how freedom of speech is a good thing(tm) vs the whole "mah freedom" thing backfiring royally as far as Covid goes)
If we look from this angle, neither ideology really "wins unequivocally", so I don't think I should get to call which framework is ethically acceptable or unacceptable. Instead, I'm trying to call out biases - particularly westerner-leaning ones given that this is a westerner forum talking about an article from a westerner source that quotes western-sympathetic ideas while conveniently not extending the favor to the other side. If you scroll around, you may notice that there are several comments effectively crying "dictatorship", and many failing to grasp the nuance about how this specific policy affects companies more so than children per se, mirroring an overarching anti-China narrative that I've been seeing a lot of lately. If I felt that the reporting was truly unbiased and accurate and that people were interpreting it with unbiased lenses, I wouldn't be taking the position I am here (I am, in fact, largely playing devils' advocate, as my own personal opinions fall more in line with westerner sensibilities)
At least in the case of alcohol, the guardians of a child are explicitly allowed to "override" that restriction (with some caveats e.g. in some states you have to be in a private residence) - so, at least there, it's pretty clear that the law is there to protect random underage children (something something executive function not completely developed until roughly age 25) from making huge mistakes with dangerous things that are still allowed to be sold.
If the same does not apply to cigarettes or gambling, that's an oversight.
I don't believe the Chinese law under discussion has any sort of exception.
Moreover, the difference in scientific evidence for the harmfulness of cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling is significantly greater than the evidence for the harmfulness of video games.
1) Mandating that kids all game at the same time will have bad problems for some web services. Some games geared towards younger people might be close to a ghost town 95% of the time, and then surge radically in traffic during allowed gaming hours. This is asking for technical problems dealing with radically different usage patterns.
2) The limits are unreasonably small for a hobby. If they had said something like 16 hours a week any time you want as long as your homework was done, most Chinese gamers would have begrudgingly accepted it as part and parcel of living in a CCP Wonderland. But 3 hours is too small and is asking for kids to try and hack and find workarounds to the tiny limits. I'm sure that 14 year old me would have made a game out of trying to find workarounds around this rule regardless of the consequences.
I think it's unlikely that every kid will be using 100% of their playtime every weekend, and thus giving a perfectly reliable usage pattern.
And yet, we are not robots. We make our own choices. Parents set limits and create alternatives, and schools and community groups do too. Games also simply get old after a while. Anyone who really wants to stop a gaming addiction can stop it - it is only a question of will. So I find what the CCP is doing abhorrently wrong because their actions create the very dependence on government, and the removal of will at any other level, that perpetuates themselves as a solution. The Western way is messier for sure, but if we want freedom, we have to be OK with mistakes.
They were, and I wonder why. If you run some open source 16-bit gaming console emulator, you also know that there won't be in-game purchases, because it just wasn't a possibility. Perhaps it was a technological sweet spot that limited capitalist exploitation within video games?
The games still had ethical issues then, like, it's actually difficult to find non-violent games. Even Zelda is addictive in its immersiveness and the game mechanics rely a lot on assaulting baddies.
> The first game I remember being extremely addicting was World of Warcraft. It became a habit to simply click the icon as soon as the desktop loaded,
This is interesting to read, that you as a ex-gameaholic disagree with this law. I wonder whether it could really be the forces that are moving game development (as in money, as in capitalism) that are the real problem because they profit from creating addiction, rather than computer games as such. One can only wonder what computer games would look like in a world not dominated by neoliberalism, and whether a healthier game development model is possible?
I am reminded of this longer comment that was removed from the Godot source code recently:
> A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class.
From https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/commit/b872229427d...
- Game prices have not kept up with inflation.
- Games are more expensive than ever before.
- More games now have online multiplayer, requiring constant funding.
Here is the answer: Crappy gatcha games and skinner boxes branded with a popular IP marketed towards kids are:
1. Much easier to make
2. Makes A TON MORE MONEY.
A gatcha game is basically a slot machine, which is basically a website with a fancy front-end. This means you can shovel out these games with low-skill labor, make your money, and then re-skin the same website with another property.
A lot of the gaming companies that used to be owned by a visionary leader are now owned by VC firms that don't give a shit about games, they give a shit about the money machine.
So they produce the same crap over and over again, employing behavioral psychologists to develop the most addicting loop possible.
I think there is probably some precedent from gambling laws we could apply to protect minors from predatory behaviour.
Multiplayer does not require constant funding, unless you want to lock the game down so you can sell microtransactions. I can fire up the original Quake or UT99, pick a server, and play online; it doesn't cost id a cent. On the other hand, I recently tried playing Splinter Cell: Blacklist again, a game released in 2013, and their centralized online services don't work.
Developers have made an effort to keep players from hosting their own servers, which has introducing many new problems. For example, the lack of community moderation / 'toxicity', homogenization of gameplay options within a title to support a matchmaking pool, and stagnation due to lack of new maps, modes, and mods that used to be created by the community.
| sed "s/gaming/drug/"
> The Western way is messier for sure, but if we want freedom, we have to be OK with mistakes.
Syncs with the outcome of prohibition.
Free will is a pretty religious and naive concept, IMO. A way to phrase what you're saying is that a laissez-faire society gives everyone more net utility than the up-front utility gains of banning all sources of harm. Then it's up to everyone's imagination to see how/personal relationship to harmful things/moral arrogance to say yea or nay.
The result has not been that the vast majority of SK gamers promptly log off at said hour. The result has been the majority of them connect to non SK servers immediately at said hour or use a friends account.
the difference is that China is able to actually apply the law, with it's fire wall and unprecedently separated tech infrastrure. It may also threaten the companies to straight up boot them from China if they don't comply.
It's kinda impressive that the CCP can make decisions that affect 1B+ humans like this, overnight. I hope it's the right thing to do, for the kids' sake.
I feel reminded of the current apple issue.
Are people really that ready to accept dictate over their and their kids behaviour in the name of moral and health? Isn't "time spent online" miles away from what the government should be allowed to regulate in your life?
Videogames are extraordinarily addictive. They should absolutely be limited for kids.
For anyone who can think for themselves it is, but the CCP has crippled its population's ability to think independently with their constant, forced propaganda. This brainwashing is a form of violence against its people and I hope they rise up someday, but I don't know how that could happen.
---
A high level official from China's propaganda department visits the CNN, and asks to learn the state of the art in propaganda.
Bemused, CNN receptionist replies: we are living in a free country, there are no propaganda here.
CCP official: That's exactly what I'm trying to learn!
If the CCP decided to ban smoking, it would be a violation of people's rights. But it would also be a net benefit to almost everyone, and to society (health care costs would go down). That kind of authoritarianism is a LOT easier to stomach than, say, putting the Uygars into concentration camps. At least to me. (Singapore is an example of what I would call a mostly-benevolent authoritarian regime, for example.)
I think you are conflating “banning” with “convincing people to stop”; these are not the same. The PRC has banned lots of things without actually stopping them, and lots of countries have banned lots of addictive drugs without stopping their use, and with a whole lot of social harms resulting from the attempts to enforce the bans.
> health care costs would go down
Health care outcomes would no doubt improve if smoking was reduced by a ban, but healthcare costs would probably go up. IIRC, most studies have shown that reducing smoking increases lifetime healthcare costs (because, simplifying, people spend more time dealing with treatable problems instead of dead from incurable lung cancer.)
> Are people really that ready to accept dictate over their and their kids behaviour in the name of moral and health?
To be clear, most commentators here are probably from outside China. There isn't anything anyone commentating here can do about this. So all we can really commentate is on the outcomes and what it might mean.
Social circles are established around online gaming; my teenager feels like he's letting his friends down if he doesn't spend enough time with 'The Clan'. His 'membership' with the group is at risk if he doesn't contribute his time.
It's made life somewhat difficult as a parent, to say the least.
Social circles are established around a common interest. Most people have to have some shared interest in order to be friends. I don't know how your son would socialize if he didn't have something in common with his social milieu. If your son was born at an earlier time, he would have to contend with the demonization of skateboarding, calling your friends over the landline, D&D, rock& roll, dance halls, chess, cafes, channel surfing, and any other thing "geeks", "hooligans", "layabouts", and other so-called non-conformists enjoyed when these hobbies were deemed the social malaise of their day. I can't speak for your circumstances in particular, but this argument of the "wrong" social circles enjoying the "wrong" hobbies strikes me as the kind of pearl-clutching I thought would have died with those farcical accusations of Harry Potter promoting witchcraft and covens back in the early 2000s.
That said, a pattern is a pattern until it isn't, and I think it's fair to ask what criteria you'd use to evaluate the cost/benefit of some activity on a cohort of individuals that lack a fully developed frontal lobe.
Some questions going through my mind as I've witnessed my children during quarantine:
1. Does the activity negatively impact the individuals ability to satisfy other obligations (academic, fiscal, personal-care, etc)?
2. Does the activity require only a shared interest, or is active participation required? if the latter, what's the time demand of the participation?
3. If the individual ceases the activity, will they maintain relationships with the individuals they participated with?
4. Can proficiency in the activity translate to other endeavors?
5. does the idea of taking a break from the activity cause anxiety or stress?
I let my kids play the games because I want them to have some autonomy, but online games in particular result in greater negative answers for these questions than other activities (including offline games).
Curious about your observations... do you find there's no difference between online vs. offline?
For an online game or a microtx based semi single player game, you want the player not to play, but to pay, over and over. That means that engineering addiction that leads to nothing but payment and compulsion is very profitable.
Offline games can definitely be very addicting and engaging. But ime those that are are because you're trying very hard to do something difficult, or because you're exploring, or because you're creating, all of which are ways in which video games can plausibly be helpful. And you will eventually get bored or move on to another game, which will give you time and pause to reconsider what you're doing.
Meanwhile you could be grinding an online video game doing menial tasks and buying microtransactions without ever having an end goal in mind and without being creative, for over a decade, every day.
So I think they're very different.
1. Online games are easier to restrict. Centralized servers, corporations with addresses and bank accounts, &c
2. Online games are a political threat. The Chinese government worries not just about "political" organizing, but about any movement or activity that gets people in the habit of collective action and mass communication.
Now, as an adult, when I do game, it substitutes for time I would've spent exercising, working on coding/ML side projects, or hanging out with the family. Hence, I'd like to flip this policy - please cap me at 3 hours a week but allow my kids to play!
So while I think their approach is far too extreme, I can understand why they would be very concerned about video games.
Even among online games, there's a huge variety of experiences available.
I'm not against regulation, just not overbroad.
Games where young frustrated [0] [1] Chinese teenagers could talk relatively freely with others from different regions of China. Or god forbid, learn English and have contacts with westerners. Better to keep them grinding on shaving a few tenth of a second on basic algebra problems for the Gaokao. That will better prepare them for the factories.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2015/06/05/gender-imbalance-china-o...
It’s why it’s banned in most countries for people under the age of 18
Your entire <18 player-base coming online at the exact same time for only 1 hour.
Of course there are solutions like scheduled auto-scaling but still, I guarantee that's going to cause some outages at least in the beginning.
Tfw.
I also think games and gaming communities have gotten much worse in 25 years. I wouldn't want a child I knew to get involved in most gaming communities at all, now.
Video game programming is very cutting edge technology (eg. 3D graphics, animation, wayfinding, and more). China throwing this industry away will mean there are no home grown video game programmers which will have implications on their entire software engineering capability.
This gives the rest of the world a big edge technology wise.
Most studios will focus on offline games again, back to old-school games.
Honestly, I'm a fan of this. No harm done to anything worth saving.
Even in the west where traditional, non-microtransaction games are very common, having an offline, single player, non-cooperative game is increasingly rare.
There is also a massively underdeveloped market for single player Chinese games that is only recently starting that will benefit massively from this decision.
I'm making an educated guess here, but i'm betting you won't see a real surge in single player games.
These services could easily institute the same limitations on their SP games; forcing them to do online checks on certain events. They could even be sneaky about it by punishing you if you try to evade the checks somehow by deleting your save game, making the game more difficult, or employing other techniques used to dissuade pirates.
They can also do forced updates on software to fix any exploits, run background services that force kill executables, and a bunch of other stuff. Mobile devices are especially well locked down. It just depends on how badly the company wants to keep kids from playing the games. They just need to make it too big of a pain to worry about for 99.99% of gamers, then report the other 0.01% of troublemakers to the authorities.
People will just pirate other games. Even on mobile. Every Android device will happily run pirated APKs.
Yeah, maybe I could've used that time better - But none of my friends did anything reasonable with that time and I don't think I am any more special than them.
Still do the occasional session, still love the FPS!
I find the reckless timewasting on social media, reddit, much more harmful in comparison.
The restriction applies to "online games", but keep in mind in China GaaS games(read: gacha games) are the norm, they are always online to fight piracy. So basically, this applies all the games that actually matters in China.
This will likely to push the China game industry to a new round of battle royal to fight for those little time they have from players, I feel bad for small shops, after 10 years of bloodbath China games had their monetization pattern in place(gacha/monthly passes/daily missions). Now they have to restart over and try again.
eSport scene? yeah, gone, but honestly this is probably good in the long run.
China shops has been winning this era of gaming and crubstomping JP/KR gamedevs with superior gacha models, server stability, update quality/quantity. This mandate will likely to halt their dominance and gave JP/KR a breather.
and I guess Bytedance's game divisions is a goner now...
