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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

#991

Post by thomastjeffery »

dang wrote: post #901
thomastjeffery wrote: post #575

This comment thread is a really interesting instance of a social phenomenon that happens in forums. The overwhelming majority of comments here are both: 1. Partially or fully supportive of this policy. 2. Downvoted to grey. There seem to be two ways people are engaging with this topic: 1. Writing a nuanced comment about how this is probably good for children or well meaning (to be downvoted by most readers). 2. Upvot…

That's not how the thread turned out in general. It's a good idea to wait and see how things develop. The earliest comments usually are not representative of community opinion.

The thread may have more comments now, but the top ones are all still the same.

The top comment is still, "I have mixed feelings about this" and totally lumps together all "modern games" as the toxic problem this win-some-lose-some law might be "needed" for; and that's exactly the facade of nuance I'm complaining about.

Just because a law is intended to fix a real problem doesn't mean we need to prop up devil's advocate on stilts to balance it against criticism.

A government forcing tens of millions of children to log in to a centralized database to make sure they only play video games during a specific perscripted three hours/week is prima facie insane. Leading discussion about it with "mixed feelings" is utterly disingenuous and unrepresentative.

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

#992

Post by binarybanana »

devnulll wrote: post #501
goostavos wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know where people are coming from any more. Like literally everyone else in tech who knows how the sausage gets made, I'm appalled by the teams of Ph.Ds which exist solely to exploit the dopamine response of children. However, it never would have ever crossed my mind to jump from "here's a particular problem" to "the government should control how much of a specific activity your child can do at home"

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.

What makes you think adults don't like flavored liquids?

Seems insane to suggest that adults would prefer the taste of ashtray over apple or orange (I like fruity aromas). I mostly vape without flavoring nowadays because I'm lazy, but I just don't get the mindset. Adults like sugar, sweets, lemonade and all that stuff just as much as children do. Some seem to really like the taste of cigarettes, but I think for the most part people are just more comfortable to say "I like the taste" instead of "I'm addicted to nicotine", because inhaling burnt plant matter along with the diffused active agents and aromatic compounds generally isn't good for taste. Weed also tastes much better vaped.

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

#993

Post by Aicy »

bogwog wrote: post #705
logicalmonster wrote: post #559

Putting aside the horrible ethics of controlling society like this, it sounds like a really bad policy by China that would likely backfire. 1) Mandating that kids all game at the same time will have bad problems for some web services. Some games geared towards younger people might be close to a ghost town 95% of the time, and then surge radically in traffic during allowed gaming hours. This is asking for technical pr…

I agree this is fucked up for a lot of reasons, but I'd take point 1 as a positive for the service teams. This gives them a way to perfectly predict the load on their servers in advance.

Not really, there will still be a lot of variance day to day, week to week etc in on how many people log on and play.

I think it's unlikely that every kid will be using 100% of their playtime every weekend, and thus giving a perfectly reliable usage pattern.

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

#994

Post by eunos »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #821
cenophor wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard from various Mainland Chinese people: that many of them thinks western media brainwashes us (think the thing about Olympic photo coverage of Chinese medalists) and many condemn westerner take on social matters (the US' handling of [COVID], for example, is seen as a "proof" that the our infatuation with freedom has severe failings). That's clearly anecdotal because I worked and lived there for a year rece…

It depends on your environment. Say if you are at a university or something with students it will be very different than if you are working for a tech company with your Chinese co-workers. Also, southerners tend to be less nationalistic than northerners, so if you are in Beijing it is very different than if you are in Shanghai or Shenzhen (though if you are working at a tech company, your co-workers will be from all…

>the right direction under Hu, if only because Hu was a weak leader

Seems you imply that the right direction for China is having weak leader, which historically it was disaster. That aside, lots of the ugly things on China you heard like airpocalypse, corruption, inequality and weak governance expanded steply under Hu, so there's that.

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

#995

Post by graderjs »

dillondoyle wrote: post #977
graderjs wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be, but i don't think they have a problem policing speech anywhere else, why would they particularly focus on it in games in a way to restrict the time? If it was the case there's always another online property people can occur to converse. the correct English acronym is CPC now, i think

Didn't know about that acronym! Yeah i think the point that they don't have a problem policing speech everywhere else kind of points out that this is just another excuse (or value add minimally). The online places that the less tech savvy majority have is shrinking.

