Sounds great until you remove the “under 18” part. Considering every part of life is now online, I don’t see how this could possibly work. It’s much like the you can’t watch this film unless you are 18, never stopped anyone. Just a waste of time and resources. The best method is to attack the companies pushing all the bad stuff, the gambling for instance, the pay to win, the deliberate grinding to push adverts. Tax those companies heavily until they change, and if they go out of business, no loss. Gaming itself isn’t however completely blameless, the likes of esports really doesn’t help as it encourages endless hours “practicing”.

NVM. Not worth it.

I mean it depends on what we're debating here. The policy is about online games only, so if we're debating micro-transactions and such then parents have full control over the child's access to significant amounts of money, if they want that. It doesn't even matter if they're around or not, or watching every moment of their child's playtime.

If we're debating "how much should kids play video games in general" and the parent wants to limit that time but finds it hard to effectively do so then that's another matter. Still there are ways they can do so, from passwords on the PC to after school supervision of some kind. Also if they ignore their school work and such to play too many games, it will reflect in their grades, and they can be punished. If you want to enforce some amount of physical exercise you don't need to be home that much to do so.

Some of these things can be challenging in our "both parents work" world today, I grant you, but those challenges are a LOOOOOOT better to deal with than the State regulating every aspect of your life and free time based on what old politicians think is proper.

Why the hell should you care you live in Poland.

In fact, if you download a offline game via internet, it is counted as a "online game" in China.
I am not joking.

The CCP seems to act like we're all living on Planet China.

"Online Gaming".

So basically, all gaming.

I agree that state regulating free time is probably a bad idea (and fortunately, in real democracies, it won't fly as most people won't put up with that).

However, I often see the argument "its the parents job" given as a panacea solution for any pitfall a child might fall into and that's a dangerous fallacy.

I think we are expecting way too much out of parents here as we greatly overestimate the amount of control parents can exert on their children (the amount of time they can dedicate to their child, to what degree they can monitor their children at any time of the day or even at certain difficult ages, how much pull they'll have on their child compared to other outside influences).

For example, I don't think parents can effectively shield their children from the pervasive effect of ads targeting them (toys, junk food, etc), I don't think parents can fully control what their children eat (at home yes for the most part, but not when they are away from home) and in the era of smartphones and games you can play in a web browser, I don't think parents can really control how much online games their children play without help from the device manufacturers and in some cases, from the online game servers.

At some point, we need to go at the source and forbid/impose certain types of behaviours, for example by forbidding ads that target children, by forcing companies to list the calorie and other nutritional information on food sold, by listing the ingredients in processed food, etc.

Similarly, while implementing a social norm for all devices is indeed dystopian, you could potentially force device and/or game developers (the later would be required for things like online browser games as it would be hard to control this at the device level) to provide control mechanisms for parents to limit the amount of time their child plays.

Whenever I hear how hard it is to fit work with family in America (at least when both parents work), I keep thinking they must work awfully long hours...

I usually leave home in the morning at about 7:40am, and come back home 4:30pm or 5pm at the latest. Maybe 6pm if I also go buy groceries on my way home from the supermarket, but sometimes I go pick the kids and wife and we go together to the supermarket. I only occasionally work at home in the evenings (and usually it is some light simple stuff, or stuff I could just as well do the next day at work), and hardly ever on Saturday or Sunday.

Granted, my wife is currently at home as she is currently temporarily laid off, but it wasn't much different before when she left for work before 6am and came back home at around 3pm (I would take the kids to nearby daycare and/or school then because she woke up before them/me). My kids arrive home from daycare and school at around 4:30pm.

So how is it with American parents then? They work from 6am to 9pm, away from home all that time, and don't see their kids in the evening? Weekends are normally full of work too?

