How can anyone here endorse something like this in any way? I get that video game addiction is a real problem, but constant surveillance is not a healthy alternative. Some people are cool with this because "kids need to be studying or playing outside, not playing video games!". But this is just an instance where your interests happen to shallowly align with the government's.
By the time we get to an issue you take offense with, there's already going to be a precedent of censorship and restricted activity and you'll be screwed. To be clear, I can't stand microtransaction-packed cash grabs and I don't game at all, but I also don't believe it's the government's place to say how we should be spending out free time.
How can people endorse? Pretty easy - cognitive dissonance, projection, vicarious tithing, etc. People are really complacent about other people suffering things they themselves would hate. We're asshole in that way.
Or, you know, people don't consider it "suffering", but "doing what's better". How about that?
If a parent demands that a kid eats his veggies instead of the "burgers and ice cream" the kind wants, it's not necessarily suffering.
Or if you still consider it suffering, it's not like all suffering is valid and should be respected.
It's very easy to make everyone happy, giving them whatever they want all the time, doesn't mean its best for them. Not even if they're adults. Not only what someone wants might be bad for them, but what someone wants might also be bad for others (like someone "wanting" to blast his favorite tunes at full volume at 2am). In those cases it's best that they "suffer" not getting what they want.
I can’t help not being offended, and “this slope is so slippery only being offended by trifles can save us” isn’t the compelling position you seem to think it is. The fact is that the slope is rarely slippery, there are often May chances to reinforce or overturn such trends in a relatively free society (which of course China isn’t). No amount of pearl-clutching is going to change that, sorry.
Isn't this argument far too strong? What distinguishes your slippery slope from the normal process of law? Can't you call every law "a precedent of restricted activity"?
It seems to me like the problem in China isn't that they have laws, it's that they're unilaterally applied by a dictatorship. But this idea seems fine. There's no censorship or restricted activity. Nobody's preventing anyone from playing Fortnite, they're just toning back some of its more addictive qualities after a set time period. It's not a fundamental human right to earn XP in Fortnite.
The problem is not really the inventive way of implementing the game penalization (instead of cutting off access hobble the game experience). It is quite a clever and soft way to wane off the game.
The problem is that it is imposed on players without them having a recourse or the possibility to adapt the mechanism to their own benefit (like parents trying to curtail children's playing time, or if you want to limit your own playing time tonight because tomorrow you have to get up early).
You probably could. Windows 10 and XBOX have a family thing where you can set times and block applications. There is an app for android called screentime that does a similar thing. You can also set time limits on PS4 accounts (they have to be PSN account though, I think)
It's not the same thing. Instead of cutting off access, display an alert and then hobble the experience (rate of game item gain drops by 50%, disable challenges). It's a lot more softer way to get out of playing instead of just turning off Internet or even the whole computer.
I agree with you competely. The chinese government should not be forcing this.
The reason parents jump on such meassures is that parenting is very hard. Everytime you make or enforce a rule you put some distance between you and your child. And while that's necessary it can be very unpleasant. Personally, we are not permissive at all but we are always glad for when some external circumstances forces what we think is best.
So there is a real danger that parents are tempted to delegate their parenting to the government because it's much easier and also because it absolves them of responsibility. Of course, that is a spectacularly bad idea.
I think a lot more of their efforts are positive than we think--but don't make the news. It's just what's good for the Chinese government is of higher priority than what's good for the Chinese people. For something like this where they aren't in conflict they do good.
I believe this started from World of Warcraft. I remember I was 16 when I started to play World of Warcraft, all kinds of regulation started to appear in this game, for example: needs to register with an adult ID card, adding flesh to skeletons, no longer gaining experience when you play too long for a day etc.
For China itself, I think it's just a typical culture resist, just like pop music in the 70s (It's actually a big deal if you try to listen to Taiwan pop music, but young people just love it).
But like other posts mentioned in this thread, it's far more a problem about how people think, just like Europe could probably do this as well. Parent themselves think kids playing video games is a guilt, much more than the government. It's pretty sarcastic that in China, typically parents spend more time on their smartphone. However back in the day, parents don't have time to play with video games because they have less time to be addicted like kids. So they tried to forcibly control their kid about playing video games without any consideration. There even quite some parents who send their kids to do electroconvulsive therapy, just like the movie "A Clockwork Orange".
I personally think the video game is not a problem. Most adults won't play video games all day long because they have their work to do, but kids in school just have to deal with senseless homework, without seeing any points of doing it. When I look back, I always think I should fight more with parents and school, and spend more time on things I like, homework is not cost effective anyway.
