China’s regulation of video game play is not working…and that might not be a bad thing.
Since the Chinese government introduced limitations to control online play times for minors, there has been no noticeable reduction in time spent gaming.
If anything, the data shows a slight uptick in game play (but with this much data that could just be statistical noise).
This study published in Nature analyzed over 7 billion hours of games played in Mainland China, with over 1 million video game titles played, in the weeks preceding and following the introduction of the new rules. Here is what they found:
– 0.77% of gamer profiles engaged in heavy play (over 4 hours per day, 6 days a week) before regulation and 0.88% after.
– Overall play time in a day averaged less than one hour per active account.
– Overall mean weekly playtime per account was estimated at 1.64 hours.
Tencent reported that only 6.4% of playtime in China on their games came from minors as of September 2020, making the presence of under age heavy player population in the data set potentially impossible to detect.
And that becomes the real point of the discussion; was anything meaningful happening that required broad regulation in the first place?
All video games are not suitable for children. We know there are exploititive games with punishing communities that are not suitably safe for any vulnerable populations, but outright bans have not proven to be an effective strategy for dealing with those issues.
Other such bans to prevent minors online access to pornography or e-cigarettes (situations where quantifiable harm is possible to the majority of the population) have proven to be ineffective at harm reduction, often compounding issues as the activity is pushed into less visible subsets of the community.
Video game companies, like any product company, should be held to tight consumer product standards and regulated based on scientific evidence of harm.
But treating a whole industry like a plague does not appear warranted here (certainly, there is a lack of data to support it), and either way it has clearly not been effective.
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