Trying to look at from their point of view and in good faith, excessive childhood gaming seem to be causing problems for some people like stunting their personal and intellectual development. China seems to be taking a stance that their citizens are a human resource for their country, and excessive gaming is hurting their asset.

They are addictive and conditioning and thus compete with the social conditioning from the Chinese government.

They see the effects that gaming has on children in neighboring countries, Japan and Korea, to the point that WHO added "Gaming disorder" as a disease and considers the addictive properties of video games, as well as monetization of that addiction to be a growing concern.

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.

Most of them are addicting time wasting shit. Especially mobile games, good God.

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.

If you want to be the global superpower and also keep your strangehold on society, you don't want children spending a lot of time on games.

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.

It's part of the recent big pro-fertility drive (same as banning 996 work-weeks).

They want kids to engage with work and, well, each other, to raise families, rather than having purely digital lives.

Most of the answers here are about games being addictive and a time waste, but what about communication? I actually have no idea about this - is in-game communication in e.g. fortnite able to be monitored?

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.

Same reason why they downgraded a lot of 2nd tier colleges to 'vocational' colleges: to increase the number of people they can put in a factory to work high pace, low pay slave jobs. This looks to be a shot at the laying flat kids who don't want to be taken advantage of, so they are removing the entertainment being relied on for something to do. Kids don't want to die for the party, they've seen nothing comes out of it, so they just passively resist.

Parents hate games. The governament is ran by parents. That's why.