I strongly believe the society should fix all other things instead of fixing kids. The problem is, fixing kids just seems too easy than those hard ways.
It's hard to think about a government's place being to limit things like gaming or viewing of entertainment. Though the intent is probably positive in this instance, it's the place of the parents to be instituting and upholding rules, not the government. It's an incredibly slippery slope.
The difference with WoW is that it frames it as a temporary bonus for time logged out, rather than a penalty for time logged in, with the "normal" progression being the lower rate.
No, there are multiple systems in China. All other regions have rested xp, but in this region, extended playtime reduces your regular xp rate all the way to zero. You can see it in the api as "fatigue" scaling
The article uses the term "government" but the citation refers to Tencent doing this voluntarily, as a form of preemptive self-regulation. The distinction is blurred but this does not appear to be a law or public policy at the moment.
Don't bother. All sense and logic gets thrown out of the window when "chinese government" is mentioned in an article. You can literally make stuff out of thin air and the crowd will gobble it with no questions asked.
In most modern societies, we agree that children have limitations on the "people should be free to live their lives as they want" mindset. Otherwise, we'd be letting four year olds subsist solely on candy, hot dogs, and twenty hours a day of the Best of Elsagate.
We've traditionally trusted the compromise for that to parents. But parenting is hard. We're running on a mix of science and lore for a lot of it. Even beyond that, a lot of parents may not follow best practices, despite the best of intentions. Then add the too busy/doesn't care/actually incompetent parents.
The state has an enormous vested interest in the next generation coming out well-skilled and socially balanced. But they can't put a child development expert into every house in the country 24/7. They've had to trust parents who are spotty at best at their job, because there were limits on how they could intervene.
For the first time, we have wildly popular entertainment products that phone home and do remote work as part of normal operation. This makes a technical intervention possible in a way they couldn't do with prior moral panics (TV, comic books, bawdy novels).
In some ways, this is actually a tame and tolerant way to deal with the fear of gaming abuse. They're not saying adults can't have games, or even that kids can't-- just restricting usage when you reach a level that implies they're sacrificing something else (school, sleep, or family life) to make the hours. I wonder if a future evolution of this would integrate into directly the schools and the social credit concept-- if you can play Fortnite II: Electric Boogaloo 14 hours a day and somehow maintain straight As, it will let you, but bludgeon your character when your grades slip.
We can't put an education expert in every home, but we can put all the children in "correct child raising institutions" where they'll follow strict schedules, intense education and balanced diets. So that we'll be sure the kids will be productive elements for the society when they grow up.
I bet in a few generations people would start asking questions like "if it wouldn't be the state, who would raise our children?".
Joking aside, it's not the state's role to raise our children. It's only role should be to make sure the kids are not abused and that's it.
These are hard questions and that's exactly why the state doesn't belong here. Parents make mistakes. Governments make genocide. Leave parenting to parents, even if they aren't perfect. The government isn't either.
A hard question it might be, but you don't get to write it off. If you think the state should intervene in cases of "child abuse" but not "bad parenting", you need to define - and justify - that line.
I think you're clearly missing that industry benefits from getting children hooked on games, be it free to play games on a console or phone which might be tied to a parent's credit card. More traditional, not free to play, games also have the same effect, buy the game and keep buying expansion packs or the next iteration of the game.
If the kid is old enough, in their teens, they might drain their bank account which was to be used as a college tuition/cost of living fund.
We regulate gambling for good reason. Some of these games, with loot boxes and leveling, manipulate people using known psychologic techniques to make them get that dopamine hit by getting little rewards.
You're missing how industry practices can become manipulative and abusive because they are chasing short term profit for themselves and not long term societal benefits. Regulations come into play to ensure that our society does not suffer due to excessive greed/profit creating manipulative or abusive situations for consumers.
Just because China seems to be willing to regulate to the benefit of their overall society this time in a way that isn't harmful to people's rights (only minors and limited penalty), does not make up for their horrible human rights record and their ongoing abuses.
I say this as an American who was probably a bit too hooked on a few video games as a kid, playing 6-7 hours after school most days on one game in particular through highschool.