He's a preschooler, not a teenager or even a kid. Can't you just... not give him a phone/tablet except at specified reward times?
We still watch stuff together every now and then (or if we really need to be focused on smth), but he's in a much better mood throughout.
Right. There's nothing quite as engaging as tv/gaming that he can just sit without guidance and safely do by himself for a few hours at a time while his parents are busy working. Probably comes down to lazy parenting.
We'll have a tough conversation where we lay out the situation, he'll melt down but will eventually accept that it's not working out, and we'll impose temporary restrictions until it feels like things are more under control. He'll quickly realize that going halfway is way too hard, and will regulate himself to a level much stricter than what we imposed.
Then there's a fairly long honeymoon period where he's getting some exposure but not too much. Eventually the beast slowly takes over again, and we repeat.
It's not fun, it's ugly to watch, it's hard to do, but it feels like it's working. As in, I truly believe he's learning better self regulation than I've ever had, and for better reasons.
I'm just thankful my wife is both aware enough and enough of a hardass to pull it off; on my own, I'd do things too late and too extreme, and we'd just be two monkeys reacting to each other.
- Strictly limited screen time, replaced with time spent reading, playing with physical toys like LEGO and playing outside actively. Devices are physically removed from the kid's environment when screen time is over.
- Kids do not get full access to the entire content library. Approved videos and games only. Most have entirely removed the YouTube app from the kid devices in favor of Disney Plus and education-focused apps. Some have kids playing more retro games rather than current games.
The kids will complain and throw tantrums, but they're toddlers, they do that anyway. And eventually they come around. Especially if their friends (children and aunties/uncles) participate with them as well.
eSports are pretty much a negative to the country as a whole. Gaming company use it as ad and sell the illusion to make big bucks. Yes, you could have the next Faker in your country. So what? for every international pro you create there's 100s more kids wasted their youth on a pipe dream where their time could be used to more productive matter. The damage could be justified IF you are the game dev/publisher so your country could benefit from all the royalties, but this is not the case for many of the countries(of course in China this is a mixed case where Tencent holds 100% of Riot).
This is actually a problem in Korea that they have many failed eSport candidate that have no proper skill to live in a very competitive job market. Although Parasite(2019) is a bit exaggerated but not getting in prestigious school/company(Samsung) will likely to put you in a very miserable economy situations.
Competition by nature is a winner takes all game. Age is a strong factor it's event worse than programmer like us which caps around 35-40. For them, it's 25. that means one had to start playing at early teens. Unfortunately most kids are also bad at negotiating terms and compensation nor they hold the bargain chips before they made names, this makes them susceptible from exploitations from all the parties involved. If a player is successful, they make probably same wages as a few high tier engineers. If a player failed, then you have lots of unskilled man with bad health conditions because they spent 12+ hours sitting in fronts of a computer for 10 years. That's disasters waiting to happen.
If I am governor I'll simply make my country very hostile to eSports. If some kid managed to make it, good for the. For the rest of them if they can't even show perseverance than they are bound to fail anyway.
Some of these restrictions have been in place for a few years. The number of allowed hours are being reduced, and the technical standards for enforcement are being strengthened. A key part of this is "real name verification". That's been around in theory for years, but was not that effective. A tougher standard was introduced in September 2020.[2] Tencent and NetEase, the big game companies in China, already have it working. Some of it uses the national identity card, and some of it uses face recognition. Identity cards are only issued at age 16, so verifying kids is hard. There's a slow but steady tightening up on ID in China that's been underway for decades.
There's been a purge of unapproved online games. The Apple app store cooperated last year and deleted about 500 games. Unauthorized game publishers are being shut down.
[1] http://www.news.cn/2021-08/30/c_1127809919.htm
[2] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/games/article/3095509/chinas-rea...
But my working experience is largely with "transition" students in America and can tell you that rules like this are like commanding the tide not to go out. At best you teach them that your rules are arbitrary and give them a framework for subverting them, they may just reject your authority outright and then you've got nothing...
Those critical of the Chinese government should take a look in the mirror. Governments around the world, including those in the US, routinely impose restrictions on minors' ability to access online content. These laws are even structured in a similar way: hold the service providers accountable for monitoring use.
> "Teenagers are the future of our motherland," Xinhua quoted an unnamed NPPA spokesperson as saying. "Protecting the physical and mental health of minors is related to the people's vital interests, and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation."
It's a favorite tactic of authoritarians everywhere: "Just think of the children!" First get a foothold by selling the thing as protecting children. In the US, we have two other options: terrorism and drugs. With the precedent set, expand the policy and watch opponents scramble to find a foothold.
In the US there's always the suspicion of ulterior motives because that's how our government is structured. The Chinese gov't doesn't have to bother. They don't need a foothold, they can just do it.
The USA benefits from having an older population who grew up playing videogames. Anyone under 40 probably played games at least a little bit growing up. And those under 30 almost certainly did, as games started becoming more broadly appealing in the PS2 era. So they view games in a much different way than their parents, who largely knew nothing about videogames did.
My personal experience in this was with a imaginative text-based game called a MUD. There were times when I was spending 20-50+ hours a week role-playing and player-killing with a group of friends. I very nearly flunked out of a full-tuition scholarship my freshman year, and left anyway because it wasn't fulfilling to me - I wanted to be a sysadmin, not study liberal arts. In HS it was fun using a PoE adapter to POTS for Internet access.
The things I took away from excessive gaming were "saying the right words to convince other people I have their best interests at heart" (RP for player-run cabals) and "speed reading skimming" "fast-twitch typing" and "writing conversationally."
I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble financially and academically and emotionally without these 'second lives' but I did see some positive outcomes. Real Life is usually a richer experience socially/experientially... except when it comes to playing make-believe... how much of the intersubjectivity superstructure (sociologically) isn't make-believe...? Perhaps, perhaps.
This is extremely relatable. I grew up playing Runescape and I legitimately think it helped me develop better rhetorical skills than my peers and just better instincts in general when it comes to social and economical things.
Don't get me wrong though, those thousands of hours spent on video games were still not worth it. And I also don't think it's desirable to be too instinctive and "twitchy".
BTW, nothing in the article about limits on TikTok or YouTube or whathaveyougot. That's as much opium as gaming, IMO.
Do you need any more than that? From the western point of view this is the apex reason.
EDIT: To add - it is true in the west that minors don't enjoy all the same freedoms as adults. However for most things those decisions are made by the parents and not the state.
Purely in terms of freedom -- without arguing for any other pros and cons -- is this worse than mandatory school attendance, or not being able to vote, or take medical decisions for themselves, or whatever else kids cannot do these days.
And parents are constantly adjusting the things their kids can or can't do, often requiring kids to ask permission to do most things. Its a way of protecting them from their immature decision making ability (with functional parents anyway).
So I think the aversion is more based on the surprise that it seems to go 'further' than we'd expect in the west, and politics/culture turns that into something to criticize the CPC (or whatever governing body responsible) for because COMMUNISTS!!!
I don't think this is a case of "because..... communists". This move is rightly criticized in my opinion.
But this is just a declaration, not an argument (there's nothing wrong with that.) Should parents be able to let their children smoke or do porn?
And much like with this new Chinese law, many minors violate all of those restrictions often with parental approval.
I mean, isn't this what Korean and Japan's policies effectively are as well? Doesn't seem to help much.
Children were not raised in isolation with two parents for most of history, an entire community was looking out for them as well that was incapable of being overwhelmed with that responsibility partially owing to higher child/birth mortality rates. But now we've put the onus of rearing functioning adults on precisely two people whose own personality and parenting traits are widely variable to begin with, if not influenced by the side effects of this two parent only viewpoint themselves.
Government is instead made up of a tiny number of politicians who are even more poorly equipped to make such personal decisions for millions of children.
I wish I knew the implications to such people when they are older. Is it a good influence? bad influence? doesn't matter? I don't know. Do you have any insights?
But I also know people like you describe, and I think that's perfectly legitimate too.
A lot of children don’t hermit up and play video games because it’s better than being with friends - it’s because they don’t have any friend options in real life.
Where I grew up, I was shunned, bullied, and neglected by pretty much everyone. It became apparent I was actually quite social, funny, and pleasant to be around when I was online. I made a lot of friends quickly when I was online playing games. But in real life I struggled because I wasn’t the right race, didn’t look the right way, wasn’t willing to throw out homophobic and racial slurs, and didn’t enjoy the same activities as everyone else.
I’m really surprised HN has such a myopic 80-year old take on video games. Must be because it’s early still…
I do empathize with you a lot having had a very similar experience in my youth. But ultimately finding people that were like me in real life was crucial.
Sometimes it's better to accept that those people don't exist where you live. Where I grew up - they really didn't exist. I'm fortunate now to live in SV where my interests and what not align more - but in rural America... I do not exist. (People like me leave that place)
I went to small schools (<100 people per grade, sometimes less than 60). If you didn't make your friends in that group - SOL. There weren't other schools to make friends at, social activities for kids, etc. You were stuck with what you had at school and that's about it.
It's probably because I'm younger than you but nowadays there are a lot more people like us thanks to the internet than there were before.
On the other hand, I've definitely seen an echo chamber effect where some people have negative growth socially due to the internet/gaming. E.G. The red pill or incel channels.
> They were one of the few avenues I had for connecting with my peers
Three hours a week isn't much, but it doesn't have to be gaming to connect with people of your age, isn't it?
> It wasn't some waste of time that I regret when I look back as an adult.
I don't think it's what worries the Chinese government. Or me.
I'm quite sure that e.g. a 1 hr/day limit would be a good thing. You can say "parents", but at one point children stop listening. Then what do you do?
Reading decidedly did not do that for me. I didn't have the attention span for/interest in most books.
> but it doesn't have to be gaming to connect with people of your age, isn't it?
Socializing was always difficult for me. Gaming was one of the few things I could mention and my peers would say "oh, me too!"
> I'm quite sure that e.g. a 1 hr/day limit would be a good thing
That would be more than twice the limit described
> You can say "parents", but at one point children stop listening. Then what do you do?
My parents actually did limit me to 30m/day on weekdays (they took the limits off on weekends). I don't know why you suggest that I could've simply ignored them (but somehow couldn't ignore a government mandate?).
When I would reach my limit for the day I'd generally do what homework I had (fair enough), and then... do nothing. Mindlessly watch TV out of total boredom. Looking back, I'm not sure why they thought that was better.
Anyway: the common theme for this and all other totalitarian ideas is that individuals are different people with different needs, and what's best for one isn't best for others.
To put another way, they could limit reading to 3 hours a week for mostly the same reasons.
Of course, playing with a ball in a field might be better, but, covid.
I don't allow them to play single-player games so much, unless it's something original, story or experience-based. Undertale, Braid, Journey, etc.
Certainly nothing 'infinite scrolling', with in-app purchase level-ups, etc, which are obviously just calculated to be addictive.
But I would caution against being too picky about single-player experiences. The most meaningful games for me were not generally story-based, they were "play-based". Exploring mechanics, exploring a world, seeing what might be possible, what might lie out there to be found. Zelda, Pokémon, etc. A game doesn't have to be a work of literature to be meaningful and worthwhile; children in particular benefit from play. I would cite Minecraft as a good modern example of this ethos (which can of course be played either alone or with others, and is valuable in both modes).
Depending on the kind of "ball", but your kid goes to school., no?
that's way more dangerous than playing outside in the sunshine. from a covid perspective.
I categorize this as "maybe". If you're a physically fit child with good hand/eye coordination, playing ball is fun. If you're not, due to genetics, weight, or illness, it's closer to torment.
Also, playing ball is almost always going to be competitive - there are no bots and only rarely cooperative objectives involved.
Some of it was my personality, some of it was how my parents raised me. Some was how that was juxtaposed against the culture/environment i was raised into.
My parents pushed a lot of sports and i grew out of it - favoring poetry ( that i didn't have thick enough skin to ever better myself at), dreaming of being a rock musician (see former), watching hours of scifi and fantasy.
And i dunno. Now I'm 40. And all my life i've almost prided myself on my introversion, my anti-social aspects, my quirky, sometimes cynical view of the world, my constantly ability to not want to be locked into the major binaries and choices society sets out for you.
And after coming down with severe anxiety.... something about it just flipped in me that made me realize how valuable human connection is.
how much family matters. How much connections with your community does. Not some online community of people who only get in contexts you can easily block or mute.
How much.. being outside in sunshine and nature and being active, matters.
I look at this boring cyberpunk world i was a part of, and there's nothing there but isolation and depression. There's nothing there but bad habits preventing you from being your best, healthiest, happiest, you.
And it's one of these things you don't realize....until something happens that forces you to need these things. Then you look back and be like.. would i ever be right where I'm at, right here, right now.. if i didn't do all this mentally unhealthy shit for 25+ years?
There's lots of reasons i wasn't positively engaged with my peers - there's blame to go around to me, my folks, and even externally to just the way society was and increasingly is, but I take responsibility for my portion and i say my reaciton to it all was wrong.
And don't want my kid getting lost in digital worlds (and jesus - it's so much scarier today that it was 20-25 years ago), hiding away, brooding to depressive and aggressive, mad-at-the-world music and basically being someone who's unreachable unless you're some underdog geek or "wrong crowd" peer.
