Study: No evidence that Chinese playtime mandates reduced heavy gaming

The authors leave out the most obvious explanation for that's going on. And instead argue that limits of gambling and drugs might also be ineffective.

Children can recognize that there is no major harm in playing games. Being forced to follow irrational rules leads to non-compliance.

Rules around nicotine, drugs, and gambling do have a rational basis and do cause real harm. And for many people explaining this is effective in helping compliance.

The stats are for all ages of gamers in China. Kids are going to be a very small part of that, so one might not expect to see significant change. Also considering most Chinese kids never had a lot of free time in which they could play games, with long hours of school, homework & extra-curricular activities.

Well, yes, the party can mandate a million things and the people workaround it, faking it. Once a bejing party official visits, all the lawns will be painted, all motorcycles confiscated, all prostitutes arrested, all street vendors ousted and all gamer dens closed. Once the official leaves, the world goes back to normal.

I don't think the question about whether gaming addiction is a real problem or hyped up is all that relevant... China's agenda now is to raise birth rates. As such less time spent on games logically means more time available for IRL interaction which ultimately is required for babies to appear. Limiting gaming at young ages might be intended to create a habit.

The question whether bans work for everyone or not may also be semi irrelevant in this context. Obedient people following and perpetuating party rules (you know the kind who could play Xi's teachings to their unborn children etc.) will obey and they are desirable to reproduce. If others spend time gaming and self select against reproduction it's probably not too bad for the party.

> This paper suggests there might be a more fundamental underlying issue with such policies: they may be ineffective at causing intended changes to behaviour. This finding has important implications for the regulation of online gaming across the world. In analogous domains such as gambling, pornography and nicotine use, restriction of online youth access via mandatory bans has been associated with substantial regulatory escape. Here we show that a similar phenomenon may be occurring in the video game domain as well

People are going to do what they want to do. You can't use forceful policy to change it. At best it becomes ineffective, at worst you get unintended side effects that you only notice afterwards.

Your best bet is to take gaming and to change it subtly to produce a more useful result. Eg teach things through games. Just don't overdo it on the teaching part, because then it stops being a game.