An automatic opt in for minors, with an optional ability for parents to opt out their kids, seems like a slightly better way to go if you want parents to have more control over this policy. Behavioral economics says you should allow people to opt out, but by default they should have the policy applied because it takes time and effort to opt in (e.g. opt in vs opt out in policies for organ donation in countries around the world, opt out policy leads to much higher organ donation rates)
What is most highly problematic about this policy is that this system is using the Chinese system of having to identify yourself online and their continued monitoring of you and all your activities, grading them and judging you. It is huge human rights issue in regards to ability to make your thoughts known - political or otherwise. If they implemented it in a way that doesn't use that Chinese social credit system, then I wouldn't have any issue with it.
I don't care if you do an analysis on the effects of games on kids and Sue the companies that do it. But don't take freedom away from citizens. Even if it's in the name of good. That's how china's bullshit starts.
As far as this is concerned children are an extension of their parents. What makes individual liberty such a powerful force is that different paradigms can compete peacefully in the same society and everyone can then see what works and what doesn't. So yeah, parent should be able to absolutely block their kids from games and they should also be able to let their kids play them as much as they want (as long as they still eat and go to school ..) and everything in between.
Not quite. Being able to test different paradigms is one reason why we protect liberty, but its not the only one. We also do it because people simply value their autonomy and consider it their right.
While the state taking away parents control over their children is bad policy when taken too far, IMHO it doesnt infringe on their rights. That would imply that one could have the right to control another person, which is not a thought Im comfortable with.
I didn't say it's the only one, but I do think it's big factor in the west's success. And that's what we want: successful problem solving in the space of media consumption for kids and for adults.
Parents absolutely have the right and even the duty to raise their children, a lot of which entails telling them what to do and when. If not even the parents have that right then the state, being a group of people, has even less of a right.
That right is, in my opinion, quite different from other rights though. Parents dont have the right to raise their children for their own sake, they have it for the sake of their children. It also isnt primarily a right but a duty, it just doesnt make sense to have a duty to do something you have no right to.
Just because a removal of freedom seems to be beneficial doesn’t make this any less of a human rights abuse. The right to free expression is inherent in all people, and it is unconscionable that the Chinese government censors expression in this way.
All governments restrict certain behaviors: alcohol (dui, public intoication, etc.), drugs(prohibition, prescription only), gambling.
Now, it’s fair to say that doing those, and doing them as much or as long as you like, is an inalienable right-like “expression”-is absolutely a position you can take. But all countries seem to agree that we shouldn’t do certain things, at least not to excess.
No, the inalienable right to publish creative works without the government forcing you to add or remove content or features.
If they didn’t protect this in the United States, your iPhone would have an FBI backdoor in it as of the last iOS update. It does not, because there are some people in the US who still believe that the government does not have the right to serve as your product manager or editorial board.
This is an interesting distinction. I wonder how, or if, China’s regulations would differ if it were free (freedom and/or beer). But, I think a country has a certain right to regulate when it comes to commerce, especially foreign commerce.
More importantly we live in times were companies are much more efficient at exploiting human weakness.
They do it faster and at larger scales than ever before. There is hardly time for even experts to react to what they are seeing unfold, forget governments.
In the past the only thing that did damage this fast was disease. Anything moving "too fast" through a population without anytime to understand the negative effects should be treated the same way we counter viruses or nuclear chain reactions - with control rods and quarantine periods.
Ancient Greece had a couple major festivals of Dionysus in which it was perfectly acceptable behavior to get roaring drunk and stagger crazily through the public square. You weren't expected to do this, but you could. (One or two times a year.)
It makes me curious whether having the rare festival allowing the activity might make it easier to get everyone not to do it the rest of the year.
There is a world where we find that certain game mechanics trigger the same reactions in our brains as gambling, in which case limiting/regulating game time is not a bad thing.
Yes. The fact that a large number of people abuse their children this way doesn't make it acceptable any more than it made beating them with belts acceptable back when that was common.
The rights that were violated were those of the publisher, by government censorship. They have the right to free expression, and Chinese officials will imprison them by force if they use it.
Are you saying that companies have a right to distribute their work, for profit, unlimitedly? Regardless of how dangerous, addictive, financially ruinous, or socially destructive it is?
First of all, the publishers were able to release the original game, but what was limited was their audience. If there were “rights” violated, it would be the minors’.
Secondly, restricting minors from certain acts is very common in most countries because they aren’t old enough to know better.
It is very common in western countries to forbid stores to sell alcohol and tobacco to minors. Would you argue that the store owner’s rights were violated?
No, they were required to institute cooldown timers for minors to be allowed to publish it. The same goes for Blizzard. Their original, unmodified game, as published in the rest of the world, is censored in China by media censorship laws.
