Anyone want to argue why this would be bad, apart from restricting freedom?
BTW, nothing in the article about limits on TikTok or YouTube or whathaveyougot. That's as much opium as gaming, IMO.
BTW, nothing in the article about limits on TikTok or YouTube or whathaveyougot. That's as much opium as gaming, IMO.
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.
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.
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.
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.?
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.
It's damaging to perpetuate this no matter how common of a new wives tale it is.
Probably not
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.
And I think gaming in moderation is very positive.
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).