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China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

reuters.com

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Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#521

Post by loudtieblahblah »

woah wrote: post #165
loudtieblahblah wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a lot of time hiding away in my room - up late on the internet, playing video games, reading books, listening to music - often the kind aimed at the alienated. I felt alone, like i didn't belong. 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 - fav…

Honestly, it sounds like your current attitude is as extreme as your former one.

I spent 25 years online. I'm now 40 with a family of my own.

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.

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#522

Post by detaro »

m0zg wrote: post #503

China, apparently, does not know any 18 year olds. I'm sure they'll all voluntarily comply, no problem. /s

Rules for how online gaming companies can offer their service is kind of the opposite of expecting users to comply voluntarily with restrictions on online gaming?

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#523

Post by TillE »

ryandrake wrote: post #498
anonporridge wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because we've all seen firsthand the reckless social irresponsibility of a massive segment of the population. 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.…

COVID has convinced me that a functioning society can’t just throw its hands up and exclusively rely on Nash Equilibrium to deal with all problems. If you rely on everyone being rational self-interest-optimizing actors, you’ll never solve problems that require voluntary collective, coordinated action. It just ends up as a giant game of prisoner’s dilemma with everyone choosing DEFECT.

Yeah, there's basically no way the pandemic is ever going to end without broad vaccine mandates. I would expect China to be one of the first countries to move in that direction, but we'll see.

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#524

Post by pphysch »

Akuehne wrote: post #293

And just like that, China's competitive Dota scene will disappear. I wonder how this will effect the Perfect World/Valve partnership.

It will take a hit but certainly won't disappear. Success in Dota 2 nowadays is not based in having fast reaction times and dexterity but in strategic planning and team cohesion. If top teams have a young player, it is usually in position 1 or 2, and many older players are also currently succeeding at those roles.

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).

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#525

Post by nickff »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #490
staunch wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temporary and mild authoritarian measures during a once-in-a-century pandemic make complete sense, even to very libertarian people. The U.S. has a track record of such measures being temporary, such as the much more extreme measures taken during WW2. Comparing this kind of thing to what China is doing is drawing a false equivalency. There is no legitimate comparison to be made.

I'm surprised to see you getting hammered for this sentiment. I agree with you and with the parent comment. 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-autho…

The parent made a specific claim:

>"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?

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#526

Post by lhorie »

appletrotter wrote: post #468
lhorie wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a game is providing reading material and motivation to read, it will improve reading skills. 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 educat…

So what I think is a really strong counterpoint to your argument is the simple fact that watching movies in a language is generally considered a great way to learn said language. That's passive learning in a similar manner to what you would get out of reading in a video game. 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…

Well, I think doing things way above your level "works" sometimes in the sense that there's a subset of things that a learner happens to be most receptive to at any given time, and immersing yourself at the deep end is a bit like brute forcing through the entire subject matter until something happens to stick. But this is inefficient and not guaranteed to yield any results at all.

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.

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#527

Post by true_religion »

ohyes wrote: post #487
Jensson wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also maybe just in terms of being attractive to other people saying you are a level 122 mage in world of ever crack does not quite have the same allure as being able to captivate a room with your piano playing. 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 v…

As a man, I don't want to hear about your video-game exploits either. I play, but I definitely don't want to define my personality or hear/tell stories about it. 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) re…

So I ski. I don’t really define my life or personality around skiing, but I would be a little miffed if I could only ski for 3 hours a week in the winter because the government thinks I’m not being productive enough.

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.

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#528

Post by pphysch »

shahbaby wrote: post #96

Bad idea. Scarcity artificially increases percieved value. This is how you make something more addictive, not less.

On the contrary, not having access to a bad habit for 5 days a week is a great way to replace that habit.

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#529

Post by m0zg »

detaro wrote: post #522
m0zg wrote: post #503

China, apparently, does not know any 18 year olds. I'm sure they'll all voluntarily comply, no problem. /s

Rules for how online gaming companies can offer their service is kind of the opposite of expecting users to comply voluntarily with restrictions on online gaming?

There are also self-hosted, and offline games. Shit, my 17 yo plays until 4 in the morning somehow even though his internet turns off at 10pm and his phone has no data plan.

Re: China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

#530

Post by thomastjeffery »

imbnwa wrote: post #44
hn8788 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be up to the parents, not the government. And like you said, it's banning one form of entertainment that is no worse than the others.

> It should be up to the parents, not the government. 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…

Unfortunately, especially in China, government is not the equivalent of tribal community.

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.

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