Selling alcohol and tobacco aren’t expression, authoring and publishing creative works is. Please do not conflate the two.
By the time we get to an issue you take offense with, there's already going to be a precedent of censorship and restricted activity and you'll be screwed. To be clear, I can't stand microtransaction-packed cash grabs and I don't game at all, but I also don't believe it's the government's place to say how we should be spending out free time.
If a parent demands that a kid eats his veggies instead of the "burgers and ice cream" the kind wants, it's not necessarily suffering.
Or if you still consider it suffering, it's not like all suffering is valid and should be respected.
It's very easy to make everyone happy, giving them whatever they want all the time, doesn't mean its best for them. Not even if they're adults. Not only what someone wants might be bad for them, but what someone wants might also be bad for others (like someone "wanting" to blast his favorite tunes at full volume at 2am). In those cases it's best that they "suffer" not getting what they want.
* In the UK and other CW countries the police now come to talk to you about your tweets or even arrest you: https://reason.com/archives/2018/09/15/britain-turns-offensi...
* After gun control in the UK knife crime soared. Now they literally have knife control:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/13/britains-knife-control-b...
* Twitter now bans and deletes for "learn to code".
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code?full=1
Nice strawman. Chinese government censorship is not a "trifle".
> a relatively free society (which of course China isn’t)
You said it yourself.
It seems to me like the problem in China isn't that they have laws, it's that they're unilaterally applied by a dictatorship. But this idea seems fine. There's no censorship or restricted activity. Nobody's preventing anyone from playing Fortnite, they're just toning back some of its more addictive qualities after a set time period. It's not a fundamental human right to earn XP in Fortnite.
The problem is that it is imposed on players without them having a recourse or the possibility to adapt the mechanism to their own benefit (like parents trying to curtail children's playing time, or if you want to limit your own playing time tonight because tomorrow you have to get up early).
The reason parents jump on such meassures is that parenting is very hard. Everytime you make or enforce a rule you put some distance between you and your child. And while that's necessary it can be very unpleasant. Personally, we are not permissive at all but we are always glad for when some external circumstances forces what we think is best.
So there is a real danger that parents are tempted to delegate their parenting to the government because it's much easier and also because it absolves them of responsibility. Of course, that is a spectacularly bad idea.
On the other hand, I expect minors to get creative at circumventing the blocks. "Borrowing" a parent's ID, for example.
I believe this started from World of Warcraft. I remember I was 16 when I started to play World of Warcraft, all kinds of regulation started to appear in this game, for example: needs to register with an adult ID card, adding flesh to skeletons, no longer gaining experience when you play too long for a day etc.
For China itself, I think it's just a typical culture resist, just like pop music in the 70s (It's actually a big deal if you try to listen to Taiwan pop music, but young people just love it).
But like other posts mentioned in this thread, it's far more a problem about how people think, just like Europe could probably do this as well. Parent themselves think kids playing video games is a guilt, much more than the government. It's pretty sarcastic that in China, typically parents spend more time on their smartphone. However back in the day, parents don't have time to play with video games because they have less time to be addicted like kids. So they tried to forcibly control their kid about playing video games without any consideration. There even quite some parents who send their kids to do electroconvulsive therapy, just like the movie "A Clockwork Orange".
I personally think the video game is not a problem. Most adults won't play video games all day long because they have their work to do, but kids in school just have to deal with senseless homework, without seeing any points of doing it. When I look back, I always think I should fight more with parents and school, and spend more time on things I like, homework is not cost effective anyway.
I strongly believe the society should fix all other things instead of fixing kids. The problem is, fixing kids just seems too easy than those hard ways.
[1] About electroconvulsive therapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin [2] A good movie about typical Chinese parenting: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3401962/
In most modern societies, we agree that children have limitations on the "people should be free to live their lives as they want" mindset. Otherwise, we'd be letting four year olds subsist solely on candy, hot dogs, and twenty hours a day of the Best of Elsagate.
We've traditionally trusted the compromise for that to parents. But parenting is hard. We're running on a mix of science and lore for a lot of it. Even beyond that, a lot of parents may not follow best practices, despite the best of intentions. Then add the too busy/doesn't care/actually incompetent parents.
The state has an enormous vested interest in the next generation coming out well-skilled and socially balanced. But they can't put a child development expert into every house in the country 24/7. They've had to trust parents who are spotty at best at their job, because there were limits on how they could intervene.