I don't have the time in the day to find some happy center. I'm happy to cut out video games and wasting my time online except for the odd Hacker News break while I'm at work.
The pendulum might be swinging, but i have a lot less free time now than I used to and I chose to use it more precisely and with more conscious intent rather than just letting the hours waste away clicking around in a digital wonderland.
If i want to read - then i make time for that. I make time for alone time, exercise, being outdoors. I make family time. I do this around work, taking my kid to sports events, school drop offs and pickups.
I look back and see the 20k posts i made on Vbulletin forms and all the reddit accounts I had and all the hours logged on video games and it all just seems like a waste of life looking back..
When i think about the things that enriched me, these things did not.
40-50+ years ago, all the way back to the dawn of man - so most of human history, this conversation would be completely irrelevant.
Technology changes us an individuals and as a society, it's broken our bonds, ruined out communities, destroyed our connections to each other, increased rabid individualism - not just in the political sense but in the sense of consumer identities and lifestyle brands and hyper-specific cultural balkanization and what do we have to show for it?
mass increases in anxiety and depression levels.
The average high school student today has the anxiety levels of a person being seen by professionals for the disorder in the 90s.
As a parent... you are going to project one way or another. I'll project the way that'll more than likely build a stronger, happier, more resilient child.
This love affair with the people who give you likes and retweets being the only ones who really get you, is poison. Relating to digital worlds more than the real one - sitting around for hours upon hours "consooooomnig" digital goods from your phone or laptop, is not life.
I'd advise you to take a step back and unpack the baggage you clearly have around this stuff. Not just for your own sake.
It's damaging to perpetuate this no matter how common of a new wives tale it is.
Probably not
Like how, currently, a Chinese team (PSG.LGD) is the favourite to win The International in Dota2 in a month's time (prize pool: 40 million dollars).
The idea here is they should be doing something better with their time right?
But as you note no limits on other time eating activities with their own negative effects.
I think it would be better to use a carrot here and hopefully encourage / try to encourage better choices... or even if they want to target games just outlaw the specifics of the problem, loot boxes, and so on.
Why would it be good? I played a lot of computer games as a kid and loved it. Why should it be restricted to just 3 hours a week? So children can grow up to be really good cogs in the system, thinking what politicians want them to think, working a "proper" job, having exactly as much children as party wants them to have in that particular period, etc.?
And I think gaming in moderation is very positive.
Children don't have freedoms, they have whatever their parents decide they can have. As a child in the US, your parents can legally assault you and can send you to what is effectively prison ('military schoool,' but same concept). You rarely hear any complaints about this being a crisis.
If parents in China want their kids playing more video games they can just create an account for them and it's business as usual. This is more of a signal from the top that excessive screen time for children isn't a thing that society approves of.
I do feel like a government (never mind central government) having the power to legislate at that level of micro-management is very bad. There would seem to be absolutely no limiting principle to what is appropriate or not appropriate to be legislated if you accept this level of government oversight as acceptable.
I know for myself, the reason I work in tech is because of my love for video games as a kid got me into computers. Being a programmer is a huge blessing economically, and I never would have done it if I hadn't spent all that time lost in video games.
Unfortunately even the current Counter-Strike incarnation has a fucking casino in it. Arguably more optional than in other games but still there.
My thoughts were that there are too many kind of video games to club them all as "games are bad". And probably I'll focus on limiting the kind of games or specific games themselves.
Some games are just elaborate casino games in nicer clothes. I really don't see benefits to that. But some offline games offer interesting stories and challenges that need brain/dexterity to solve. I feel those are probably just as good as books or movies/tv.
For online competitive games, that's a harder one. Games like Fortnite, COD, online sports games, and all that. Some people say it lets kids play together with friends, but I find nowadays it can also just expose yourself to kind of bad social interactions.
Coop online games and such, where the friend group is closed, like you play within your friends, no other strangers involved I feel is probably fine.
Having said all that, I feel that we're missing some actual evidence here to say if games are good or bad. Is there actually some data on it? Any correlation with kids who spent a lot of time playing video games and how they turned out later in life? I personally did grow up playing games, and I turned out fine, so sometimes I wonder if it's more of a false scare than anything.
If you look at their 5 year plan release this year, there's a huge focus on research on next generation technologies. This is a write-up about it: https://merics.org/en/short-analysis/chinas-14th-five-year-p...
Right now, games like Apex Legends, League of Legends, etc. suck up a lot of time and I think China doesn't want its youth to do that. It would rather them focus on how they can contribute as they grow older.
China has always had a heavy hand in social engineering and this is just another example. Whether it's good or not, is left to be seen.
If China finishes building their city in space and lands on Mars, while the rest of the world are watching e-sports, don't be surprised.
(And even ONLINE may not be quite precise enough.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/video-game-facia...
> The new functions will initially be used on around 60 mobile games, including the massively popular "Honor of Kings" multiplayer battle game, which boasts over 100 million daily users.
Diablo III is a bad example in that it's actually an online multiplayer game now. It didn't use to be, but I think it was planned all along.
Beyond that if it means kids won't play online-only single player games with all of the economic impacts that has on these games I think that's a very different thing. But that's not actually the case rn.
Multiplayer has always been included with D3. And singleplayer mode still exists. But, let me add a different examples.
Doom Eternal's campaign can be played offline, but only after you've signed into your account.
Genshin Impact is online only, even though you can play it alone.
AFK Arena, a mobile singleplayer-only game, requires you to be online.
Crash Bandicoot 4, a singleplayer-only game, requires you to be online.
> That system applies only to online games.
I don't know a lot about the system, so you are likely right. But I have to ask, is there anything that restricts it to multiplayer online games only - aside from the current policy?
Point taken for all of the others. The law will force them to provide a true single player mode, which is good.
As far as single player games, it's technically infeasible. People will just pirate games and nothing can be done about that.
While this ban seems very specific (only online, certain hours of the week) I wonder if the companies might try to overachieve and extend it to offline games or social media platforms as well. Guess it depends on how the parents/ companies interpret that law (is it a law?). Watching the recent VIPKid / online teaching fallout, they just banned online classes very short notice for the remaining summer holidays. According to some VIPKid teachers however they're not getting new classes booked for september or the existing ones are getting cancelled.
Edit: or pirated games.
Scarcity artificially increases percieved value.
This is how you make something more addictive, not less.
Underage users would find ways to appear to be 18 or older. Or use multiple accounts to continue playing. This is already common in many grind games. You have support accounts that feed the main account items.
Or just straight up hacking the timer system. Or playing games published outside if China.
Where there's a will, there's a way.
I'm sure some people will find ways around it, but I don't think that will be the norm.
When I was a kid, my parents refused to buy me a machine good enough to play the games I wanted. As a result, I got scrappy and found a way to piece together a computer that was decent enough to play at least "something". The main game I was interested in was the infamous "Star Control II". I was able to social engineer my mother to nag my father into bringing home a dusty 386 that was in his office so he could "work from home". It was weak sauce but back then you had stacks of manuals to read, and I spent endless hours "tweaking" and learning everything to get things to run. Scrapping ancient free hardware from my “rich” friends. Little did I know I was learning valuable skills.
Before long I was building computers for the whole neighborhood, went on to be a CS major and now do large scale software.
Make the kid earn the fun.
I wonder how this will effect the Perfect World/Valve partnership.
Besides, this regulation does not appear ban things such as a Dota club at school (online play would be forbidden, but local lobbies would not).
While I am responsible for my actions, I am still learning and growing, and it is helpful to have government looking out for our collective health.
I watched an interview with David Harbor and he made a really amazing point. ( David is an avid poker player ): D&D is a lot like poker, in that it doesn't get REALLY good until you've been doing it so long that you get the feeling you should REALLY be doing something else.
I feel the same way about gaming. I play a lot less anymore, and that is because the way to play a game is to dive in and really immerse yourself in it for a few hours straight.
Hell, you can't even get warmed UP in an online FPS game in under an hour.
As an introvert kid, socialising mainly happened via video-games for me (and most of my circle of friends). With 3hs a week of ANY social interaction, I doubt I'd ever had made any friends, or developed ANY social skills at all.
I fondly recall draining days and days and days into online multiplayer games, made some of my best friends who are still with me to this day across state lines, and came to my wedding, while eating all sorts of stereotypically bad gamer junk food.
Other than spending too much time arguing with people online, I don't find myself outside of what people would consider "well adjusted."
Besides, most people don't spend their entire lives playing video games for hours on end. You do get tired of it.
On second thought, maybe such rules would help one keep their love of games for longer...
This is to control the demand for GPUs, as there is now such a drastically psychotic situation around the supply that a nation-state must now intervene to allocate cards for their AI projects.
Addiction to Online/PC Gaming is a real problem in China.
This. And social development. What are the implications of having all of your friends online and never met them in real life?
I can think of a dozen negatives
It's interesting how gaming addiction is on the fast track for a formal disorder diagnosis (https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/internet-gaming, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5700715/). When I look at Candy Crush - just to pick on one - and other "gamified" (ie optimized for addiction) cases they seem to have a lot more negatives, particularly for groups with still-developing prefrontal cortexes. I really worry about the developmental impact of modern gaming and social media. I have increasingly seen kids that are just not well attached to reality in ways that are detrimental to them, going on several years now.
It feels bad to pick on escapism when the world is such a mess, but, just like the similarly increasing drug problems (particularly in opiates) it is only making the situation worse.
Peace and quiet?
They want kids to engage with work and, well, each other, to raise families, rather than having purely digital lives.
Show me a mobile game that has a good story, little grind, works offline and sells for ~$60 with no in-game purchases.
Phones are as capable as a PS3/PS4 these days, too.
For various reasons, the issue is not nearly as prevalent in the U.S. or Europe but it's a pretty big issue across Asia.
Is this the right way to curb it? Absolutely not, the government should look to find the root causes of the addiction, mostly social in nature, and promote healthy alternatives, but like most things the government is more interest in easy and short term solutions.
You want them to learn social skills (for future reproductive success), study math/science, etc.
The US brain-drained the entire world for more 100 years, and the CCP likely sees efforts like this as a way to catch up.
I disagree -- I think you become as powerful as the US by being the best place for smart people to move to, not by forcing your populous into a predetermined mold -- but they're never going to be the attractive bastion of freedom that the US was perceived as.
996 white colar jobs are not high pace low paying slave jobs?...
And how many such jobs are there anyway...
If not, and if the CCP is as interested in controlling discussion as people in the West think they are, online games are a problem. Youth are supposed to be more impressionable and easily influenced. So, the CCP may just be trying to limit competition.
How effective/strict has enforcement of the previously existing time limits been?
If time limits haven't been hard to circumvent or punishments for doing so severe, most kids would have routinely flouted the rules. Video games are quite the carrot.
It would be interesting if, by feebly enforcing these time limits, a totalitarian government would willingly commit the blunder of passing a law that trains children to disobey the state.
Prohibition can restrict and reduce participation and usage at an overall level, but certainly some portion of this will be pushed underground, or to unregulated spaces - probably just the thing the government WOULDN'T want to have.
Particularly when we are talking about some portion of the players being addicts here... how many are going to sign up for VPNs, Tor (or some other workaround) and find some other game or activity that satisfies that itch?
If people can’t express their resent at all, at some point they even stop thinking about it.
...and lots of disaffected people end up dead or beaten or in prison or, seeing those options demonstrated vividly, resigned to their fate under the CCP’s rule, unwelcome as it may be.
It’s not like this hasn't played out already several times over different issues.
Yes, we [*] know that, because its happened before, see, e.g., the ’89 Democracy Movement.
On the other hand, we [*] know how that ended, too.
[*] Unless our information comes exclusively from the CCP-filtered internet, in which case, maybe not.
That's basically the story of 90% of parents in China pre 90s. This is more a continuation than disruption. These kids will play games when they turn into adults and enforce same limitations on their children. Keep in mind curbing video game addiction is something Chinese parents WANT, this is CCP listening to their base. Children don't vote in the west either, their interest are lobbied by adults.
Old ban: 1.5 hours per weekday, 3 hours on weekends
Though, maybe when discussing China it seems like beating a dead horse to some...
There should be no debate about this, discussing the pros and cons of games and the potential for addiction.
Well, this is China, at least this has the merit of clarifying their policies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzrxrN_3seo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJk7VGldrYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix1RY-2C9lA
Most of the corps are back to their 996 schedules, this includes low tier, manual heavy sweatshops. you can ask people who have contact in China, they will all tell you the same thing.
Knowing COVID, it's not possible "fake" it at this scale nor this long. They had COVID in control, more or less.
The Chinese government was able to control the pandemic because they are authoritarian. Meanwhile Florida just received 14 portable morgues.
Before I get the "Fake News" crowd coming at me...I was on a video conference call last week with my Chinese counterparts in my company (my first meeting) and I was taken aback when everyone in the conference room didn't have masks...then I remember their spread is basically nill.
This will almost certainly be extended beyond China because of the obvious data mining revenue and will almost certainly be a net loss for consumers globally.
It will be really interesting to see what types of games or hacks are cooked up to get around this.
