Chinese state media describes gaming as 'spiritual opium' that stunts education and destroys families China's government has again expressed its severe dislike of gaming, and one of the nation's major purveyors of such entertainment has reacted by limiting the time that can be spent on the pastime. Beijing has never been entirely comfortable with gaming. In 2013, China sought to define gaming addiction so it could be treated, …
So the Chinese Communist Party is against computer gaming are they...
Fortunately, the real China (based in Taiwan) more than compensates for that loss.
The more I read about the CCP abuses of human rights and freedoms I really don't give a flying fudge what they think.
Free Tibet first and then we'll talk.
To be fair to the Chinese government, they aren't actually wrong and I'm glad that they are pointing out an obvious elephant in the room.
I also approve of the requirement to game with your real name. There is much to much nastiness hidden by anonymity.
A lot of people simply spend too much time gaming and need help and I was no different when I discovered Civilization back in 1993. It didn't help my studies much either.
If weren't for the fact that it was run by the Chinese government, I'd even welcome the idea of Internet detox camps.
Unfortunately, given that it is the Chinese government, I can't say I'm happy with how it will be/is being implemented: permanent scars on your Personal Record (and all Chinese have one) which will live on to haunt long into your future, God knows what happens in the Internet detox camps given what happens at teh re-education centres. The article didn't explicitly state this, but we know how the Chinese government operates.
Back in 1984, my father brought me an IBM PC. It had the venerable 8086 CPU and 128KB of RAM. It also had the finest manuals I have ever read in my life to this day (I still have them).
I learned how to program with that computer. I made my very own D&D random magic item generator.
That didn't help my studies much at the time either, but now I am a professional programmer and have been for more than 25 years.
It's not because something has impacted your studies that it was necessarily bad at the time.
But go ahead and blame gaming. I'm sure that all those teenagers glued to their smartphones will suffer no consequences at all.
Almost the same here, only I started with a ZX Spectrum - I started programming simple BASIC games and sharing them among my friends, then moved to assembler (making it probably the only academic subject I was interested in at the time - but my parents saw the positive in that, owing to an engineer uncle who told them that I was doing great). It allowed me to start making money writing small programmes and games, until it was enough to buy my first proper PC (a Schneider with - not one! - but two floppy disk drives!), rinse, repeat. And still going strong (although, through the years, it's less and less hands-on and more SW design)
To be fair, you were a programmer who happened to make games rather than a gamer per se (well, as far as I can tell from post). Although D&D can be played with a computer, it is a game played with friends rather than a solitary game. That being said, I had to be told to stop playing AD&D when I was 15, my marks before the Inter Cert were beginning to suffer on account of the amount of time I was putting into it.
Smartphones are incredibly addictive and should be treated as such. Children shouldn't have access to them and be allowed only to adults (and, even then, the populace as a whole needs a lot of education about them). Once you've given a child a smartphone, even with parental controls (that are often not so great although Apple's aren't bad), getting them off it is hard.
You could try not giving them a smartphone and then they are the only teen in their class without one. Who wants to be the child in the class who isn't allowed to eat meat because their parents are strict vegetarians? Who wants to be the only child in the class not on Instagram, SnapChat & WhatsApp?
To the critics above, personal responsibility is always the argument trotted out with dealing with dangerously addictive things. It is *your* fault, but not the industry's fault. In your opinion, the Food Industry shares none of the blame for the stuff it puts into the food that you can't help buying. The oil companies share no blame in destroying the climate because you chose to drive to work or you chose to heat your home. Too many regulations eh? You probably pine for the good old days when Reagan was president.
Yes, personal responsibility has a role to play as does the role the government has to protect us from dangerously addictive substances as does the industry in question a duty of care towards its end-users. Think about Oxycontin and what should have been done to prevent all of those poor people becoming addicted to opioids.
"I'm sure that all those teenagers glued to their smartphones will suffer no consequences at all."
