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Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Top of my wish list is a time limit on time spent playing video games for under 18yo’s, to be imposed on and enforced by consoles and platform providers (eg Steam, iOS).

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Interesting, I'm super opposed to that! Parents who are able to exercise some control over their children's activities already enforce these limits, and parents who can't could do far worse than kids playing video games.

The problem is many parents aren't parents, but a single parent who works multiple jobs. They can't easily control what their kids do since they are not home.

Yeah, I get that completely. In those cases, video games are a comparatively harmless thing for children with no supervision to opt into.

Unless the kid is addicted and plays 5 hours a day. He may not be socializing, getting his homework done, studying, etc.

Agreed, I'm not arguing that video game addiction is good -- it's not. I'm saying that if a parent doesn't have the ability to enforce rules (whether by lack of ability, or because they're too busy supporting the family, or any other reason), then a child breaking the rules to play video games is much better than them breaking the rules in other more destructive ways.

If this had been implemented during my youth, I might have actually gone out and joined my peers in underage drinking.

This will only result in kids going nuts when they turn 18 without time to ease into their adult freedoms.

I hope my son learns how to budget his time before he turns 18. But ya, there are guard rails that will progressively get weaker as he ages so he can ease into it.

Doesn't China already do something similar with limiting game play for children? Instead of speculating about the result there's potentially data about the result that can be looked at. (Of course that's if the data coming from there can be trusted.)

It’s only for online games, so I don’t think it’s very comparable to a blanket playtime limit on video gaming.

Ok, it's not perfectly 1 to 1, but you think there's nothing that can be learned from the results of banning online games for children with regards to banning video games in general for children?

For one, banning online games is much easier (if your accounts are appropriately verified), and because of piracy, China’s gaming industry evolved into a mostly freemium model that demands addicting its young and adult customers to the game.

This is really different from little johnny playing super Mario Wonder on their Switch, how would you even implement that?

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