Perhaps a burgeoning distributed gaming scene.
and this was before the recent PR disaster
they made the calculation that losing some percentage of their western markets to appease the CCP was worth it
and now they're going to lose that too
couldn't happen to a group of nicer people
Blizzard maybe, but Blizzard is owned by ATVI and are still growing top line revenue QoQ:
https://www.reuters.com/companies/ATVI.OQ/financials/income-...
So, yes the company is technically still in "piles of cash" ($2.8B net cash from operations in 2020 for example).
In the meantime the actual authoritarians who are persecuting religions and minorities are walking all over them and getting them to comply.
But I do think everyone would be better off if any game with a cash shop tied to randomness (loot boxes) or an in-game mechanic tied to randomness that can be exacerbated with cash shop purchases (Black Desert Online's gear improvement mechanic being a good example) be limited to those who are of gambling age.
Mandates are only enforceable if you have control in the first place, so your reasoning is backwards.
Or publishers can cirvument entirely by moving games web on foreign server, and it's another entertainment locked behind VPN situation.
The harder the government bans it, the more tempting it would be.
Caveat: I know next to nothing about the gaming universe in China :-)
The ban applies to the service, not the client. Could we have another Renaissance of local gaming again? More games allowing LAN-based play in response to minors not being able to regularly access a centralized server.
Or log in with your older sibling’s ID or parents ID.
If the video game ban is strictly enforced, but 996 ban is not strictly enforced, that's a recipe for a lot of social discontent down the line.
One of my goals if I were in charge of the Chinese government would be to get that rate down by making what rules and laws I introduce easy to enforce (and easy to understand and to follow).
In particular, if I were going to impose this kind of ban, I would've made it apply to everyone, not just under-18s. Well, actually, I would've made 2 tiers of restrictions, the looser tier allowing more hours per week, so that if a boy escapes the stricter tier of restrictions (e.g., by signing in with the credentials of an adult in his life) he still has some limits on how much he can play.
Seems odd that you’d only apply this to boys.
I was assuming (but do not want to defend the claim) that most of the children wanting to play more than the allowed amount of time will be boys.
I'm obviously against that kind of regulation coming from the state.
I'm saying that and I was addicted to WoW during end of high school and college. But guess what? It was better than any alternative. My life sucked at home, at school, and personally. I lived in country where I was a misfit. I was lucky to have a fun outlet that also made me fluent in English and learn a few skills along the way.
My elders thought I should spend time doing normal things like watching TV instead.
Hilariously out of touch.
How can they possibly implement this regulation?
“Don’t stand in a way between a 9yo and Roblox”
They will absolutely send you in jail rather than give up Roblox/MC/Youtube.
I understand this is aimed at someone who isn't legally an "adult" so I can give some small leeway in that case. However, I don't think this enforceable at all and it really still comes down to the parents putting in time to limit them.
Nationwide BBSes (Compuserv, AOL, etc.) and then the Internet have made or accelerated societal change. People can congregate and share information at a scale that wasn't feasible before, and in particular marginalized groups have found strength in numbers that just wasn't possible before.
I think the 24 hour television news cycle (and the advertising it takes to support it) has also had more of an impact than games.
[1] - https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-no...
I spent a LOT of time gaming in my teen years, but my parents practically forced me to play outside with friends, ride my bike, be a part of a church youth group, and greatly encouraged my hobbies programming and designing software formally starting at age 8.
I already had a pretty well-balanced life, and by this policy's standards, I would be "too addicted to gaming" and breaching its rules.
Today I work a wonderful job in tech getting paid well, and by and large love my life.
While in some ways, I can agree with the outcomes these policies are driving at, I can never get behind a government enforcing these at the risk of penalizing a family or children for breaching it.
Wars have been fought and won (rightfully) over the culmination of these types of far-reaching policies that seek to determine how an individual spends their recreational time outside of other obligations like school and work.
It also sets a terrible precedent for controlling the amount of time an individual spends on any other activity. I fundamentally reject the reasoning behind viewing gaming as a potential addiction when any other recreational activity could be classified as such if one spends a great deal of time pursuing it, especially given that many games incorporate history; useful story tropes for understanding life, myth, and relationships; and for online games, the social bonds, management of guilds/clans/resources, and other portable skills that readily translate to corollary activities in a multitude of career fields.
China really knows how to bum its citizens out on so many levels, and the fact that so many in Western cultures seek the cold-calculated utilitarian outcomes of policies like these for Western civilizations without considering the tangible, psychological, emotional, and cultural impacts (among others) on societies is absolutely appalling.
Western civilizations didn't endure wars and literal genocide over freedom from authoritarian lawmaking (and taxation) only to have these freedoms challenged again and again by a select few who have the audacity, hubris, and arrogance to impose on them in the name of the better good. Fuck that.
Perhaps by joining a gang…
Or, if I'm being frank, a more inherently valuable form of entertainment than gaming.
OK, probably not. Kids will figure out how to go around it somehow.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=...
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.
- Jeffery McDaniel
> China has sought to deal with addiction to video games by its youth by enacting regulations to be implemented by video game publishers aimed to limit consecutive play time particularly for children. As early as 2005 China's Ministry of Culture has enacted several public health efforts to address gaming and internet related disorders. One of the first systems required by the government was launched in 2005 to regulate adolescents' Internet use, including limiting daily gaming time to 3 hours and requiring users' identification in online video games. In 2007, an "Online Game Anti-Addiction System" was implemented for minors, restricting their use to 3 hours or less per day. The ministry also proposed a "Comprehensive Prevention Program Plan for Minors’ Online Gaming Addiction" in 2013, to promulgate research, particularly on diagnostic methods and interventions. China's Ministry of Education in 2018 announced that new regulations would be introduced to further limit the amount of time spent by minors in online games. While these regulations were not immediately binding, most large Chinese publishers took steps to implement the required features. For example, Tencent restricted the amount of time that children could spend playing one of its online games, to one hour per day for children 12 and under, and two hours per day for children aged 13-18. This is facilitated by tracking players via their state-issued identification numbers. This has put some pressure on Western companies that publish via partners in China on how to apply these new anti-addiction requirements into their games, as outside of China, tracking younger players frequently raises privacy concerns. Specialized versions of games, developed by the Chinese partner, have been made to meet these requirements without affecting the rest of the world; Riot Games let its China-based studio implement the requirements into League of Legends for specialized release in China.
> A new law enacted in November 2019 limits children under 18 to less than 90 minutes of playing video games on weekdays and three hours on weekends, with no video game playing allowed between 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. These are set by requiring game publishers to enforce these limits based on user logins. Additionally, the law limits how much any player can spend on microtransactions, ranging from about $28 to $57 per month depending on the age of the player.[126] In September 2020, the government implemented its own name-based authentication system to be made available to all companies to uphold these laws.[1]
So China is quite serious about it, even going as far as tying playtime to their national id system (which westerners are probably going to balk at), and imposing limits to micro-transactions for underage players (which, I think, is actually a good thing). It's interesting that eyesight issues are also brought up as a rationale (especially considering the school cramming culture there). Kind of a mixed bag IMHO, but alas, what'd you expect from mass-implemented regulations?
[0][1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_China#Governmen....
I'm guessing they took a look at Korea and Japan's well-known issues with young men isolating themselves enabled by the high availability of online gaming and said "nah". Both of those countries are also experiencing widening gaps in hetero gender relations whereby there's a big issue with how many people are unmarried past their 30s into middle-age, and I imagine the CCP is not interested in either unregulated population controls or having to erect infrastructure to cater to elderly and middle-aged single people as is already happening in Korea. Also related to the notion that the real estate game is nominally designed to accomodate single people graduating from apartments to houses as married couples.
Video games are just a popular form of escapism. Limiting access will just drive people to other forms of escapism (potentially more dangerous ones) unless these underlying issues are solved.
The overwhelming majority of comments here are both:
1. Partially or fully supportive of this policy.
2. Downvoted to grey.
There seem to be two ways people are engaging with this topic:
1. Writing a nuanced comment about how this is probably good for children or well meaning (to be downvoted by most readers).
2. Upvoting the handful of comments that point out how this is obviously a terrible overreach (but not writing as much in a comment because it has already been said).
Because those with an unpopular opinion have so much more to express, those perspectives generate the most comments and the fewest upvotes/most downvotes.
This phenomenon tends to make it seem like a minority opinion is held by the majority present.
The top comment is still, "I have mixed feelings about this" and totally lumps together all "modern games" as the toxic problem this win-some-lose-some law might be "needed" for; and that's exactly the facade of nuance I'm complaining about.
Just because a law is intended to fix a real problem doesn't mean we need to prop up devil's advocate on stilts to balance it against criticism.
A government forcing tens of millions of children to log in to a centralized database to make sure they only play video games during a specific perscripted three hours/week is prima facie insane. Leading discussion about it with "mixed feelings" is utterly disingenuous and unrepresentative.
If they cared so much about people not wasting their time maybe they shouldn't have forced thousands of people to become athletes solely for the Olympics and when they inevitably fail to become pro and they don't have any education because they spent their entire life sheltered training so they now have to beg on the street for handouts, that seems like a waste of time.
China is just North Korea in different clothes and with the long term aspirations of Nazi Germany during WWII. China will be the next catalyst for the next major war, they are pretty much that aggressive.
I'm with him on this, gambling, and even flapping a few billionaire's egos/finances.
It’s about more than just online games. It’s about control.
I’m sure the great firewall is perfectly fine as well?
I don't get the desire to see everything as black and white and boil everything problem down to a slippery slope fallacy.
If you are only looking for a cartoon villain and not, say, yourself, you might be caught flat footed when it arrives at your door.
The topic in question was whether Covid restrictions has made people more comfortable with other authoritarian measures which are implemented to benefit society as a whole. I actually think it's a very apt point and I'm surprised you don't see the connection.
Half of the US is up in arms about it, for better or worse. I think you'd have a hard time imposing anything on the US.
The other half doesn't think immunizations are authoritarian, just science.
Maybe 1% of the loud and attention grabbing people on either side of the isle wants to impose things on the other just for the sake of imposing them.
So not exactly.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/7576955/coronavirus-vaccine-passp...
[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/8104692/canada-getting-proof-of-v...
Faced with this, it's not surprising to me that many people would see a more authoritarian government to be preferable to a laissez faire approach that requires the vast majority of individuals to make reasonably good choices for the collective and understand the wider implications of their behavior.
It would be ironic if the right wing shrieking for 'freedom' ends up backlashing on all of us because they've simultaneously demonstrated that we're not mature enough to handle that level of freedom.
Australia was a model for success, until a cab driver in Sydney contracted the delta variant. Much of the country is now in total lockdown, while the army patrols Sydney streets and daily COVID cases continue to rise exponentially, far exceeding any previous COVID outbreak in Australia. There is no ten billion dollar program to develop vaccines for new variants, no path to eradication, and no way out of the continuing crisis except to ignore it. Therefore, I expect that this situation of mandatory quarantines, mandatory vaccination proof, mandatory negative test result proof, and multiple new-variant outbreaks and lockdowns annually will continue until politically untenable, and I conclude that countries instituting hard lockdowns are not places where I want to live or travel, until they eventually reform.
Australia knows it can just... get vaccines right? They are sitting at 27.1% fully vaccinated vs 52% in the US. What's their excuse?
Ahh. This one is good old pure utter incompetence plus possibly some good old corruption thrown in to the mix as well.
As much as a I understand, the gov decided not to buy Pfizer early in the pandemic since they could produce AstraZeneca plus an early vaccine candidate developed at University of Queensland at CSL (Australian BioTech company).
Instead of placing multiple orders with multiple providers, they put all their faith into CSL and it's trials.
Turns out, the vaccine at University of Queensland returned false positives of HIV cases. Stage 2/3 trials never occurred.
AstraZeneca later turned out to have side effects that quickly led to vaccine-hesitancy. By that time, Pfizer had supply issues since the US went full swing in to the vaccination drive.
There were some reports that the PM's mates were high up in CSL. I am not entirely sure of that bit but it doesn't seem unlikely.
The five key reasons that come to mind, after witnessing events unfold:
1. Sitting at a lower global priority on the vaccine purchase list for Pfizer due to very low case numbers.
2. Government deciding that the bulk of vaccines should be produced locally (likely due to a combination of sourcing being difficult, and for national security reasons). This inevitably means taking a bit longer to ramp production up.
3. The Australian Immunization Advisory Group declaring that the vaccine produced locally should be used on people aged 60+, while Pfizer would be the preferred vaccine for everyone else.
4. No vaccine injury scheme. If you are unlucky and get a rare blood clotting disorder, you have to wear the full treatment cost. And because of #3, you have to see a doctor and sign a waiver to get AstraZeneca. (This has since been relaxed now and does not have to be a doctor consultation. You can just sign the waiver at the point of vaccination)
5. Government not pushing as hard, as it in hindsight should have, to purchase more Pfizer. This is a difficult call for any government to have made at the start of the pandemic though and really ties back into #1. The locally produced vaccine would have easily covered the entire population, but the chance of blood clotting really did a number on this strategy.
If I buy a car, there's a warranty on it. Why doesn't the government stand by what it's recommending people inject?
“ The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,””
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
"From September 13, NSW residents that are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will be given new freedoms.
