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Why does China's government hate video games so much? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lemuria@lemmy.ml to c/gaming@lemmy.ml

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I saw a post here (https://lemmy.ml/post/1179679) about some Chinese kid spending USD 64k on video games and I read the news article and found myself down a rabbit hole.

https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-parents-money-mobile.html

China has long held a dim view of video games, calling them "electronic drugs" a few years ago. It only allows those under 18 to play online games for one hour, between 8 pm and 9 pm local time, on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

So basicaly, this article says that China (or more accurately the Chinese government) has a dim view of video games.

So I kept digging and found this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/business/media/china-online-games.html

“I think this is the right policy,” she said. “It amounts to the state taking care of our kids for us.”

This phrase just screams "BAD PARENT" to me.

Why do you have to offload the responsibility of caring for your children to the government? You chose to bring them into the world, now you're responsible for them.

Which brings me to my question... why does China's government hate video games so much? Why would they want to impose such draconian restrictions on childrens' free time?

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[–] Jongaros@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

While being illegal in theory, China still has 9-9-6 in most of the workforce. That means parents work from 9 am to 9pm 6 times a week. Biggest employer of China such as Foxconn make people sleep at factory floor from Monday to Saturday.

This creates an environment where children basically grow with playing games. Most people in China does not own gaming computers or consoles. People play P2W mobile games with real gambling and gacha mechanics. Gambling addiction is insanely big problem so Chinese government is trying to bud the problem out of it is roots. Henceforth children gets limited screen time.