Children in mainland China are subject to some of the world’s strictest restrictions on online gaming time, but a new study published in Nature found no evidence that those government-imposed rules had reduced heavy gaming.
Researchers from universities in the UK and Denmark pulled anonymised data from US game engine developer Unity, covering 7.04 billion hours of playtime from 2.4 billion mainland Chinese gamer profiles from August 2019 to January 2020.
Those profiles include both children and adults, the researchers noted, because the data they obtained did not include age information. It was also unclear how prominent Unity was in China relative to other game engines.
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The researchers found that between August 2019 and October 2019, before China put in place its gaming time mandate, 0.77 per cent of the profiles they observed engaged in “heavy play” – defined as spending an average of more than four hours a day and six days a week on gaming.
That compared with 0.88 per cent of gamers who did so after the Chinese government in November 2019 limited the online game time of minors to 90 minutes a day.
The study also examined play patterns in 2021, when China tightened online gaming time for minors to three hours a week. Researchers saw no meaningful reduction in heavy gaming after the new rule was imposed.
Such “broadly scoped restriction policies ... may be ineffective at causing intended changes to behaviour”, the researchers concluded.
China has continued to ramp up its oversight of internet usage among those under 18 years old, in an effort to keep children from being glued to the screen.
Earlier this month, the country’s internet watchdog published draft rules that require device manufacturers and app stores to give users the option to deploy a “minor mode”.
The mode should limit smartphone and tablet usage to 40 minutes a day for children under 8, one hour a day for those aged 8 to 15, and two hours a day for those aged 16 and 17. Additional usage would require parental intervention.
App store operators should ensure that children under 12 cannot download any apps without parental guidance, while those aged 12 to 16 should only be allowed to download apps under minor mode or apps specifically tailored for minors.
Despite China’s efforts to weed out internet addiction among its youngest citizens, children and teenagers have been adept at finding creative workarounds to various restrictions. Some have resorted to using fake identities, while others have set up new accounts with credentials of adult family members.
This could be one reason researchers found no reduction in heavy play time after related regulations took effect, the study said.
Another possible explanation is that while large corporations are more inclined to enforce rules, as they “have the resources to effectively identify and police their player bases and have become prime targets of political intervention in China”, it is less clear whether smaller game developers are compliant, according to the paper.
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