There are of course cultural differences I know nothing about. In American movies the parents are always busy in the morning preparing some lunch for their kids for school in the lunchboxes; none of that here as schools give all kids a "free" lunch. Heck I don't normally even give any breakfast for the younger son as the daycare provides a breakfast as well, as long as I bring him there latest at 8:15am (the daycare is on the other side of the road where I live, 50 meters from my home).

Can't the American parents just relax a bit more?

Heck, even kid's birthday parties seem awfully stressful and complicated in American movies, as if they've been preparing for their kid's birthday party six months in advance, re-decorating the whole house and hiring a couple of clowns and magicians for the kids etc. Shit, my older son's birthday party was just last Saturday and it was mainly me buying a cake he likes from the local supermarket, my wife preparing some good food and snacks the earlier day, and we inviting a bunch of the closest relatives/friends to the party. That's it.

I hope the real American life is much different from the movies. Could it be? I thought they are documentaries about how American families live, the biggest tragedy in their kids' lives being that their dad misses a school play where their kid is participating (the most overused cliche in American family movies). I would be surprised if either of my sons ever will be in any kind of school play. I know I never was, just couldn't care less, so I obviously missed the tragedy of my dad not seeing my school play.

wait what? LMAO.
Poor Chinese.

Sure, I'm sympathetic to what you're saying. How much the State should control X and Y versus personal responsibility (or in this case parental responsibility) is the endless debate of our time. The US highly leans toward avoiding State control, even among Democrats, and due to being raised in that environment I grant that I am more likely to reflexively feel disgust at anything close to this China law. However that doesn't mean I don't think I'm right. ;)

I tend to believe in a healthy balance, with things like gambling being controlled for minors but left to personal responsibility for adults, but I am somewhat flexible. Parents do need help. To me though playing video games is no different or worse than watching TV though, and regulating that time at all is a ridiculous overreach of State power. If you want your kid to get away from the screen and run around the block, you can enforce that when you finally get home.


Many, many Americans are obsessed with working harder and harder to make more money to afford more things and be in a higher class. It's very ingrained in our culture, and taught through our media from a very young age. This might be slowly changing with millennials and zoomers, but it's hard to really say. 60s and 70s kids acted like things would be different and then grew up and voted for Ronald Regan.

So you've taken a truism -- yes, in many parts of the US it is hard to juggle work and family (due to many reasons) -- and you've taken it upon yourself to inject your politics. As someone recently said... "C'mon man."

Yeah that seems to be the case, and I guess it is not only a negative thing, all things considered...

However, if I started spending 10-12 hours per day at the office (or working from home part of that time) and working 6-7 days a week, I just feel I would probably work at 50% (or less) efficiency most of the time. Longer hours just make you less efficient on the average, and you die younger too from the stress.

Then again I guess there is still the goal (the American dream) of becoming a millionaire before reaching 30 (or 40) and then one wouldn't have to work one day after that... Fortunately we don't have that problem, our high taxes make sure hardly anyone becomes a millionaire, let alone a billionaire. Well, there are some I guess, like those guys who developed the híghly successful mobile game, Clash of Clans. Then again they did pay quite a lot of taxes for their profits too, and didn't seem to mind it either.

EDIT: I recall hearing from someone though that in US, spending long hours "at the office" does not necessarily mean you are working all the time, but many hours of that office time is used for all kinds of recreational events at the workplace, socializing with others etc... If so, I guess our work culture is just quite different, we consider work as work, and when we don't work, we go home and that's it. Sometimes I might leave the office after 5 or 6 hours if I have somewhere to go and there is no real reason to say at the office at that time, and then next day work extra hard for straight 9 hours if needed.

Which is all kinds of bullshit. This kind of stuff is all about keeping workers at the office as long as possible under the guise of additional benefits. Also, never take what your heard from someone that one time as fact. In the end though, work culture isn't one size fits all here. Not all jobs/industries are the same.

The whole "American Dream" thing is a cockamamie notion: to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps and make it big! There's just too much classism, racism, and nepotism getting in the way for that to happen unless a person is miraculously lucky.