The pervasiveness of loot boxes, gambling and spending money in current games is an area where I beg to differ
Gambling addictions are already a recognised problem and many of these things exploit our natural tendency to go for rewards, etc
Translating this as "spiritual opium" doesn't even come close to describing how the Chinese government is portraying this
'Opium' is more-or-less synonomous with "deadly poison" in Chinese society thanks to the opium wars and the Century of Humiliation. This kind of tag is tantamount to a western government calling games publishers crack or meth-pushers (and gamers, crackheads/tweakers)
(Even comparing the kneejerk reaction to "opium" to our reaction to "crackheads" or "methheads" isn't close to how bad the connotations are for chinese, but it may give some idea)
Similar story with the Spectrum. It definitely did help my understanding of Maths at the time (I wrote some programs to solve quadratic equations and similar things) and has lead to a 25 year career in IT so far.
IMO social media is much more likely to stunt education and destroy families.
Given the two lost decades in Japan and economic deprivation for many GenXers onwards due to economic contractions, I can't say I blame people for behaving like that
Japan abruptly snapped from a society with guaranteed well-paid jobs for life to one where employment is uncertain and badly paid. The social contract was essentially torn up for anyone born after 1970 and yet demands for conformity continued to increase as economic conditions tightened
I worked with a lot of "wayward japanese youth" in the 1990s who had been shipped out of the country by wealthy parents due to "being uncontrollable" and embarrassing to the parents. Most of them were perfectly ordinary teenagers who fitted in well in my country - and people like them are responsible for the new renaissance of Japanese creativity
But sitting in your little room, like a pig, isn't a solution. Instead of coming together and changing things, they managed to have them separated, unable to grasp that the others out there are just like you. They act like plants. This is desired. Fortunately, the Chinese don't seem to want their children that way.
Much of China is still family oriented rather than state oriented like the USA, and as such the overwhelming majority will approve of the measures. as with most things.
Interesting that those who vehemently abuse and denigrate BLM support minor dissent in the PRC and claim it is a major problem.
"the overwhelming majority will approve of the measures. as with most things."
It's amazing what killing and torturing does to people, isn't it? Oh, but it's supposed to be the democracies which are "state oriented". Yeah, you might not know what that means. We're allowed to disagree with our governments. It's nice.
Next in line TV series and movies, binge watching something is basically the same as smoking another one because the previous felt good. Then comes books, god forbid people throwing away half a day reading childish comic books, holding the pee because they have to turn another page. After that is music, you learn nothing from it and most current music is garbage anyways.
"If weren't for the fact that it was run by the Chinese government, I'd even welcome the idea of Internet detox camps."
Trust your government much? At this point, I'm wondering what, exactly you *wouldn't* approve of as long as it isn't "run by the Chinese government?" Drone strikes? Extradition to secret torture prisons? Bulk data slurping? Archiving all phone conversations in a searchable database? This sort of "it's OK because we're the ones doing it" attitude is the root of many of our current day problems in the western world.
"...but we know how the Chinese government operates."
We know how all governments operate, the second you turn your back.
So it's the games fault for the child's education suffering. Nothing at all to do with the bad parenting that allowed the kid to spend ridiculous hours playing and not making them do their homework, go to bed at reasonable hours, etc.?
Yep all Tencent's fault. Totally.
I was (and still am) a gamer. I played a lot as a kid, but it never caused any problems with my education, because my parents made sure I went to bed at a reasonable time, made sure I came to the table for meals, made sure that my homework was finished before I was allowed to play. Also not having the PC in my room, meant I couldnt sneakily get up and play in the night (well I probably could have, but the temptation wasnt there).
Gaming is no different to any other past time - done to excess, anything can be bad for you. And like most things that kids to do excess, bad parenting in allowing it to be done to excess is usually the main cause. So maybe China, if it really cared about the effect of gaming on kids, should be looking into the problem of bad parenting first, rather than just blaming the games...
"The ultimate goal of the capital holders, of course, is to make labor obsolete."
