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

> ... correlation between games and violence (i.e. the consensus is that no such causation relationship exists).

I feel that the connection between violence and violence in games is far more subtle than a direct connection.

Video games are not real life but the thoughts and feelings we have when we play games are real. When we experience anger, sadness or joy in a game, all of these emotions are real for us.

When we have experiences pathways are laid down in the brain through the process of myelination and these pathways get reinforced over time by having the same experiences.

When we hit, shoot or kill something in a video game and get feedback, sound, visual or music, our brain starts to become conditioned to those experiences.

Our brains are plastic and flexible in that they can learn that hitting, shooting and killing, being violent can feel "good". It is possible that this can happen even being completely unaware of it happening.

If you make games, and there is violence in your game, I would seriously take a moment and consider. Is this violence in the game really necessary? There are many other options for different types of gameplay.

There's a famous quote attributed to Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” The only way we'll find better ones is if we keep exploring.

It's not so much that I want more or fewer regulations, as I want to explore systems other than market-based incentives. I'm not sure that regulations + free markets will get us to a place where people aren't addicted to video games, eat healthy, exercise, have quality education, and generally lead the good life. In 1930, there were a lot of ideas for how to get there, and a lot of those seem plausible. I'd like to see how some of those play out in practice.

I'll mention that I'm aware of where China is with regards to labor practices, freedom-of-speech, and so on, but with regards to public health systems, China is way ahead of the US. Everyone has access to decent, affordable healthcare. It's not at the same level as $50,000 procedures in the US, but it's good enough, and everyone has it.

It's also not really fair to compare countries with $64k per-capita GDP to ones with $10k per-capita GDP. It's even more unfair if one considers where the per-capita GDP was a decade or two ago. 25 years ago, China had a per-capita GDP of under $1000 -- that's less than Nigeria today. I think that's a more fair comparison between systems of government. Would you rather live in Nigerian democracy or Chinese CCP? That's not a loaded question -- they're quite different.

> Oh good grief.

Islam has a lot of good ideas too. For example, it has a wealth tax, and it discourages debt-based economies. You don't need to swallow political and economic systems wholesale.

I have a feeling that there is a bit of subtle manipulation by the framing going on here. The current Reuters article title that I get is "Three hours a week: Play time's over for China's young video gamers", but the submission's title is "China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week". This conjures images of Chinese police raiding homes and punishing children or parents who are caught gaming too long.

But getting closer to the source (http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/30/c_1310157673.htm), the regulation appears to be exclusively targetting the amount of on-line gaming services that companies are allowed to offer to minors. This doesn't any seem different in principle to various Western regulations attempting limit ads[1] or pornography[2] to children. Granted, some people in the West also consider these as examples authoritarian government overreach. But my guess is that a some people's reactions are driven substantially by the specific story framing (and of course, China), more than by principled reasoning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...

How many of these variants or noteworthy viruses kill as many people? Genuine question, because covid has been on a different scale to SARS, MERS or any of the various animal flu pandemics, in terms of R number and how difficult it is to control.

I don’t understand why there is such an outrage about this. I bet most of the HN crowd supports vaccine requirements to even buy groceries, always using the argument that is to protect everyone. Well the Chinese gov has determined that people being addicted to games is a threat to their society as a whole so they decided to restrict them. I’m sure you could even get some doctors to do publish some papers about how the games are really affecting these kids, that way you have the “Science” blessing.