Alcohol pretty much universally prohibited for minors and nobody calls that authoritarian. Governments have responsibility for the wellbeing of citizen, even against themselves (mandatory seatbelts comes to mind).
Meanwhile, gaming addiction can also be very destructive.
Lots of others ITT are expressing the same view, and I understand the logic behind it.
Alcohol is an addictive, psychoactive, carcinogen. The difference between drugs and “online game time” is pretty stark from my perspective.
The essence of your argument seems to be: “we already give up some control for other health-related regulations and online game time is no different.”
I have to admit, drawing the exact line is difficult and I’m unable to create a clear definition of government overreach. This specific example is obvious to me, but clearly some people disagree.
Where do you think the line should be? Would you be okay with CCP mandated exercise, sleep time, or diet? Do you believe there should be a line at all?
Not trying to be adversarial here, I am genuinely curious.
> Alcohol is an addictive, psychoactive, carcinogen. The difference between drugs and “online game time” is pretty stark from my perspective.
Requires elaboration. When "online game time" is intentionally designed to be addictive, its affects on addicts need to be critically examined - loss of physical fitness, loss of social fitness, loss of motivation, agoraphobia. That both can be consumed responsibly in small quantities does not preclude that addiction is a serious problem and too often not treated like a serious problem in Western countries.
This line is indeed hard to define. I am not sure that such a limit would be enforceable even in China. However, it will have the side effect of making time gated games and other addicting dark patterns illegal or impractical, which it probably a net good thing.
To your last question, many jurisdictions are making fast food or sugary drinks illegal thus imposing a diet. I am fine with that. Some company are lowering health premium to those who do exercise, imposing exercise. I am fine with that too..
I was about to reply with something opposing your thought and then realized other countries don't have an age limit and they don't have a billion underage kids dying of alcohol. If anything that probably happens more in the states where there is an age limit.
You don’t consider an age minimum of 18 to purchase alcohol an age limit?
The link they posted even has a pretty picture within of the areas without age limits. They’re all mostly in Africa, Vietnam has a shout at stable and successful though.
Equivocating alcohol with video gaming is ridiculous. One is a toxic chemical that has physical, neurological effects on an individual and easily kills tens of thousands of people a year. The other is watching and interacting with pixels on a screen as you're doing at this very moment.
Emphasizing the physical effects of alcohol, and reducing the mental effects of any human computer interaction to “watching and interacting with pixels on a screen” isn’t the right way to go about it.
There’s a difference between checking your feed and doom scrolling, there’s a difference between playing fortnite with friends, maybe even a little too late into the night, and compulsively grinding.
Indeed, the effects is not the right way to go about it. Perhaps looking at the health statistics (and car accident statistics due to alcohol) would be a better way to compare the severity of the two problems
Well, at this point we might as well blame social media feeds (which we can also call pixels on screens) for killing more people than drunk driving, at least in 2020 and 2021.
When kids game excessively, I'd wager it's an escape for them. It's an escape just as much as it was for the geeky / nerdy kids of America, as it is for the kids in China who have goukou.
You can try to enforce whatever culture you're gonna enforce, but I think we've seen from the war on drugs that these kinds of things don't really work. There's always some deep psychological and/or physiological deficit whenever there is an "addiction" at play. And you're trying to treat the disease by treating the symptoms. You can try to tighten control so that you can try to force that "ideal" society, but when you do that, things have a way of becoming authoritarian in a handbasket. Everything messed up about China is about socialist idealism turning authoritarian, and you can say that about other countries too.
People should have figured that out when they did that study on rats, where the rats that lived in some enriched environment, with plenty of playtime, did not get addicted to sugar water the way that the rats trapped in cages did.
People have been making a lot of prediction about China, such that market economy would lead to more political openness or a middle class would demand more political freedom - all good guess but turn out wrong.
I think we're bad at prediction - so why not let them experiment and see how it turns out 50 years later.
So, in a way, you could be seen as arguing for authoritarianism.
> And you're trying to treat the disease by treating the symptoms
So, for example, Opiods. In the United States we're treating the symptoms by banning it (and this is pretty much supported by both political parties). Yet we know the root cause: People that are effectively feeling worthless, do not feel connected to a specific social group and/or disengaged from culture.
Other aspects of our entire culture is causing people to feel like that: 1. Changing family values, 2. Disconnected from people, connected to devices and online popularity, 3. Impossible to succeed and feel valuable.
I feel like we have a really weird problem: Our capitalistic environment or, greed in general, are driving these problems. So the solution is authoritarianism.
Sorry that's just the way my mind works. I see right through issues to their root causes and it makes my worldview weird.
Meanwhile, gaming addiction can also be very destructive.