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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

#661

Post by xvector »

goostavos wrote: post #591
devnulll wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are all sorts of things governments express control over, even at home. The obvious scenarios are alcohol, nicotine & drugs. As a parent of young children, there are addition parallels between Minecraft / Roblox / Alcohol / Cigarettes. To a real degree, more effort is put into making gaming deliberately additive - although flavored vaping (bubble gum, cotton candy, etc) would like to enter the conversation.

I don't know if we're coming at it from the same angle if we're lumping Minecraft in with alcohol and cigarettes. To your initial point, though, just because the government currently expresses control is not actually an argument that they should continue to do so or be granted additional powers to do more. Because it's normal, doesn't mean it's correct. Flavored vaping products are for sure bad. I'll happily give you…

Videogame addiction probably stunted my childhood development as much as drugs would have, so I can see where the Chinese government is coming from if it's from an addiction perspective.

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

#662

Post by Jensson »

eric-hu wrote: post #497
ryan93 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound a lot more scientific than it is.

Seconded. It doesn’t take a team of PhD’s to run A/B testing on features and variations that improve lift. Tie performance bonuses to improved engagement and sales, and you can motivate many non doctorates to find novel ways to make things addictive.

Pretty sure Candy Crush has such a team of PhD's though. Not all games, but the big games definitely do.

You can read about it here from their own page:

https://careers.king.com/kingdom-news/data-at-king/

> That experiment is typical of how we learn from data at King. We have about 150 people working in data roles, out of a total workforce of 2,000. They come from a range of backgrounds. Many are from the games industry, of course, but we also bring in lots of recruits straight from university.

> These people will have just done their masters or PhD in a wide range of disciplines. Many of our team studied statistics, physics or computer science but we also have people who came from theoretical biology because work on DNA sequencing in that field has produced a lot of data-sophisticated people. Others are behavioural psychologists or behavioural economists.

Now in the specific example they choose to highlight they saw that making the game less frustrating made people spend more money. However if making the game more frustrating turned out to make more money since users bought more powerups then they absolutely would do it.

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

#663

Post by pojzon »

ezconnect wrote: post #98
namelessoracle wrote: post #7

I have mixed feelings about this. Younger me learned a lot of problem solving skills and most importantly spent a lot of time learning how to read by playing RPGs and games that required lots of reading. My reading skills would not have been as advanced if i wasn't playing text heavy games that had a lot of plot like Square Enix games and the CRPGs of the time. Modern games though are clearly designed to get you as a…

When you were a kid you had a lot of extra time and video games fill that voids.

As that kid I now regret not spending that time on something productive like reading interesting books or having a unique hobby (carving/skating/guitar etc)

Now I dont have time for anything and reflecting at that void space - it was filled with garbage - like running pokemon yellow 7 times in a row.

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

#664

Post by Ajedi32 »

treebot wrote: post #642
Ajedi32 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the policy itself isn't necessarily an issue, but the fact that it's being imposed by the government is a huge problem. (Especially since it's not even a democratically elected government. Taxation without representation and all that.) If a parent instituted the exact same policy for their kids I would have no problem with that.

If it were imposed by a democratically elected government, would it still be a problem?

Yes, in my opinion. If a law like this were passed in the United States I'd be vocally campaigning to get the law repealed and the people who voted for it replaced in the next election. Sadly, the Chinese people don't have that option, which only makes the situation that much worse.

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

#665

Post by mrtranscendence »

lhorie wrote: post #526
appletrotter wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

> For example, I only learned in my 30s that "down" (as in Final Fantasy's "Phoenix down") refers to a type of plumage

For what it's worth, that's not at all what I'd consider a weird gap. As an educated 40-year-old native English speaker, I think it's possible I've gone my entire life without speaking aloud the word "down" in the sense of plumage. I'd only expect a non-native speaker to know it if they spent some time focusing on animal terminology.

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

#666

Post by skystarman »

mcdonje wrote: post #506
skystarman wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure a country that commits cultural genocide and sent a million or more Muslim Uighurs into reeducation camps is where you should be looking for a "better system". Forced sterilization, forced labor... Or a country that has no freedom of the press, savagely beats or murders political dissidents, will take away your job and livelihood if you dare question CCP orthodoxy... The fact that you think is somehow mo…

What's astonishing is how thoroughly you missed their point.

[flagged]

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

#667

Post by yuy910616 »

president wrote: post #638
yuy910616 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad I have certain inalienable rights, but I'm also happy to see the authoritarian government experiment continue. There is a chance that liberal government is the most effective government, ever - the so-called end of history argument, but let's not forget the shot heard around the world was fired less than 250 years ago. Benevolent dictatorship could still work - especially today. Look at Singapore, look at Ch…

> lifting millions and billions of people out of poverty is an achievement that shouldn't be denied This is an oft-repeated propaganda talking point. Their system created their poverty in the first place. Not sure breaking something then fixing it again is much of an achievement. Not to mention, the Chinese government changed the definition of what constituted poverty in order to make that claim. I really don't care…

It's a fairly valid argument imo. The idea that liberal ideals is the best way to organize markets is good - but you can't just ignore the outliers.

If it was easy to fixing it - every country that has been colonized should be at least middle income by now right?

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

#668

Post by sudosysgen »

mywittyname wrote: post #619
ehutch79 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but there won't be any minor users graduating to of age users. I'm making an educated guess here, but i'm betting you won't see a real surge in single player games.

Single player doesn't prevent them from being tied to an online service. Even in America, lots of modern "single player" games don't run without a connection to the internet. These services could easily institute the same limitations on their SP games; forcing them to do online checks on certain events. They could even be sneaky about it by punishing you if you try to evade the checks somehow by deleting your save ga…

Single player games that are always online are subject to the restrictions.

People will just pirate other games. Even on mobile. Every Android device will happily run pirated APKs.

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

#669

Post by make3 »

rank0 wrote: post #235

I am appalled by all the supportive comments in this thread. Why are HN users so comfortable with authoritarian government? It’s about more than just online games. It’s about control. I’m sure the great firewall is perfectly fine as well?

you can be supportive of a policy without being supportive of the type of government that runs it. I'm for it if it was done in a democratic way.

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

#670

Post by maccolgan »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #664
treebot wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were imposed by a democratically elected government, would it still be a problem?

Yes, in my opinion. If a law like this were passed in the United States I'd be vocally campaigning to get the law repealed and the people who voted for it replaced in the next election. Sadly, the Chinese people don't have that option, which only makes the situation that much worse.

I'm placing my bet on the fact that vast majority of Chinese people probably support this, and that's fair.
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