Residents of hotspots can leave home for an hour of recreation on top of their exercise hour, while people in other areas can meet five others outdoors.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the vaccination milestone of six million reached this week would allow for a small renewal in freedoms for residents with the jab."
Freedom is never granted, only earned.
Comparing this kind of thing to what China is doing is drawing a false equivalency. There is no legitimate comparison to be made.
Mild? Australians can't travel more than 5km from their homes. For essential purposes only. Vaccinated Australians can only leave their homes for 2 hours a day (unvaxed 1 hour a day).
In Oregon we were on a very bad trajectory in the last two weeks with hospitals full and "elective" medical procedures suspended in some areas (my family being directly effected by this), that is now being deflected a bit by the renewed mask mandate. And in America we're very fortunate with how easy access we have to vaccines, other places aren't as lucky so they have to enact harsher measures...
I've complained in other spaces about this, but it really feels like we're reliving the 1918 flu again. People dealt with restrictions the first year, but got fed up the second year. Costing lots of human lives.
My problem is simply the loose definition. Kate Brown didn't even say that much, I don't think. But if that's the metric, it should be easy enough to say so, and define it. E.g. "When ICU bed occupancy is below 90% and has declined for three consecutive weeks, the mandate is lifted."
I think many people would quibble less about the mandates if they weren't open-ended.
Your argument is already flawed. We don't have vaccines available to everyone in the US yet.
I'm not even "very" libertarian at all, yet I find the "temporary" (which is not so very temporary) and "mild" (which is not so very mild) authoritarian measures absolutely reprehensible.
Just saying something is a false equivalency doesn't make it so. Both instances have the government putting limits on your autonomy in unprecedented ways. The government is very boldly telling you what you can and cannot do and how much of it when allowed. I completely reject your characterization of totalitarianism as "mild" and "making complete sense."
"Ahh, they fell for the temporary fallacy!"
Most Libertarians are extremist libertarians in my view.
Both things can be simultaneously true.
I think you've implicitly agreed that the pandemic countermeasures were authoritarian, and this thread is saying "authoritarian bad." But we all saw what happened to places that delayed or denied countermeasures. If authoritarian bad, then that questions whether non-authoritarian is actually good in this case.
>"Temporary and mild authoritarian measures during a once-in-a-century pandemic make complete sense, even to very libertarian people. "
I have not seen any (even centrist) libertarians supporting these measures; having checked the most mainstream libertarian publication (Reason). Additionally, 'very libertarian people' are minarchists, who definitely don't support these measures.
Have you actually seen/heard 'very libertarian people' endorsing these measures? Is it possible that the parent is projecting their beliefs onto others?
Very-libertarians? That’s a good point; I’m not sure I’ve seen any. But it’s hard to know who among us is very-libertarian except those who say so, which may be a small subset.
There’s a newsworthy virus (usually SARS-like) every 2-5 years. There are notable “variants” every few months. The perceived risk of COVID has a lot to do with reporting, which is fickle at best. Heart disease kills hundreds of thousands and we basically don’t care.
>temporary
Nixon’s closing the Gold window and Bush’s GWOT come to mind as substantial counter-examples. I don’t foresee the US politburo giving up on their newfound unlimited and totally arbitrary authority so long as their appointed brain trust says it’s for your own good. Their subjects might start to ignore them, though.
But now would be a good time to roll back all the temporary 9/11 stuff, if there are any politicians wanting to see some trust lent to talk about 'temporary'. Hard to see a better occasion for it ever coming up, with the 20th anniversary in a couple weeks.
About the WW2 example, I was surprised how much was still on the books and even in continuing 'emergency' use, reading https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Leviathan-Critical-Government-...
The U.S. legal system is by no means perfect but there are very few examples of real abuse that go unchecked for long periods. U.S. history is full of overreach that is curtailed relatively quickly, although it can go on for years at a time.
The Patriot Act was not renewed. Very little over the overreach inspired by 9/11 is still in place. Even mass surveillance has been curtailed and restricted to a large degree (although not enough by my estimation).
I think it's status-quo bias to look at this picture and think the high-order bit is that yes, temporary emergency measures were temporary. In the bigger picture there are dozens of separate national emergencies getting repeatedly renewed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i....
No, the West isn't find. Mild tyranny isn't cool and how temporary these measures are is debated. If they actually were temporary, why is there no restriction for how long they can last? How much longer will it go? Nobody knows.
This is a loophole in our constitutions, they can use "emergency" situations to suspend civil rights indefinitely. This very same method has been used many times in history to establish dictatorships and totalitarian systems, so it's a very legitimate concern.
And the U.S. has a legal system unlike any other country, that has proven itself able to prevent long-standing and unjustified overreach. The Supreme Court is incredibly powerful and has the ability to strike down unconstitutional laws, and has done so many times.
People should be concerned about this issue and pay close attention. But there is very little reason to be very concerned at all. These mask mandates, or even requiring vaccine proof, is not a cover story for a take over of the U.S.
These are extremely rational and justified, and even mild, measures being taken to address a very real and easily verified threat.
The U.S. is not Australia. No one's first amendment rights are being curtailed. Anything anyone wants to say is perfectly accessible to the public. No one is being fined.
And the U.S. is not China or a a banana republic and there's absolutely no evidence that we're in any danger of becoming like either.
Like literally everyone else in tech who knows how the sausage gets made, I'm appalled by the teams of Ph.Ds which exist solely to exploit the dopamine response of children. However, it never would have ever crossed my mind to jump from "here's a particular problem" to "the government should control how much of a specific activity your child can do at home"
You can read about it here from their own page:
https://careers.king.com/kingdom-news/data-at-king/
> That experiment is typical of how we learn from data at King. We have about 150 people working in data roles, out of a total workforce of 2,000. They come from a range of backgrounds. Many are from the games industry, of course, but we also bring in lots of recruits straight from university.
> These people will have just done their masters or PhD in a wide range of disciplines. Many of our team studied statistics, physics or computer science but we also have people who came from theoretical biology because work on DNA sequencing in that field has produced a lot of data-sophisticated people. Others are behavioural psychologists or behavioural economists.
Now in the specific example they choose to highlight they saw that making the game less frustrating made people spend more money. However if making the game more frustrating turned out to make more money since users bought more powerups then they absolutely would do it.
The obvious scenarios are alcohol, nicotine & drugs. As a parent of young children, there are addition parallels between Minecraft / Roblox / Alcohol / Cigarettes.
To a real degree, more effort is put into making gaming deliberately additive - although flavored vaping (bubble gum, cotton candy, etc) would like to enter the conversation.
Flavored vaping products are for sure bad. I'll happily give you that. I'll also give you sugar, processed food, alcohol, cigarettes, McDonalds, and a near never ending supply of things we regularly consume (food, entertainment, or other).
I wouldn't petition the government to control access to any of them. I tend to trust the millions of individual personal (or parental) decisions over the long haul more than I do centrally planned, top-down mandates.
My belief is that's a reasonable debate with very valid points on both sides. At a personal level, kids 2-12 are Addicted to games (Minecraft, Roblox, etc). Taking the games away has the same impact as taking away narcotics from an addict.
The unregulated ability of these platforms to target children (and they do), seems very analogous to pre-regulated cigarettes, drug, and alcohol marketing.
I wager more psychological studies are done on driving MAU, rapid viral adoption, and upping Click Through Rates than were done for nicotine.
Seems insane to suggest that adults would prefer the taste of ashtray over apple or orange (I like fruity aromas). I mostly vape without flavoring nowadays because I'm lazy, but I just don't get the mindset. Adults like sugar, sweets, lemonade and all that stuff just as much as children do. Some seem to really like the taste of cigarettes, but I think for the most part people are just more comfortable to say "I like the taste" instead of "I'm addicted to nicotine", because inhaling burnt plant matter along with the diffused active agents and aromatic compounds generally isn't good for taste. Weed also tastes much better vaped.
It's honestly nice to see a not totally incompetent government try a novel policy with good intentions. It's welcome break from the firehose of our own government making policies that seem to only target the poor and minorities.
Actually though this is a fucking big brother atrocity of a policy that people will inevitably circumvent and the government will pick and choose when to enforce.
I fully agree with this and actively encourage this behavior, but we also need to be careful with our words because 1) we're in a time that we're discouraging this kind of practice and 2) as stated above there are factions actively promoting confusion about this specific subject matter (specifically ones relevant to this conversation).
I would love if we could all argue in good faith and give the benefit of the doubt, but it should not be a working assumption.
1. The people being enforced will find ways around these laws, naturally because it's considered unreasonable and overreaching in some regards.
2. In doing so, the government will selectively enforce these rules based on the limited amount of information or surveillance used to enforce these rules, so those who are busted for breaking them will pay the price, while others who are breaking the rules without getting caught will not pay the price.
I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence by breaking this down, but it's worth clarifying the scenarios.
While I agree with the GP's sentiment (it's very much overreaching into the private lives of its citizens who may wish to decide for themselves (or their family) how they spend their free, recreational time), the argument is no different from the fact that many DUI offenders never get caught while some do and pay the penalties.
I don't think this is a strong enough argument to mount a realistic protest against it, but it's a small factor that's unequivocally true -- many will get away with gaming longer than 3 hours anyway.
Gaming longer than 3 hours will give youth a good thrill at least. ;)
Jokes aside, this policy sucks.
This is more like the CCP imposing its value system on them.
I honestly don't see what the big difference is between online games and weed.
It doesn't really seem off-brand for governments these days to be making these kinds of decisions.
I mean, if they decided to make coffee illegal for kids - yeah, that seems dumb, right? But is that REALLY that big of a difference than making tobacco illegal?
I just don't see a huge difference with online gaming.
Video games aren't all mindless watching of bibs and bobs and dodads and shinies. They're often organized groups of social activity.
There is a chance that liberal government is the most effective government, ever - the so-called end of history argument, but let's not forget the shot heard around the world was fired less than 250 years ago. Benevolent dictatorship could still work - especially today. Look at Singapore, look at China - lifting millions and billions of people out of poverty is an achievement that shouldn't be denied because they're an authoritarian government.
This is an oft-repeated propaganda talking point. Their system created their poverty in the first place. Not sure breaking something then fixing it again is much of an achievement. Not to mention, the Chinese government changed the definition of what constituted poverty in order to make that claim. I really don't care about the US vs China war because I think the US has already lost but it is quite annoying to hear people repeat propaganda.
If it was easy to fixing it - every country that has been colonized should be at least middle income by now right?
This is not in any way similar to video games.
This entire thread seems to be overrun with Tankies or CCP bots.
In the U.S., it’s somehow become popular opinion that the government shouldn’t do anything. Without the ability to make coordinated decisions, the U.S. has predictably fallen behind on a wide variety of metrics (income equality, health care, education, mass transit, etc.)
You should reflect on why you view a government making a decision for the health of its citizens as a bad thing.
Why should the government control how I manage my time? I'm pretty sure this site would be pretty outraged if the government decided we could only code 3 hours a week.
And please don't use the "but coding is constructive!1!" argument. A good use of time is defined by whoever spends it, not whatever someone else's idea of wasting time is.
As a case in point, playing hours of Splitgate has kept me sane during the pandemic as a college student locked in a room for 1.8 years. I meet on Discord with friends and discuss topics while playing. I've made more friends gaming than physically in the past year. That's pretty constructive if you ask me.
Your logic seems good but is removed from history and reality.
I'd rather have less GDP and no CCP; I'd also "sacrifice" max GDP for universal healthcare, fewer wars, jail reform...all kinds of things.
Personally I'd propose things like longevity, obesity, parks per-capita, household wealth, etc.
To say that money isn't everything is already a luxury
It's like we've confused a metric (GDP) with success; we maximized the metric and can't even wake up and realize it's not what we were actually trying to accomplish.
I'd argue the best way to accomplish whatever you're thinking about that we should be accomplishing - something that is hard to measure - is by maximizing GDP. Because GDP is correlated with everything you're thinking about accomplishing.
Because GDP pays for universal healthcare, for example...?
Also countries "worth" less seem to pay for it, so maybe it's that we have fucked up priorities?
The best way to progress has been GDP growth - modern medicine is not driven by good-will, kindness, or faith. It's driven by profit
The US (pockets at least) are dysfunctional but other countries demonstrate the model of not having to live under a dictatorship that commits genocide and restricts liberties and have high values in the things you mentioned.
Not to mention that obesity comes from… consuming too much food. Chinese will be obese too soon as they become wealthier. Well, unless the government mandates calories or something like they do hours playing video games..
The US is the only country committing genocide. They have killed over a hundred innocent civilians in Afghanistan just the past few weeks. Over the past decodes they've killed around a million innocent civilians in the name of the hyper-aggressive and hypocritical "war on terror". Indirectly, they're responsible for several millions criminal murders during the same timespan, and they've not once been put to trial. They're not only failing their citizens, they're a genocidal, terrorist state.
Hard to have a response to something so far removed from what I'm seeing. Not really any reconciliation possible here I think. Have a good day/evening!
In fact, reading what you wrote just strengthened my conviction that they're not true at all.
There's plenty of research, and leaks have uncovered much of the extent of US war crimes. The proportion of civilian casualties in Afghanistan (and Iraq) are immense, bordering 80%. This is because of the extremely low bar for claiming someone are enemy combatants.
See for example just the past few days: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/30/an-afghan-family-ki...
