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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

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CCP is the one making the mistake, not the people. No one said it was the people.

It is easy to read the above comment that way. Often people confuse governments with people. Americans vs American Government. Chinese vs CCP. Etc. We should be clear about the distinction because certain factions have a vested interest in promoting this.

Except that the comment itself drew a distinction between the government's decision, how the people will respond, and how the government will respond to the people's response. I could see confusion happening only if the reader gave up part way through.

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is aimed at online, it's probably aimed at casino style ones.

I think that's a fairly misinformed statement, there's a vast library of online multiplayer games that are not casino like in the least bit.

Yeah, like, Quake 3/Live, CS 1.6, MTA/SAMP…

Unfortunately even the current Counter-Strike incarnation has a fucking casino in it. Arguably more optional than in other games but still there.

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

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it'll just destroy the shitty gambling microtransaction games. Most studios will focus on offline games again, back to old-school games. Honestly, I'm a fan of this. No harm done to anything worth saving.

Then just regulate the microtransactions instead of doing this.

perfect example of a keyhole solution. Also perfect opportunity to link to my favourite propaganda site [0]

[0] https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the last year of 'quarantine' for most of the Western world has made people more comfortable with authoritarian governments and actions. It's rather alarming how widespread and quickly this change in ideology has happened.

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"

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

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

#486
I can't help but think that this action could very well spur out some 'unintended consequences'.

Prohibition can restrict and reduce participation and usage at an overall level, but certainly some portion of this will be pushed underground, or to unregulated spaces - probably just the thing the government WOULDN'T want to have.

Particularly when we are talking about some portion of the players being addicts here... how many are going to sign up for VPNs, Tor (or some other workaround) and find some other game or activity that satisfies that itch?

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Struggling to come up with a logical counter argument but learning a musical instrument is deeply satisfy as is listening to someone live who is good. 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. Edit when I was about 12 I started playing the guitar non…

> 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) reading a book for fun.

I'd say that some games are more constructive, like Minecraft or other games where you're building something or creating a story yourself... but I think what's being targeted is largely RNG lootbox online grind games. There's also an argument that top tier professional gaming isn't really that much different than being good at some other sport... and that's kind of an unfortunate side-effect.

The title is a bit misleading as there's no provision for 'offline' games.

Culturally for me... regulating media time seems like a parent's responsibility, and maybe this does give parents the tools to do that as the child could use their parent's account with their permission fairly easily.

I'd be against a similar thing where I live, but as I am not a Chinese citizen nor do I plan on living there, I can't say my opinion is worth much.

However, I think people are making this out to be much worse than it is as there's (for a long time) been a provision that children under a certain age can't sign up for online accounts (in the US) without a parent's explicit permission (with the implication that that the parent takes responsibility for monitoring the child's activity). This makes that implication more explicit as the child must use the parent's account most of the time.

This is one way of solving the 'online games have predatory practices against children / teens,' I don't think this is how I'd solve it, but again, not really my business.

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

#488
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Half the time I spent gaming was spent figuring out how to get the computer to do what I wanted which lead to a life long interest in technology. I remember the old days of "extended memory" which meant you needed slightly different configuration files for each game. That meant if you wanted to play a bunch of games, it made sense to learn how to write a bat script to config according to what you wanted to play. Yo…

There is also the value of the skills being learned. Learning about extended memory may have been of value to some people in the day, but it had negligible value a decade later. It may have launched a few careers, but it did not have lasting value. Learning how to create batch files had more value since those skills were transferable to similar domains (e.g. Unix administration and software development). That being s…

I beg to differ about XMS. That particular technology may have only been relevant for a decade, but the idea of using a harder-to-access storage to supplement cheap-but-limited storage is everywhere. L1 and L2 cache, data warehouses, cloud storage, and so on. I value learning about that abstraction early on. I’d agree it’s not singularly career changing, but I don’t think knowing any one technology in the software industry is.

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

#489
I was just thinking about if I should limit game time for my kids or not.

My thoughts were that there are too many kind of video games to club them all as "games are bad". And probably I'll focus on limiting the kind of games or specific games themselves.

Some games are just elaborate casino games in nicer clothes. I really don't see benefits to that. But some offline games offer interesting stories and challenges that need brain/dexterity to solve. I feel those are probably just as good as books or movies/tv.

For online competitive games, that's a harder one. Games like Fortnite, COD, online sports games, and all that. Some people say it lets kids play together with friends, but I find nowadays it can also just expose yourself to kind of bad social interactions.

Coop online games and such, where the friend group is closed, like you play within your friends, no other strangers involved I feel is probably fine.

Having said all that, I feel that we're missing some actual evidence here to say if games are good or bad. Is there actually some data on it? Any correlation with kids who spent a lot of time playing video games and how they turned out later in life? I personally did grow up playing games, and I turned out fine, so sometimes I wonder if it's more of a false scare than anything.

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the last year of 'quarantine' for most of the Western world has made people more comfortable with authoritarian governments and actions. It's rather alarming how widespread and quickly this change in ideology has happened.

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-authoritarian is actually good in this case.

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