For the first time, we have wildly popular entertainment products that phone home and do remote work as part of normal operation. This makes a technical intervention possible in a way they couldn't do with prior moral panics (TV, comic books, bawdy novels).
In some ways, this is actually a tame and tolerant way to deal with the fear of gaming abuse. They're not saying adults can't have games, or even that kids can't-- just restricting usage when you reach a level that implies they're sacrificing something else (school, sleep, or family life) to make the hours. I wonder if a future evolution of this would integrate into directly the schools and the social credit concept-- if you can play Fortnite II: Electric Boogaloo 14 hours a day and somehow maintain straight As, it will let you, but bludgeon your character when your grades slip.
I bet in a few generations people would start asking questions like "if it wouldn't be the state, who would raise our children?".
Joking aside, it's not the state's role to raise our children. It's only role should be to make sure the kids are not abused and that's it.
Why not? "It takes a village to raise a child", they say. The state is the embodiment of communal action.
> It's only role should be to make sure the kids are not abused
Where is the line between abuse (where the state should intervene) and simply neglectful or poor parenting (which can be very damaging)?
If the kid is old enough, in their teens, they might drain their bank account which was to be used as a college tuition/cost of living fund.
We regulate gambling for good reason. Some of these games, with loot boxes and leveling, manipulate people using known psychologic techniques to make them get that dopamine hit by getting little rewards.
You're missing how industry practices can become manipulative and abusive because they are chasing short term profit for themselves and not long term societal benefits. Regulations come into play to ensure that our society does not suffer due to excessive greed/profit creating manipulative or abusive situations for consumers.
Just because China seems to be willing to regulate to the benefit of their overall society this time in a way that isn't harmful to people's rights (only minors and limited penalty), does not make up for their horrible human rights record and their ongoing abuses.
I say this as an American who was probably a bit too hooked on a few video games as a kid, playing 6-7 hours after school most days on one game in particular through highschool.
An automatic opt in for minors, with an optional ability for parents to opt out their kids, seems like a slightly better way to go if you want parents to have more control over this policy. Behavioral economics says you should allow people to opt out, but by default they should have the policy applied because it takes time and effort to opt in (e.g. opt in vs opt out in policies for organ donation in countries around the world, opt out policy leads to much higher organ donation rates)
What is most highly problematic about this policy is that this system is using the Chinese system of having to identify yourself online and their continued monitoring of you and all your activities, grading them and judging you. It is huge human rights issue in regards to ability to make your thoughts known - political or otherwise. If they implemented it in a way that doesn't use that Chinese social credit system, then I wouldn't have any issue with it.
While the state taking away parents control over their children is bad policy when taken too far, IMHO it doesnt infringe on their rights. That would imply that one could have the right to control another person, which is not a thought Im comfortable with.
Parents absolutely have the right and even the duty to raise their children, a lot of which entails telling them what to do and when. If not even the parents have that right then the state, being a group of people, has even less of a right.
All governments restrict certain behaviors: alcohol (dui, public intoication, etc.), drugs(prohibition, prescription only), gambling.
Now, it’s fair to say that doing those, and doing them as much or as long as you like, is an inalienable right-like “expression”-is absolutely a position you can take. But all countries seem to agree that we shouldn’t do certain things, at least not to excess.
If they didn’t protect this in the United States, your iPhone would have an FBI backdoor in it as of the last iOS update. It does not, because there are some people in the US who still believe that the government does not have the right to serve as your product manager or editorial board.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
They do it faster and at larger scales than ever before. There is hardly time for even experts to react to what they are seeing unfold, forget governments.
In the past the only thing that did damage this fast was disease. Anything moving "too fast" through a population without anytime to understand the negative effects should be treated the same way we counter viruses or nuclear chain reactions - with control rods and quarantine periods.
It makes me curious whether having the rare festival allowing the activity might make it easier to get everyone not to do it the rest of the year.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purim
But Christmas now is pretty different.
I was born at the wrong time.
It is absolutely a bad thing, even if you think the end result is a benefit - that was my point.
Separately, the laws against gambling are similarly infringing upon basic human rights to free association and free communication/expression.
This is control by an authoritarian state, not by parents. But you already knew that, didn't you?
If you've been through a public education system you've already received social and cultural values from a government.
Secondly, restricting minors from certain acts is very common in most countries because they aren’t old enough to know better.
It is very common in western countries to forbid stores to sell alcohol and tobacco to minors. Would you argue that the store owner’s rights were violated?
Selling alcohol and tobacco aren’t expression, authoring and publishing creative works is. Please do not conflate the two.