A "suspected" car bomb (not a car bomb at all), triggered the US to kill 10 innocent civilians. They claimed they targeted ISIS, and that no civilians were known to have died. This is the rule rather than an exception, which leaks and whistleblowers have extensively shown.
Yea thought so. No engagement possible here when we just live in two completely different worlds. Have a good day!
Cheers!
You say that people can't be left to the own accord, but then you also want people that you can't trust (leave to their own accord) to be in charge of you and managing a country?
What would you suggest?
IMO that's why we're seeing problems with the U.S. that simply will never resolve. The long-term future is balkanization in some fashion. Either outright via secession or implied via arbitrary restrictions that make certain places undesirable to go to. Contrast that with a country like Iceland where the population is more homogenous and the democracy seems to work better.
And it's not a race thing so much as a belief/culture thing. Just in case someone mistakenly believe that was what I was implying, it's not.
But I do think it's hard to reconcile saying that you fundamentally mistrust people but then you still want to give them power to make rules for you. The safer bet would be to have less or no government in that scenario unless you trust that you can create a process that really weeds out those who are not trustworthy. It's hard to do that too. Even people who are highly credible (scientists, doctors, etc.) often aren't people you would want making rules for you because they're not philosophers...
Making rules is a function of government, and government is a function of the collective will of the people. So rules are nothing more that what I, and most of my neighbors, believe how everyone should behave, and the process is ultimately a trial and error; an experiment.
Its not so uncommon belief/opinion.
I don’t agree that having SOME laws means that the government should be able to pass ANY law.
No child owns his own life or decision making. Typically parents make most decisions, the government makes some others e.g. mandatory schooling, setting standards that parents most abide by if they don't want their children taken away from them (sufficient food and shelter etc.).
Why should the government tell stores & restaurants when they can or cannot sell alcohol? How can the government tell me when I can, or cannot buy/consume alcohol. How is that a benefit to society? Why is it in a country codified for separation of religion and government are they allowed to have this in law?
The government didn't. They just put online-game service providers to the same category as alcohol or drugs.
True.
> In the U.S., it’s somehow become popular opinion that the government shouldn’t do anything.
Amongst some people and some topics. Liberals don't think the government should do anything about heroin needles and homeless people, and conservatives don't think the government should do anything about gay conversion camps (arbitrary examples). This is the core of how democracy works. What you're seeing here actually is a breakdown in homogeneity when you have 300+ million people trying to make decisions when they have different values.
> Without the ability to make coordinated decisions, the U.S. has predictably fallen behind on a wide variety of metrics (income equality, health care, education, mass transit, etc.)
Which depends again on factors such as demographics, etc. and is largely a function of the lack of homogeneity. Not to mention all sorts of compelling arguments. Like we have people who won't take a vaccine, but we were also one of the first countries to roll out mass vaccinations. It's not simple.
> You should reflect on why you view a government making a decision for the health of its citizens as a bad thing.
I think many people do reflect on that. It's a precarious balance of liberty, management of a nation state, and many other things. I don't think it's wise to try and over-simplify these things into "well the government just wants you to be healthy". Ok. Let's ban all junk food, alcohol, cars, high-end restaurants, skydiving, and make everybody walk 10,000 steps/day or else they go to jail. I mean, why would you view the government making a decision for the health of its citizens as a bad thing?
Other societies may look at it differently and feel ok delegating decisions about how their lives should be lived to their government. I, for one, would never be OK with that.
Meanwhile, gaming addiction can also be very destructive.
I mean, yes, "other countries" don't have age limits, but it's pretty rare and it's overwhelmingly not what you'd call successful or stable countries.
The link they posted even has a pretty picture within of the areas without age limits. They’re all mostly in Africa, Vietnam has a shout at stable and successful though.
And more and more online games use psychological tactics to encourage spending.
Emphasizing the physical effects of alcohol, and reducing the mental effects of any human computer interaction to “watching and interacting with pixels on a screen” isn’t the right way to go about it.
There’s a difference between checking your feed and doom scrolling, there’s a difference between playing fortnite with friends, maybe even a little too late into the night, and compulsively grinding.
The dose makes the poison.
My bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM6hEOtV92E
When kids game excessively, I'd wager it's an escape for them. It's an escape just as much as it was for the geeky / nerdy kids of America, as it is for the kids in China who have goukou.
You can try to enforce whatever culture you're gonna enforce, but I think we've seen from the war on drugs that these kinds of things don't really work. There's always some deep psychological and/or physiological deficit whenever there is an "addiction" at play. And you're trying to treat the disease by treating the symptoms. You can try to tighten control so that you can try to force that "ideal" society, but when you do that, things have a way of becoming authoritarian in a handbasket. Everything messed up about China is about socialist idealism turning authoritarian, and you can say that about other countries too.
People should have figured that out when they did that study on rats, where the rats that lived in some enriched environment, with plenty of playtime, did not get addicted to sugar water the way that the rats trapped in cages did.
I think we're bad at prediction - so why not let them experiment and see how it turns out 50 years later.
> And you're trying to treat the disease by treating the symptoms
So, for example, Opiods. In the United States we're treating the symptoms by banning it (and this is pretty much supported by both political parties). Yet we know the root cause: People that are effectively feeling worthless, do not feel connected to a specific social group and/or disengaged from culture.
Other aspects of our entire culture is causing people to feel like that: 1. Changing family values, 2. Disconnected from people, connected to devices and online popularity, 3. Impossible to succeed and feel valuable.
I feel like we have a really weird problem: Our capitalistic environment or, greed in general, are driving these problems. So the solution is authoritarianism.
Sorry that's just the way my mind works. I see right through issues to their root causes and it makes my worldview weird.
Alcohol is an addictive, psychoactive, carcinogen. The difference between drugs and “online game time” is pretty stark from my perspective.
The essence of your argument seems to be: “we already give up some control for other health-related regulations and online game time is no different.”
I have to admit, drawing the exact line is difficult and I’m unable to create a clear definition of government overreach. This specific example is obvious to me, but clearly some people disagree.
Where do you think the line should be? Would you be okay with CCP mandated exercise, sleep time, or diet? Do you believe there should be a line at all?
Not trying to be adversarial here, I am genuinely curious.
But it's more of a experiment - life is an experiment.
To your last question, many jurisdictions are making fast food or sugary drinks illegal thus imposing a diet. I am fine with that. Some company are lowering health premium to those who do exercise, imposing exercise. I am fine with that too..
Requires elaboration. When "online game time" is intentionally designed to be addictive, its affects on addicts need to be critically examined - loss of physical fitness, loss of social fitness, loss of motivation, agoraphobia. That both can be consumed responsibly in small quantities does not preclude that addiction is a serious problem and too often not treated like a serious problem in Western countries.
Edit: and too many newspapers?
It was a mild addiction and the feelings of my teacher was that it could be disruptive to my experience and those of students around me.
There's no such clear definition of 'games'. So there is potential for interpretation and overreach.
Different magnitudes.
> It’s about more than just online games. It’s about control.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Politics and governance is about compromise and deciding where to draw lines, not slippery-slope absolutism about vague ideals and fervent dogmas that are all-too-easily impinged.
> I’m sure the great firewall is perfectly fine as well?
If you can't differentiate between "control of information and discourse across the entire population" and "control of how long (not even 'whether or not') minors can play online videogames" that's your problem.
This is a horrendous infringement on personal liberty. No human should ever have to endure government mandates over such trivial parts of their lives “for the greater good”. This tactic is used by the likes of the Taliban who banned painting, music, sports etc.
I mentioned the great firewall to illustrate what Chinas real goals here are: total and absolute control over their citizens. The CCP restricts access to free information, political dissent, and freedom of religion.
These are new laws being introduced which would make it illegal for a teenager to play ONLINE CHESS on a Wednesday. How is this not overreach? If the dark software patterns were really the issue they would just make the loot boxes and micro purchases illegal. It’s 100% about power.
Most of the people who agree with you simply upvote your comment and move on.
I think HN crowd is more prone to question their own believes and playing devil's advocate to just bashing on authoritative regimes. It is a blessing and a curse.
I do agree with you that a lot of rules on kids even in our "free countries" were hypocritical and didn't actually work.
Kids shouldn’t be playing games 5 hours a day and looking up to streamers. The government shouldn’t be involved in this.
I think the larger threat of gaming in today’s society is that we have a situation where the standards have gone up dramatically for everyone to be an average mediocre person. You will have to do something serious if you want a real career in the future. You will have to be social and socially astute to navigate social networks (pretty much as early as 10). The pressure is much higher at a much younger age, and chronic gaming is going to be the goto escape. We don’t have a reasonable enough society where gaming can just be an innocuous past time. It’s going to be a hideout for people growing up under the enormous pressure of this new world.
I expect drug use, and prescription medication use to be going up on exactly the same curve.
I'm against that but don't see it as overly authoritarian.
On the other hand, both systems owe their existence in part to government saber-rattling that they would impose actual regulation. Some attempts at actual legal enforcement have been struck down over the years.
Odds are that you are under an NDA which limits your freedom of speech. Odds are that if you refused to sign one, you couldn't afford a mortgage in a place with a lot of tech. Odds are you will sign more NDAs so your kids can keep going to the same school. The freedom of no regulation is an illusion.
Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you. Without regulation, video games will become more and more addicting. Without regulation, companies will keep running advertising, even if ads harm culture and the overall economy.
To manage all of this, we need a better system. I, for one, am excited about countries trying something different. The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life, from limiting stress on kids, to workforce stress, to limiting unhealthy activities. I'd like to see how that plays out.
As a footnote, I'd even be excited about a fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, if it wasn't expansionary, and if people were free to emigrate if it was't working for them.
Or a country that has no freedom of the press, savagely beats or murders political dissidents, will take away your job and livelihood if you dare question CCP orthodoxy...
The fact that you think is somehow morally equivalent to an NDA is just absolutely astonishing.
It's not the current state that matters, but possible future outcome.
We're both hill-climbing trying to improve systems from an imperfect present. The US is higher up its hill than China right now, but it's not clear that China won't pass the US in a few decades. Or the US will race ahead. Or how other systems will fare.
It's also not clear how those will change as the world itself evolves.
I like having a diversity of political and economic systems, even is some are better than others. I also like a diversity of cultures, even if there are ones I strongly disagree with.
#simulatedannealing #geneticalgorithms
These are mostly very specific, very limited and largely perfectly sensible. Yes some NDAs are onerous but they're quite rare. China has no concept of freedom of speech at all. It simply doesn't exist. I don't see how that's better.
>Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you.
We actually do have market regulation in the west, more in some countries than others, but it's a well established principle. You may disagree with the regulations we have, that's a matter of opinion, but we do have regulations on safety, quality, etc. If you want further regulations you are free to campaign for them, but the lack of any relations you might want is not a flaw in the system, it's just a consensus choice you disagree with.
>The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life...
All western states, even the US, have regulated labour markets including controls on working hours, minimum wages, mandatory breaks, etc. 996 is in practice illegal in almost every (possibly actually every) western country already. We are way, way ahead of China on this, so much so that you thinking China is breaking ground is frankly laughable.
Many countries already have guidelines in place on activities like video games. Public health systems recognise, provide advice and support, and even treatment for games addiction. The CCP is not breaking any novel ground on any of this. The fact is it has a woefully inadequate public health system and primitive social services that are so bad they have to resort to crude dictatorial mandates like this because it's all they have left. That is not a good thing.
>As a footnote...
Oh good grief.
It's not so much that I want more or fewer regulations, as I want to explore systems other than market-based incentives. I'm not sure that regulations + free markets will get us to a place where people aren't addicted to video games, eat healthy, exercise, have quality education, and generally lead the good life. In 1930, there were a lot of ideas for how to get there, and a lot of those seem plausible. I'd like to see how some of those play out in practice.
I'll mention that I'm aware of where China is with regards to labor practices, freedom-of-speech, and so on, but with regards to public health systems, China is way ahead of the US. Everyone has access to decent, affordable healthcare. It's not at the same level as $50,000 procedures in the US, but it's good enough, and everyone has it.
It's also not really fair to compare countries with $64k per-capita GDP to ones with $10k per-capita GDP. It's even more unfair if one considers where the per-capita GDP was a decade or two ago. 25 years ago, China had a per-capita GDP of under $1000 -- that's less than Nigeria today. I think that's a more fair comparison between systems of government. Would you rather live in Nigerian democracy or Chinese CCP? That's not a loaded question -- they're quite different.
> Oh good grief.
Islam has a lot of good ideas too. For example, it has a wealth tax, and it discourages debt-based economies. You don't need to swallow political and economic systems wholesale.
This is not true at all, I know because my wife is Chinese. Almost everyone is covered by health insurance in theory, but in practice this has limited use by most people because it only covers 50% of costs, and less than that for serious illnesses. Those on low incomes simply can't afford it anyway and there is nothing comparable to the level of cover under Medicaid or CHIPS, or Medicare for the elderly. Everyone under the public system has to pay up or not get treatment. Employer plans are better, but still very basic compared to typical US corporate plans. Waiting lists can also often put treatment out of practical reach unless you are willing to pay a lot of money to the right people.
