Goodness. If this was the US, I would be losing my mind over such legislation.
We must not convince the law makers that video games can be beneficial. That puts the wrong emphasis on the conversation.
The emphasis must be, you have no jurisdiction when it comes to raising children. Your laws are invalid. Even if video games are detrimental, you do not decide what is the best interest for a child, the parents do.
What about child protection service, school, free lunch at school, healthcare, and more comparably age 21 restriction for alcohol consumption? Those are all examples of 'jurisdiction over raising children'.
Physically abusing your child by chaining them to the radiator is not a parenting decision.
Providing lunch at something the child is required to be at by law is not a parenting decision.
Requiring annual physicals is not a parenting decision, nor a health care decision. However, requiring a specific treatment is both.
Alcohol consumption is a grey area, and a cultural choice the country has made. Why not make the driving age 14? 18? It's a question of maturity. But this is a poor comparison. While alcohol has an objective measure of physical harm (ie: LD50, a measurable and detrimental effect on developing minds), video games do not.
Listing these as examples is not a justification for the government deciding for a parent how much time their child can spend on video games.
And for disclosure, I think a time limit is a much needed societal thing. But the government must not be the one to make that decision.
A parents' can ask their kid to limit video game time, but can't have the video gaming industry to enforce it. A national government can.
That's the issue.
And if a parent really feels their kids deserve more video game time, they can always lend their own account to their kids, which would disable the mechanism, that simple.
The equivalent of regulating video game playing times for children would be regulating when a child gets to have their favourite dessert, when they get to go out to meet their friends etc. These are all highly context-dependent individual parenting decisions that the government should have very little say in. Especially in the form of rules like restricting play time to 8 PM on Weekends.
The government can ask video game industry to provide enforcement mechanisms in the form of parental controls, which incidentally are quite widely adopted by most tech companies without government intervention in the West.
You can get harmed by a lot of things in excess, including desserts, well before you get physiologically or mentally exhausted by having too much of it.
The difference is there is a long tail of activities that a family might be engaged in during non-school hours, especially a weekend evening. This is something a government can't possibly fathom or account for in an overarching policy.
If a person chooses to have a child, they should be deemed to have enough agency to determine what's good for them.
If a State wants to be the nanny, why stop at video games? Why not prescribe precise caloric intake, meal times, study times, sleep times, extracurriculars, and more? Just an illustration of how absurd this policy is.
This policy is about predatory industry practices that make use of natural brain functions to make kids addicted to certain games while also spending absurd amounts of money on it.
But in my opinion they should have just disabled this business model completely. It seems like they want to limit the inflow of cash but not by a lot.
One is adding something (school), the other is taking something away. Further it takes a leisure activity away which is (to your point) performed exclusively outside of school. A more pointed discussion that still allows the benefit of government policy is why mandate a limit rather than mandating a system that allows parents to usefully set the limit? A related discussion would be if I claimed that TV and fiction novels are worse for kids than games, so we should allow unlimited games but limit all fiction books and all TV to 3 hours a week for everyone.
Time can't be increased or decreased. You have 24 hours in a day, no more, no less. Adding something to the schedule is only more stringent than having a blocklist of activities where you'd at least have a choice.
I don't want to start an argument on the effect and difference of fiction books / tv to games. You point is effectively that those choices may be arbitrary, however games are much more addictive than those that you've mentioned. Realistically, I've seen kids play too much games whose grades dropped like hell, but few watching too much TV, much less reading too much novel. Games can be addictive and difficult to maintain, while the same can hardly be said to TV and novels.
I agree that government-mandated limit would be too much, and less preferrable than a government-mandated system that allows parent to set the limit. You would effectively be requiring game companies to acquire and collect information on the parents of the child playing the game.
I expect a government-mandated default unless with explicit written approval from parents which would seems still rather easy to circumvent for the lack of better ways.
> the new feature sees the company check accounts registered in adults’ names if
> they are playing games between 10:00PM and 8:00AM. The company will then run a
> facial recognition test and, if it identifies someone who is not the account
> holder, they’ll be booted offline. “Anyone who refuses or fails face
> verification will be treated as a minor,” according to a machine translation of
> Tencent’s QQ post.
I disagree. Children deserve a lot of protection, and anybody can become a parent. A lot of people are far too bad at parenting to leave the decisions to them completely. Some intervention is needed.
Good grief. This debate is so devoid of reason, it's difficult to have a discussion.
Saying that video games is outside the jurisdiction of the government is NOT saying there needs to be no guard rails.
Further more, yes. There are a lot of bad parents. The people who would be installed as the benevolent parental decision makers for society would be the worst of all.
(USA centric view) You cannot legislate parents into being good parents. You cannot pass laws that protect children from bad parenting as best case result you may get the state to intervene and put the child in a foster system where there's a 50% chance that they end up in an even worse place.
Laws against child labor might be an example most of us would agree are called for, instead of just leaving it up to the parents whether children should work in mines and sweatshops or not.
Although I have no doubt someone will show up and say that should be left up to parents too.
Children have assisted their parents in their work as they are able from an early age for millennia. It serves to train them in useful skills they will need as adults and also to improve the family's financial prospects, which is beneficial to the entire family including the child. Increasing wealth, in some areas, has allowed for the luxury of allowing children to prepare for adulthood in less immediately productive ways, such as schooling—but that does not imply that it is wrong for children to work. Most parents care deeply for their children's welfare; in general you can trust that if parents are asking their children to work they are doing so for the children's benefit. If you would prefer that they didn't need to work the solution is to offer them a better option, not take away one of the few ways they have to improve their situation.
Speaking as a parent of two kids, I mostly agree, but also think that some amount of law-making in the interest of children is appropriate and fair. Drawing the line is the interesting part.
Precisely. But the statement, "the government has no business making parenting decisions" needs no qualification. It is an axiomatic statement, and it should not be a controversial statement.
Like you say, what is considered a parenting decision? Reasonable people can have a discussion about this.
But I'm shocked how many people seem to think A) the government actually should make parenting decisions, and B) that things like banning child abuse is an example of the government making a parenting decision.
Neither of these things are reasonable, and so the discussion about what qualifies as a parenting decision will also be unreasonable.
We must not convince the law makers that video games can be beneficial. That puts the wrong emphasis on the conversation.
The emphasis must be, you have no jurisdiction when it comes to raising children. Your laws are invalid. Even if video games are detrimental, you do not decide what is the best interest for a child, the parents do.