Researchers question the effectiveness of China’s game time restrictions for minors in reducing heavy play
- A new study published in Nature found no evidence that China’s online game time limit reduced lengthy playing
- China has continued to ramp up oversight of internet usage by children and teenagers in an effort to keep them from being glued to the screen
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.
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.
Such “broadly scoped restriction policies … may be ineffective at causing intended changes to behaviour”, the researchers concluded.