Yeah fair enough that's an interesting way to turn it around. I guess we come at it from different perspectives. I suppose I get you see it as the main thing the CPC is trying to do is control people's thoughts and speech and everything is subsumed to that goal and so all the other reasons are just fake pretexts in order to achieve that single goal.

But I suppose I have a more broad view of the cpc's goals and while I definitely acknowledge and I'm okay to some extent with their attempts to control speech because I see the utility of them doing that and I understand the reason they try to do that. I also think they have a lot of other goals that they're trying to do. you know they are trying to create various types of social reform and get people to behave in ways that they think of as good for the country. so I do believe that this is genuinely about that; I mean they want to free up young people to do some useful work and enhance themselves and not just you know become sort of slaves to these game companies and make the money or become addicted to that kind of behavior.

but I think the argument you propose is sort of an effective counter narrative to the cpc's policy argument there I guess so if people wanted to criticize it they could claim it was just you know another suppression of speech but at the same time that trope seems a little bit tired and stretched thin particularly I think if you look at the realities of what they do achieve and I think from the point of view of a CPC adversary you know the danger of using thinly stretched tropes is they lose value and they lose weight over time.

so if that's your bag I suggesy coming up with sort of a constantly you know updating set of counter narratives. because that's certainly what the CPC narrative engineers and propagandists are doing they are always refining their rhetoric and their arguments so if you want to compete you can't do it with a tired thin stretch trope you have to kind of constantly be innovating.

Hope that helps! ;P ;) xx

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

#996

Post by throwaway675309 »

Anyone who seriously thinks that the reason for these restrictions are anything other than a means for the CCP to exert control and remind big tech (the entertainment industry in this case) exactly where they stand in the pecking order is simply naive. For the children my ass...

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

#997

Post by greengrom »

Everyone is almost now playing video games. I think it's a great pastime. Besides, it's even more interesting when you know more tricks. I just found a great website https://dmarket.com/pt/ingame-items/item-list/csgo-skins/pis... where I now buy skins at a very low price and enjoy the game even more.

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

#998

Post by RandyGoldy »

Everyone is almost now playing video games. I think it's a great pastime. Besides, it's even more interesting when you know more tricks. I just found a great website https://dmarket.com/pt/ingame-items/item-list/csgo-skins/pis... where I now buy skins at a very low price and enjoy the game even more.

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

#999

Post by jamesnadeau »

ethagknight wrote: post #941
danudey wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 6yo son really, really wanted to play Breath of the Wild. He loves Zelda, my wife loves Zelda, my best friend's girlfriend is over the moon with Zelda, etc. I always played Link in Mario Kart, to the point where, when he was 2 or 3, he was in Best Buy with my wife and saw a Breath of the Wild Switch case and said "is daddy!" Of course, after a few requests a year and a bit ago, my wife had to give him an ultimatum…

What other games do you recommend? …uhhh asking for my 6 year old son who loves Super Mario 3D World… Zelda BoW is my next purchase I fortunately bought a used Wii U bundle with a stash of games and controllers off eBay pre pandemic “for the kids” and I realized while playing with them that I far prefer them playing games than staring at the TV. We are talking and laughing and arguing and explaining the whole time du…

The Labo sets are a blast, although not much reading, but good hand eye coordination

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

#1000

Post by riffraff »

nybble41 wrote: post #457
riffraff wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In UK you can't buy alcohol if you're below 18. You can drink alcohol in a public place if you're 16 and there is an accompanying adult buying it for you. It's not quite a "free for all", but anyway, I doubt it relates to the issue at hand. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age#Europe

Those rules are for public drinking. There doesn't seem to be any age restriction for private alcohol consumption in the UK, or for that matter most of Europe.

sure but if you're a kid you can't concretely drink in private if you can't buy alcohol.

Other countries don't have rules or don't enforce it, but the UK certainly does.

Source: I was an italian teen used to buy wine for my grandpa, but I could not get a beer at the supermarket in the UK.

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