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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

#751

Post by mrobot »

bogwog wrote: post #702
lhorie wrote: post #687

China thinks that video games (specifically, the online variety) are harmful enough to children that it needs to be regulated at a federal level and children's exposure to games should be restricted. But here's the thing: We on the west do exactly the same thing for things like cigarettes, alcohol and gambling. The motivations behind all those restrictions are even similar (largely related to children's health/well-b…

> It's a big double standard to call their flavor of restrictions "authoritarian", while being ok with (or even strongly in favor of) our flavor of restrictions, even though the two are objectively similar in nature. Our restrictions came about through a democratic process (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_... ), not because our supreme leader decided he knows what's best for us. N…

What do you actually know about China's governance and democracy? How do you know your flavor of democracy is really better than everyone elses?

Chinese people actually like their government, and no they are not brainwashed.

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

#752

Post by _carbyau_ »

wedn3sday wrote: post #349
lhorie wrote: post #91

People talking about the benefits of games reminds me of people talking about the benefits of, say, a glass of wine with every meal: it's worth looking into but at the same time it's the sort of thing that obviously doesn't scale linearly with the amount/intensity of consumption. I similarly have mixed feelings as well, but for slightly different reasons. I've read about studies that say that musical training (which…

personal anecdote: I've played hundreds of hours of driving games, my girlfriend has never touched a controller. When we got our Tesla, the backup camera view was perfectly intuitive to me and I was immediately comfortable driving the car backwards using just the display, but she was not. As we go into the future of computer driven everything, people comfortable with controlling things via computer interface will hav…

I still refer to the nav screen in the car as a minimap. Using it feels completely native.

Unlike some games however I can't drive using only the minimap...

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

#753

Post by alasdair_ »

bennysomething wrote: post #300
jliptzin wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone is putting off other important things in their life to play video games then that's definitely a problem. However, if people want to set aside 100% of their free time to play video games, I don't think that's any worse than other things people do with their time that we (as a society) hold in high regard such as becoming a chess grandmaster, practicing violin 12 hours / day, watching football games nonstop…

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…

The highest paid pianists in the world make roughly the same as the highest paid esports players. Both groups are exceptionally talented and driven multi-multi-millionaires with massive fan bases. These things can be attractive to some people, even if the source of the attributes is videogames over piano.

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

#754

Post by justinmcp »

grecy wrote: post #691
Ajedi32 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you vocally campaign to repeal the law that bans under 18s from consuming alcohol and cigarettes? Do you vocally campaign to repeal the law that prevents you buying and using asbestos in their buildings? Do you vocally campaign to repeal the law that prevents you from buying and owning an anti-aircraft missile system? Our democracies have plenty of laws about things we're not allowed to do. Some of them are for ou…

One of the most interesting things about China related discussions is the flood of people who will arrive and post points/arguments with various levels of false equivalency with "western" law/practise/etc. _Not_ that you are doing that, maybe, but thats one of the challenges in these conversations, who is being genuine and who is not?

China _is_ authoritarian, denying that is ridiculous. The CCP creates laws that individually or in part can benefit its populace, but are often or solely pro cadre or their personal interests.

That democracies have corruption or vested interests (whether "positively" motivated or not) influencing laws does not make the process or the results equivalent.

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

#755

Post by sudosysgen »

Gunax wrote: post #154
brundolf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember we're talking about a totalitarian regime, where using real IDs for digital accounts is already a thing. Where importing unapproved foreign media is (presumably) banned. Where you can't so much as get a VPN without permission. I'm sure some people will find ways around it, but I don't think that will be the norm.

I dont see it working any differently than piracy. If people can hack the bytecode to appear as though the game has received a valid key, I dont see why they cannot do the same for these restrictions.

That's not how online games work. Core functions of the game are executed remotely. You need to convince the server, not your local machine.