It's also very scammy. They charge for everything they do, from painkillers, saline drips, blood tests, being hooked up to a blood oxymeter. On arrival they will set up all of that, the works, whether it's necessary or not so they can charge you for it. There is little to no regulation to prevent such abuses, and no practical way to get redress for malpractice.
On experimentation, communism and authoritarianism have been tried many, many times. There's nothing novel or experimental about it. We know it sucks. We know what Taliban style Islamic theocracies are like too, Afghanistan has been under one before remember?
And Democracy was tried several times during the French Revolution, as well as in many countries in Africa, to great failure. You can't generalize from small n.
It's really unclear how Communism would have worked out if not for Stalin. Communism isn't fundamentally authoritarian. The concept of workers soviets as a political system sounds pretty plausible to me. Things played out that way, but it's only been tried once.
And as far as a planned economy, I think the feasibility really changes with access to computers which can simulate complex systems. Market economies are a greedy algorithm. It's likely there's a better system.
What I like in the current Chinese model is market economy for commodity businesses (like restaurants) and central control of rent-seeking ones (like banking). That seems more efficient. I also like the concept of systems of governance which are more meritocratic (which contrasts with populist ideals in the US), where competent people make decisions, and where you can plan strategically over long periods. I don't think China has yet stumbled on the right model there. But they're trying.
Sorry, but Marxism has coercion at it's core because it's maximally redistributive. I'm no libertarian fundamentalist, I'm proud if my contribution to society through my taxes, but Marxism takes confiscation to the ultimate extreme. All property belongs to the state, all needs are decided and provided by the state. Max called it 'society' and said that society would regulate every aspect of the economy, but in practice it's the state.
As for tried out once, er, this whole thread is about China not the USSR. Stalin died 39 years before the collapse of the USSR, they had four decades to fix it. There's also Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia. Robert Mugabe was a Maoist, Hugo Chavez was a Marxist. It's been tried over and over. They've all either run their country into the ground or basically given up on Marxism and clung on to power anyway.
You're quite right that democracy has had plenty of failures, that's irrefutable. It certainly does create a moral dilemma, but I still believe in allowing as much individual choice and autonomy as is practically achievable.
The Chinese Communist Party is seen as a meritocracy within China, which draws on an ancient tradition of bureaucracy. It's hard for Americans to understand.
[1]: https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1281853054078386181?lang...
Good news comes almost direct from CCP. Bad news is from anywhere-but-CCP.
Neither good/bad news can be judged as 100% true or false but the "CCP influence" means I have to use a fudge factor that decreases the trustworthiness of good news in comparison to bad news.
It doesn't outright invalidate "good news" but it introduces a significant element of doubt.
Do you vocally campaign to repeal the law that prevents you buying and using asbestos in their buildings?
Do you vocally campaign to repeal the law that prevents you from buying and owning an anti-aircraft missile system?
Our democracies have plenty of laws about things we're not allowed to do. Some of them are for our own good, some are for the overall good of society.
Not all regulations are born equal and some of them are definitely not worth fighting against.
I agree, though definitive evidence is clearly *not* the threshold for when laws to protect us are or are not created.
For example, there is a mountain of evidence that smoking is exceptionally bad for adults, but there's no law against it. I could smoke 20 packets a day from now on. I could even drink 10 bottles of vodka a day perfectly legally.
China _is_ authoritarian, denying that is ridiculous. The CCP creates laws that individually or in part can benefit its populace, but are often or solely pro cadre or their personal interests.
That democracies have corruption or vested interests (whether "positively" motivated or not) influencing laws does not make the process or the results equivalent.
Maybe I'm the delusional one.
but given the many many reports on CCPs active propaganda and controlling of media/online content (hell the whole point of this discussion) gives me plenty of evidence to support large-scale coordinated govt propaganda tools, if not here, definitely elsewhere.
Does it matter? Judge the idea, not the person behind it I say. If the argument is not worthy to stand, it will fall.
> That democracies have corruption
But it's not corruption. That's the issue.
"When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy" [1]
That's not corruption. If America was a true democracy, the country would look completely different.
> The CCP creates laws that individually or in part can benefit its populace, but are often or solely pro cadre or their personal interests.
It doesn't seem like that from the outside. Looking in, it seems like the CCP has successfully pulled an astronomical amount of people out of poverty and increasing QoL insanely, all while maintaining public legitimacy.
Honestly, all it seems like, is that America drunk the cool aid too much and now believes so hard in it's own propaganda that it looks like brainwashing, while the reality is utterly different.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america...
Of course it matters, what a bizarre statement.
>> That democracies have corruption > But it's not corruption. That's the issue.
Either deliberately, though in-attention or personal need you, are mis-interpreting and or changing the subject.
> It doesn't seem like that from the outside. Looking in, it seems like the CCP has successfully pulled an > astronomical amount of people out of poverty and increasing QoL insanely, all while maintaining public ? > legitimacy.
There is no good way to assert that, but it's a pretty common refrain.
> Honestly, all it seems like, is that America drunk the cool aid too much and now believes so hard in it's > own propaganda that it looks like brainwashing, while the reality is utterly different.
I'm not American.
All this cycles round to what I was saying. You could just be an interested observer, passionate about seemingly connected ideas. Or you could be deliberately derailing, trying to muddy the waters. There's no good way to tell, but ultimately it still paints China in a bad light - eventually no one will believe anything.
Why? Please elaborate.
As the person you replied to said, I feel that ideas should be judged on their merit, not on who came up with them. Plenty of "bad" people have good ideas and visa versa.
It's a pretty typical tactic - but whether it was done because they want to boost the CCP or wether they just aren't good or careless at understanding or expressing themselves? I don't know.
Being genuine; the field of human interaction isn't some philosophical paper; if your cousin consistently lies, and has always lied; it's a good bet they will do so again - not evaluating each thing they say on its merits is a rational choice.
If everyone in a group is prone to lying or misdirection - evaluating each idea will lead to exhaustion - trust matters.
For reference, I am the other poster. I don't think I pivoted. My entire point is that genuine-ness of the poster does not matter. This is what confuses me.
What does the "genuine-ness" of the other person matter in terms of whether the idea should be judged on it's own merit or not. If you disagree with it, you disagree with it, regardless of whether the other person is being genuine or not genuine.
> "making some rules that benefit themselves"
You didn't say that. You said that the laws can benefit it's populace, but are often or solely pro cadre or in their personal interests. That's not making some rules that benefit themselves, that's more making laws that mostly benefit themselves with citizens being a secondary factor.
Considering that in 1990, China had 750 million people under the poverty line and in 2016 (latest World Bank figures I could find with a quick google search) that number is 7.2m million. Clearly, the policies aren't entirely aimed at benefiting CCP with slight citizen benefit as a secondary thought. Or else maybe the CCP's incentives are very very well aligned with lifting people out of poverty.
> It's a pretty typical tactic
I honestly find this so yucky. Every discussion on China devolves into people claiming the other is a shill in an attempt to discredit the person and get away feeling like they're superior.
> if your cousin consistently lies, and has always lied; it's a good bet they will do so again
but you don't know it's your cousin online talking to you. Therefore, what happens is that anyone who speaks against your preconceived notions must be working for the shadowy government to spread "propaganda".
> If everyone in a group is prone to lying or misdirection - evaluating each idea will lead to exhaustion - trust matters.
and the group is everyone who disagrees with you? That's certainly what it seems like.
But it does, don't agree? OK.
>You didn't say that. You said that the laws can benefit it's populace, but are often or solely pro >cadre or in their personal interests. That's not making some rules that benefit themselves, that's >more making laws that mostly benefit themselves with citizens being a secondary factor.
Much more accurate, but still not what the other poster claimed I was saying.
>I honestly find this so yucky. Every discussion on China devolves into people claiming the other is >a shill in an attempt to discredit the person and get away feeling like they're superior.
That is bad, because it is a low-trust environment - deliberately so.
> and the group is everyone who disagrees with you? That's certainly what it seems like.
That's your thoughts, not mine, but maybe you understand why I say genuineness matters, all these conversations are traps while the dishonest sow doubt. Talk to a point, answer it directly, don't derail with "facts", introduce new ideas as a new idea in the conversation, not a made claim on others thoughts.
Why? Who cares if the other person is genuine or not? The idea is still an idea.
> because it is a low-trust environment
therefore, the only real solution is to simply talk about the discussion/argument/idea not about the person behind it.
> deliberately so.
deliberately? How? Just China or the entire internet? I was talking about the entire internet btw.
> all these conversations are traps while the dishonest sow doubt
they aren't if you are not focused on the "genuine-ness" of the poster.
> maybe you understand why I say genuineness matters
I really don't. I am failing to see it and you clearly cannot explain it well enough or simply are saying it without any concrete reasoning behind it. Either way, you haven't explained why it matters.
> Talk to a point, answer it directly, don't derail with "facts", introduce new ideas as a new idea in the conversation, not a made claim on others thoughts.
I don't understand what this weird pontificating is about.
Because the goal is not to expose ideas, the goal is to change the conversation so they can be hidden.
>I really don't. I am failing to see it and you clearly cannot explain it well enough or simply are saying it without any concrete reasoning behind it. Either way, you haven't explained why it matters.
Well, thanks for the criticism, you are probably right, I'll work on it. Have a good life.
I don't think I was doing either. If I was, please explain what exactly you were saying and what I mis-interpreted.
My understanding is this:
1. China is authoritarian. 2. They make laws that benefit themselves (i.e. CCP) without care for the populace (populace benefit is secondary) 3. Democracy is corrupt. 4. However, even if corrupt, it's better since it is not equal to China's system where the laws are made mostly out of interest for the CCP.
This was my interpretation.
However, as I said, the evidence is the other way around.
1. China is authoritarian -> Sure.
2. They make laws that benefit themselvse ahead of the populace.
Poverty in 1990 -> 750 million. Poverty in 2016 -> 7.2 million. That's World Bank figures. Not China figures. Clearly, either they had policies actually aimed at benefiting the populace or the laws that benefit CCP also align extremely well with the populace. In which case, we should learn from them since aligning incentives for politicians and populace is a pretty insane trick.
3. Democracy is corrupt.
Democracy is not just corrupt. It is corrupt in a way that makes the voice of the citizen entirely useless. Democracy does not represent your views if you live in America at least.
4. However, even if corrupt, it's better since it is not equal to China's system where the laws are made mostly out of interest for the CCP.
Economic elites and the organized interest groups group control America. Not the average person.
> There is no good way to assert that, but it's a pretty common refrain.
What? World Bank figures should that China has pulled massive amounts of people out of poverty, and increased their Quality of Life. Public Legitimacy seems clear since there aren't mass protests (Hong Kong showed that it is certainly possible).
Forget that. Just fly to Beijing. It's arguably more modern than most Western cities and talking to people will show you how their lives have changed. I genuinely don't understand how you're denying the economic miracle that the CCP has engineered.
> You could just be an interested observer, passionate about seemingly connected ideas. Or you could be deliberately derailing, trying to muddy the waters.
I am the first one. I don't understand how I derailed? Or how you thought that happened? Either you entirely misunderstood me, or just have no interest in actually talking about the discussion?
> There's no good way to tell, but ultimately it still paints China in a bad light - eventually no one will believe anything.
I mean, again, you can literally dismiss every argument that goes against your preconceived notions and pretend that the other is a shill but that's a very weird way to live in my opinion. It's more better to actually critically analyse what the other says and break it down or agree with them.
If your goal is to see China in a bad light, it doesn't matter what I say. You will see them that way.
This is what I meant by drinking the Kool_Aid too much. (Not limited to Americans but the entire Western sphere)
Come on. That's just false. You can't operate a country successfully at China's size by making law just to benefit the cadre / personal interests.
Don't get started by advocating that benefiting the people is just a way to benefit to cadre. It's infalsifiable and just pointless.
That feels like a loaded question because something like that simply would never pass in a Democracy.
Isn't this more likely to provoke the opposite? Addictive time-wasters are an aid to authoritarian government.
Assuming this policy is effectively enforced, Chinese youth suddenly have a lot more free time on their hands.
They're an aid to control; however, the government has interests apart from control. If the government feels that it has sufficient control, but worries about economic output, it may prioritize economics over control. Ultimately government needs to achieve both.
The CCP is an authoritarian government. Yes. Is this being proposed in the US? No. Why all the whining and insane amount of pearl-clutching then?
Frankly, I was hoping to see more discussion about the (potential) effects of (excessive) gaming or the potential/unforeseen consequences of the ban, but apparently people here seem to go braindead the moment China, government or freedom is mentioned. It feels like I'm back on Facebook or Reddit again. Has the level of discourse really become that much worse on HN over the years?
It sounds like if you had your way, you'd be quite the authoritarian. Do you hear yourself?
> The CCP is an authoritarian government. Yes. Is this being proposed in the US? No. Why all the whining and insane amount of pearl-clutching then?
Vaccine passports and mandated lockdown and vaccines without informed consent are bringing us closer to authoritarianism than we ever have before.
> Has the level of discourse really become that much worse on HN over the years?
So in response you create a meta post complaining about others complaining about authoritarianism?
So every forum that has mods to moderate the posts that are made is "authoritarian"? Do you listen to yourself? It's not authoritarian to ensure a certain level of quality or level of discourse. And what's going on in these comments does not meet any reasonable bar.
