I'd be fine with some kind of regulation on microtransactions for kids, similar to gambling. At the end of the day though parents can just control their access to money. In any event the State regulating people's free time is ridiculous, as said above.

Oh, goodie. More ways for them to control their sheep... I mean people. =P
Considering China is pretty much anything but communist, these days the middle C in CCP is a meaningless moniker as it's all about the authoritarianism with a thin veneer of capitalism.

We need to stop spending money on Chinese products. It only encourages them. They have no business telling the whole world what we can and can't play.

Like one hour of online games per day but many hours of gog games?

Oh wow! So more noDRM gaming for China then?

Old offline games are safe ...for now. Next step will of course be mandatory GOG Client, and the Client must have the facial recognition and social credit features built in. GOG will comply of course with these demands.

Yes, the peer pressure to spend inordinate amount of time playing online games it huge. Its not healthy, especially with people that you never meet.

Its better to spend the time with actual live people, even if its playing games in the same room.

We're not made to be isolated hermits.

Maybe your idealized verion of parents.

We live in a work-obsessed culture.

In a lot of families, both parents work full to make ends meet. Often, they do significant overtime too or even have to work several jobs.

And then, you have single parents... The first 12 years of my life, it was just me and my mother and she had to work 50-60 hours a week to make ends meet. I spend A LOT of time by myself with no parental supervision.

A lot of children are in that situation.

Society limits your freedom all the time. Heck, some freedoms are antagonistic (ie, your freedom to stab someone with a knife vs your freedom to walk in the street safely).

As a small example, here, you can't drink alcoholic beverages in the street and if you make an inordinate amount of noise after a certain hour, your neighbors are entitled to call the cops on you and get you to bring the noise down.

You also cannot smoke in a restaurant and I'm reasonably sure we have laws on advertisement limiting the ads that target children.

I assure you that most people here are for the above regulations.

Only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy, the majority should have a say in how people's freedom is regulated.

Given that you exported most of your manufacturing industry in China, good luck with that.

This, I agree with.

I do think young people spending so much time online and not socializing is an issue we'll have to tackle socially, but enforcing that children play online only an hour a day is a little strong.

However, I agree with the underlying principle that we should do something to tackle that problem.

My guess is that first they are going to limit online time and next time spent offline playing games. I would suspect that in one way or other the reason for this isn't health of their citizens but to raise birth rates in the relevant age groups. Since there is now a 3-child policy that has been enacted just recently, with the plan to lower legal age of marriage to 18, which most young Chinese didn't support, this is going to be yet another way to get people together physically and hope for the best. I know this all seems very far fetched but one thing is certain: The officials don't do this without a plan and some goal in mind.

True.

As a parent, I'm performing an human experiment on my two sons, letting them play quite a lot of Team Fortress 2 (PC/Steam) and Minecraft (Nintendo Switch, this is an offline game though) after school and daycare, at least if it is a poor weather outside like it often is here. In about 10 years I will know how they turned out for playing games so much.

My older son is playing Minecraft much more than TF2, and with the younger son it is the opposite, so I am also gathering data on whether single-player offline games have a different effect than online multiplayer games.

Nobel Prize, here I come.

From my experience, the parents who see gaming as a "crack cocaine" are non-gamers who just don't understand gaming and why someone would enjoy it. They are not the kind of parents who would play WITH their kids and that way also be able to control their gaming (what, when and how much to play), but they are the kind of parents who storm into the room, shut down the electricity from the room, and then are surprised when their kid is choked up for "having to stop playing a game". They think even an hour of gaming is "too much".

I've noticed this a bit with my wife who is not (really) a gamer. When she goes to e.g. switch off the Nintendo Switch (pun intended), she just goes there "That's it! Now stop playing!" and turns off the console. And my son is sad and/or angry.

When I go there, I ask my son(s) "Wow, what are you building there?" and then my son either shows what he has just built in Minecraft, or explains what he is doing in Team Fortress 2. Then I kinda softly suggest that now it might be a good time to stop, so they prepare for it if they are in a middle of doing something in the game, then hand over the controller to me so that I can save the game and switch off the console. So I let them prepare to stop playing the game, not just abruptly stop it there.

Yeah, my tactic works much better, and apparently my wife has realized that as well as nowadays she tells me when they should stop playing for the day (unless I decide before her that it is enough for the day).

Yes.

This is preparation.

Aside from the paternalistic and/or authoritarian notion of dictating what everybody can or can't do in their free time...

This reminded me of the movie Ready Player One...

***Spoilers below***



at the end when they shut down the virtual world two days a week so people would be forced to go outside. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't find your explanation far-fetched at all, imo it's quite likely that something like this is the reason behind this ban. Its aim certainly is to raise the "quality" of Chinese for nationalist purposes, and maybe also their quantity, as you explained.
Sounds like you have a good parental strategy. I can't comment from personal experience, since I don't have children (also limited experience with multiplayer, just find the thought a bit sad that people spend hundreds or thousands of hours on games like Wow, which seem kind of dumb to me tbh).

This. My parents, despite being from a generation that had every right to not understand computer games and be somewhat baffled by them, were open minded, played many games with me like Dune, Lost Vikings, Secret of Monkey Island, Heroes of Might and Magic, Disney's Aladdin, Prehistorik, and it made it the experience so much better. It was shared fun and something to talk about too and games were never ever a boogeyman in our house. That people who are only parents now can still demonize games is just laughable.