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

#756

Post by javierluraschi »

barnesto wrote: post #737
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…

All good points, but the main issue here is the government, in this case the CCP, dictating game play. It's the parent's responsibility to dictate when and how their children play games not the government. If the government wants to go after game developers because their games are addictive that's one thing. Dictating to the players is a level of control free citizens should never experience. Although, in this case,…

Where is the line compared to government enforcing parents to not leaving their kids alone in a car or home, or sending their kids to school?

How do we measure what level of control we have/deserve on our kids?

I'm not disagreeing, just arguing that there are cases where one could argue that the government is overstepping on how we parent our kids.

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

#757

Post by raman162 »

lhorie wrote: post #91

People talking about the benefits of games reminds me of people talking about the benefits of, say, a glass of wine with every meal: it's worth looking into but at the same time it's the sort of thing that obviously doesn't scale linearly with the amount/intensity of consumption. I similarly have mixed feelings as well, but for slightly different reasons. I've read about studies that say that musical training (which…

I think regulation on past time activities isn't the appropriate approach. It's a slippery slope, are they soon going to regulate the amount of time someone can watch television, or the number of times one may go to a movie theater?

Knowing china's history, it doesn't seem too far fetched and sounds like we're slowly evolving into an episode of black mirror.

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

#758

Post by mhh__ »

jpambrun wrote: post #334
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?

Alcohol pretty much universally prohibited for minors and nobody calls that authoritarian. Governments have responsibility for the wellbeing of citizen, even against themselves (mandatory seatbelts comes to mind). Meanwhile, gaming addiction can also be very destructive.

I've met alcoholics and I've met people who play League of Legends too much. Of the latter, they are all alive...

Different magnitudes.

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

#759

Post by superfrank »

toxik wrote: post #703
perlgeek wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just limiting to three hours a week, but to three particular hours a week. Feels even more Draconian to me.

Imagine the thundering herd problems you experience when all of your users have the same three hour time slots.

I worked at an ed-tech company for a few years. 80%+ of our traffic came on line in a 2-ish hour every morning. Additionally, because most schools have similar summer break schedules, we'd have this crazy ramp up in August and September where out daily active users would 10x in a little over two weeks.

It was actually a pretty unique challenge that had some weird trade-offs.

For example, when do you release new code? You've got this nice window at the end of each day when traffic is super low, so any issues with the release will affect a minimal amount of users, but on the other hand, if you release at the end of the day, you don't really know if your code works at scale until the next morning.

Similarly, what do you do during the summer period? You've got a couple quiet months in where almost no one is online where you can kind of swing for the fences in terms of changes, but at the same time, you won't really know whether it handle the full load of the customer base until September.

Sure there's things like load testing (which we did), but theres no way to truly predict how your customers will use your product. We had a really solid engineering team and ended up coming up with processes to handle a lot of these problems, but still, it was something that I hadn't dealt with before and I found pretty interesting.

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

#760

Post by lhorie »

bogwog wrote: post #702
lhorie wrote: post #687

China thinks that video games (specifically, the online variety) are harmful enough to children that it needs to be regulated at a federal level and children's exposure to games should be restricted. But here's the thing: We on the west do exactly the same thing for things like cigarettes, alcohol and gambling. The motivations behind all those restrictions are even similar (largely related to children's health/well-b…

> It's a big double standard to call their flavor of restrictions "authoritarian", while being ok with (or even strongly in favor of) our flavor of restrictions, even though the two are objectively similar in nature. Our restrictions came about through a democratic process (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_... ), not because our supreme leader decided he knows what's best for us. N…

I don't want to start a us-vs-commies flame war but I'm finding it ironic that not a week ago someone was trying to tell me that american democracy is more of a plutocracy...

Something that people don't seem to realize about China is that CCP values are supported by a majority of Chinese people.

> What other word would you use to describe the Chinese government?

I strongly suggest getting out of your comfort zone and go talk to some mainland Chinese people (preferably not the living-in-america ones). You'll find that they describe it with words like "unified" (which, for record, I also consider a loaded term).

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