It does seem like there has been a lot of news lately about curious social engineering policies coming out of China. I wonder if the politburo suspects trouble.
I don’t think well of the CCP for many reasons but please, this is a very superficial understanding of China on display. It seems more well suited to Soviet about half a century ago.
But I have to admit I will relish the opportunity to tell my (11 year old) son about this around the dinner table tonight (after he spent the whole day hiding inside playing Terraria and Minecraft)
And I wish as a parent I had the actual ability to enforce such a limit myself (maybe not so drastic). But the battle would be intense, futile, and conflict ridden. It's been tried.
The government has no business doing this, but there's something to be said for community / cultural standards and leadership. Parents in our society are on their own, fighting a tide of digital "addiction" without supports. And in fact key pillars of our kind of society (that is, corporations) are working to encourage screen time, rather than the other way around. A year of COVID isolation has made it so much worse, too.
I wonder what the outcome of this policy will be and if it will make China's youth more competitive and their society healthier. Or if it will be a total an abject failure and laughed at in a couple generations (most likely).
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it's highly successful at cutting down on game addiction (which is a problem you easily carry into adulthood).
Worth mentioning they aren't banning children playing games outside these hours. They are only restricting access to online games. Namely multiplayer games like Honor of Kings. If a parent is happy for their child to play other games that don't require online services they are free to do that.
Easy to have when you control what the media reports.
But getting closer to the source (http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/30/c_1310157673.htm), the regulation appears to be exclusively targetting the amount of on-line gaming services that companies are allowed to offer to minors. This doesn't any seem different in principle to various Western regulations attempting limit ads[1] or pornography[2] to children. Granted, some people in the West also consider these as examples authoritarian government overreach. But my guess is that a some people's reactions are driven substantially by the specific story framing (and of course, China), more than by principled reasoning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
I currently look after a system which gets random spikes of traffic thats critical to serve. Which means I more or less need to run a huge amount of redundant servers 24 hours a day incase there is a spike at 2am.
We have horizontal scaling but our traffic has little lead time.
Every Monday, an hour after school, scale up 5x, because the timer has reset for students. Scale down from Wednesday to Friday. Scale up 2x over the weekends.
Or whatever your data tells you.
It was actually a pretty unique challenge that had some weird trade-offs.
For example, when do you release new code? You've got this nice window at the end of each day when traffic is super low, so any issues with the release will affect a minimal amount of users, but on the other hand, if you release at the end of the day, you don't really know if your code works at scale until the next morning.
Similarly, what do you do during the summer period? You've got a couple quiet months in where almost no one is online where you can kind of swing for the fences in terms of changes, but at the same time, you won't really know whether it handle the full load of the customer base until September.
Sure there's things like load testing (which we did), but theres no way to truly predict how your customers will use your product. We had a really solid engineering team and ended up coming up with processes to handle a lot of these problems, but still, it was something that I hadn't dealt with before and I found pretty interesting.
Almost every single comment I make with that sentiment gets instant downvoted or flagged.
I’m not surprised. Sad? A bit. It normalizes authoritarianism. But what are you going to do? I want to live in a globalized society and internet, and China is a huge portion of that, despite their best efforts to insulate their citizens from the world.
I think people recognize the efficiency--that they, China can actually pull something like this off; if they mandate that they're going to restrict this then it doesn't get mired in debate and bogged down in Parliament to eventually passes as a watered down concession representing everybody's possible interest group; rather if they say they're going to do something they just go ahead and they execute on that--and I think people can admire that.
And certainly probably nobody else in the world can do this at that kind of scale.
So I think ultimately that sets China up for great success by evolving a system of government because they can afford to run the experiments.
Other countries they can't afford to run the experiments: first off, they don't have the data or the scale to do so; second they don't have the ability to do so; and third they're not able to conjure the political will to be able to run an experiment.
But if China wants to run an experiment and figure out if this policy is going to work or what the effects are going to be--if it's going to help or not--they can afford to do that and they can iterate quickly. And that's what they do.
So in the long term China has a better, more scientific approach to figuring out a system of governance for their people. and this is not some slap dash theory I'm just pulling out of thin air and predicting what the future of China would look like in some fantasy: this is how the CPC have run things for the last 70 years.
Contrast with the West and liberal Democratic systems we have in the West: because we cannot move so quickly, we have to--to some extent--assume what we're doing is right prima facie and so a lot of our rhetoric reflects that. Our political rhetoric about ourselves reflects our sense of moral or procedural superiority to the rest of the world. we constantly remind ourselves you know of the superiority of our system even while acknowledging its flaws. instead of being able to implement policies, at scale, and collect data and move quickly we commission studies, and design intricate theories, and funnel money to think tanks, and often these policy manufacturing initiatives are partisan dalliances with foregone conclusions serving the interests of some of the number of competing groups.
But we cannot iterate as quickly are effectively as China can. But interestingly there's no real reason why we can't. If you consider the scale of our so-called Western civilization stretching from the EU to all of the anglophone world and even South America we should be able to run policy experiments. But consistently we do not. So we fret away the hours theorizing, debating and raising ginormous elections while the world keeps on turning.
so ultimately in the long game even if we started out ahead with a better system--even if--China is going to be able to create a better system in the long term because they can run more experiments more quickly, more efficiently, with bigger scale and they're going to have bigger data. so they can iterate more quickly they can analyze the bigger data that they have and they can come up with the optimal policies to drive their nation and their people forward.
one danger for the West is as China gets deeper into that approach the choices they make are going to seem more and more perplexing to people in the west because the choices are based on a set of assumptions and knowledge that we simply don't have in the west: because we haven't been able to run those experiments we don't have the benefit of that experience. so we're not going to understand China or how they make these choices. and I think that's dangerous for the West politically because we'll fall further behind but it's also dangerous you know culturally and individually because there'll be an increasing empathy Gap between people from different systems which will I suppose in the online world get reduced to a binary polarization of zero nuance and zero understanding which we see the beginnings of today very clearly.
so China is playing a high-risk high reward strategy to some extent. (And it's funny because I think there's a stereotype in the west where people often think of Chinese as very risk averse people. But if you look at the way that China has run its government it's calculating but they take a lot of risks. And you want to push that stereotype further you know a lot of Chinese people start businesses so I feel that stereotype is wrong: the Chinese culture embraces risk.)
If it's not clear what I'm talking about with the term experiments here, it's policy experiments. We are not able to run policy experiments in the west because everything gets bogged down; we can't execute on a plan and the short-term need to appeal to the lowest common denominator and people's sentimental or emotional nature or to their amygdala--their fear--this kind of pragmatic political necessity in our Western liberal Democratic systems distorts the discourse and the issues of democratic politics away from something substantial and towards something that's pretty ephemeral, often insubstantial and even petty.
What kind of future are we creating for ourselves and for our culture and for the legions of people who have sacrificed throughout our history with this kind of behavior?
And I think this abuse of our position is especially egregious when compounded with the lack of empathy and understanding towards the different system that the Chinese are doing when if we could look at it clearly I think we would have much to learn. At least much to give us pause and reflect about our own flaws but instead what you see happening is people look at this different system and instead of reflecting on themselves, they puff themselves up with--an almost seemingly reactionary or even compensatory-- pride about how good their own is, using some fabricated pretense of the evil bogeyman Other and how righteous they are themselves. you might dismiss this as simply the reaction of the common person but that reaction is very important in politics and that drives the discourse and ultimately constrains the thinking and the policy of the nations that comprise the west.
So China can afford to run the experiments and they can afford to think long-term. So who's going to win in like 200 years? it doesn't have to come down to a military conflict. they just have to win at everything else. And then who's going to be the more likely primary aggressor? The side that's on top or the side that's embittered and feeling their foregone place in the world has been stolen and with the history of amassing enormous military power and utilizing it sometimes seemingly haphazardly?
I think the Western system really has to evolve if we are really going to back up our grandiose self-important rhetoric and self-congratulatory triumphal political narratives about ourselves with real results. And I think the core of that is our governance system. It has to be flexible enough to prosecute our interest in a changing world we can't outsource that adaptability solely to the military because while necessary it overly constrains our strategy. We need a flexible government as the core of everything. that's one thing that I've learned by watching and thinking about China over the last 10 years. And I think in order to start doing that there needs to be a correction to the narrative of how Western culture thinks about and talks about china. That's what I'm trying to achieve with this comment: contribute to that correction.
I’m mad just thinking about it. And to think people want socialism / communism in the US.
Also note the general background of Chinese bureaucracy, especially at country level are almost all at Biden's age. Imagine their rage when their children abandon them for games and now it's their time to pay them back.
That being said, it's still surprising since 3 hours/day seems fair and ok, but 1 hour/day and 3 hours/weeks feels overreaching.
You're painting with far too broad of a brush here.
It does not matter if you agree or disagree with the proposition, this should not be decided by the state
Do you think the US gov is going to propose requiring all gamers to provide a real ID to prove age, and people will just be ok with that? No way in hell.
I don’t take anything for granted these days.
(Though to look at reaction here on HN, doing a 's/games/video games/' in the title would be utterly superfluous.)
The TV show Occupied (norway Okkupert) has a fun example where a militarized group uses video game live audio chat to secretly communicate and pass info.
I think there are memes about COD waiting rooms too illustrating digital forums of speech, even the most dumb teenager smack talk you can think of!
And that seems scary to CCP.
Yeah i think the point that they don't have a problem policing speech everywhere else kind of points out that this is just another excuse (or value add minimally).
The online places that the less tech savvy majority have is shrinking.
But I suppose I have a more broad view of the cpc's goals and while I definitely acknowledge and I'm okay to some extent with their attempts to control speech because I see the utility of them doing that and I understand the reason they try to do that. I also think they have a lot of other goals that they're trying to do. you know they are trying to create various types of social reform and get people to behave in ways that they think of as good for the country. so I do believe that this is genuinely about that; I mean they want to free up young people to do some useful work and enhance themselves and not just you know become sort of slaves to these game companies and make the money or become addicted to that kind of behavior.
but I think the argument you propose is sort of an effective counter narrative to the cpc's policy argument there I guess so if people wanted to criticize it they could claim it was just you know another suppression of speech but at the same time that trope seems a little bit tired and stretched thin particularly I think if you look at the realities of what they do achieve and I think from the point of view of a CPC adversary you know the danger of using thinly stretched tropes is they lose value and they lose weight over time.
so if that's your bag I suggesy coming up with sort of a constantly you know updating set of counter narratives. because that's certainly what the CPC narrative engineers and propagandists are doing they are always refining their rhetoric and their arguments so if you want to compete you can't do it with a tired thin stretch trope you have to kind of constantly be innovating.
Hope that helps! ;P ;) xx
Edit: Found a story about it - https://www.wired.com/2008/09/world-of-warcra/
> Toavs, for one, believes that spies will have to spend more time in virtual worlds like WoW, if they want to have a hope of keeping tabs on what goes on inside 'em. Which means, some day soon, we might find secret agents in World of Warcraft, along with the druids and orcs and night elves.
Truly absurd. Sounds to me like someone at the CIA just wants to play WoW instead of working.
It's really obvious by now that more and more policies like this will be embedded into software. There are so many applications: Cars (how much, where, and how do you drive), TVs (what do you watch and when), personal assistants (what do you talk about with your children)...
But I agree with your larger point, and would argue that insofar as we no longer understand our tools' functioning then they can (and will) be used to control us.
With that said, I'm not surprised to find people in the West wondering what else we're going to do about "artificial addictions".
Many online games use matchmaking which push you towards a 50% win rate which keeps you more interested than if you were to 'always' win or lose. Depending on the game, you might then spend money or grind time in an attempt to improve the resources available. And in some of those, 3 hours a week necessitates redesigning these games so that they're playable - at least segmenting China's user experience to retain interest. If this regulation can encourage developers to better respect gamers' time and resources, that's a win.
On the other hand, games with longer matches like DotA2/League in their standard modes may run too long to squeeze into an hour. I don't think the experience in those games themselves disrespects the time of users, but the 50% win-rate matchmaking and dream of getting out of 'dumpster tier ELO' can be problematic. On a hot streak or a cold streak? "Let's play til we win/lose."
Single-player games have less pressure and more ability to walk away at mostly anytime (especially these days with quick-save) so you're playing them more on your schedule rather than beholden to the game itself (really the people playing). Multiplayer creates a lot of replayability through the unique decisions other players are making.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/business/media/china-onli... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sets-new-rules-for-youth-...
Any competitive, skill-based matchmaking system that's tuned to produce the fairest game will strive to produce games where all participants have a statistically equal chance of victory. That includes non-video games.
Why are you spinning this as if it's some dirty, manipulative ploy?
I'm commenting in the context of why China might ban online gaming. If you can learn the strategies that you fight against in a bot in offline play - or exploit the blunders they make - it can still be fun, but there's less variance and more predictability. You'll probably get tired of it sooner than seeing emergent strategies from other players. Until games are built with bots that can effectively mimic the full range of ELO and unique strategies like you get in online play, I think there will be something missing in offline play. Even then, do we derive the same satisfaction from beating a bot?
Partner up matchmaking with engagement tricks like "first win of the day" and other quests that net you some in-game resources like battle passes and you create a sense of FOMO that drains player time (while ensuring active players to keep queues fast). Add in micro-transactions and financial drain can happen too.