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.
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.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.
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.