The moment you do that, it doesn't matter where your production facilities are and logistics dominates
In general at that point the production of finished product is best carried out close to the point of consumption
this _is_ slowly happening but whilst politicians - on ALL sides - like to claim "jobs are coming back", the reality is that at every step along the way, employment numbers decrease
The Detroit car factory employing 12,000 people didn't go to Mexico to reduce worker pay, but worker NUMBERS - there are only 1500 people working on the equivalent site in Sonora and if forced to move back to the USA it would likely be a total staff of 400 including the gardeners
"relocating production" to save money has almost never been about paying individuals less, but about employing far fewer of them - an older example being that a single very well-paid japanese welder using automated equipment was able to outproduce several teams of burly Glasgow shipyard welders working shifts - AND at higher consistent quality. Efforts to "save jobs" at any given site by preserving uncompetitive behaviour invariably end up killing the entire site or company instead.
FWIW: Chinese workers now cost slightly more than American ones and about the same as European ones. China's win is in tighly integrated LOGISTICS and whilst they've been oursourcing work to other asian countries with cheaper labour, that outsourcing has been going with heavy production automation, resulting in those outsourced sites employing even fewer people overall
If you can run things in an automated method without many workers, then the people you used to employ would have to find new jobs. This gives you several options which cover most of the range from utopian (the cheapness of things produced by automated methods allows everybody to achieve basic consumption, so they can now spend their time on the things at which they are most skilled or enthusiastic) to dystopian (only those with money can buy things, only those with money uninvested will keep it, a dictatorship of the wealthy, cue civil war). The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.
Most of these parents are in office jobs which very often entail long commuting times. Very few factory workers have to travel very far, nor do agricultural ones.
Then there are the children of migrant workers who are left at home to be looked after by doting grandparents.
The PRC is still pretty 3rd. World in may things
"Rather than slagging off other countries why don't you sort out your own countries massive problems."
Two reasons come to mind. First, because the other country's problems are worse than my country's problems. Second, because that country was the point of the article we're all talking about, so of course we're talking about their problems and how they're solving them and how they could do better.
That's all well and good, but just how many parents are aware of the need to do this, and if they are, how many have the energy to fight this battle along with all of the others? I really hope that public perception about kids' relationship with technology has radically changed by the time my little ones go to school, because seeing the hoards of schoolkids walking to school all staring at their phones makes me very sad. It also makes it even harder to do things "right", because as well as the intrinsically addictive nature of games (and other online baubles), my kids will also be the odd ones out.
That's quite speculative. You can read and enjoy doing so for a long time and you can easily spend your time reading to your detriment. The same is true of games. Studies have tried to prove a long-lasting mental degradation as a result and frequently failed to do so. You might be able to prove that games are more easily addictive than books, but I don't know that and you would have to present some good data to that effect before it could logically be used in regulation.
I was rebuked several times in English classes because I didn't know where my semi-lliterate classmate had got up to when reading a book aloud. I didn't know because to stave off boredom I was half the book ahead. Pointing that out didn't mollify the teacher but did get some nods from the others who were similarly reading ahead.
Most pastimes do not involve the hours spent on gaming though, it is beyond a pastime and is an addiction, i.e. like opium.
Yes, bad parenting is partly to blame, everywhere not just in the PRC, and Beijing recognises the problem so it is facing up to it. Implicit in the action is a rebuke of the parents, isn't it. Also, the problem is not "the games" it is the excessive playing of them. There is a difference you know.
No, that's not necessarily true. Children have always spent their leisure time on things and could do so for long periods. Whether it's playing games, watching television, reading books, or playing outdoors, they are capable of spending hours at it if they find it enjoyable. I'm guessing you're not thinking of the other possibilities because you view the last two as productive and may know a child who is more into videogames than television. While I was never much into gaming, I spent whole days during my childhood reading, swimming, or bicycling, and yet I wasn't addicted to any of those. For that matter, my family managed to spend an entire weekend playing monopoly, which I also did, and I soon realized how deterministic it was and stopped playing. It's not unusual to spend a lot of time doing something, especially if, as with many children, you have few responsibilities to occupy you and don't have the freedom to add other options.
You can be addicted to playing games, but it doesn't follow that someone who spends a long time with them is addicted. Nor is it true that all children who play games do so for a long time. If we assume that anything that's done for a long time is addictive, I'm terribly addicted to working for my employer--I do it for eight hours at a stretch and longer on some days. People have tried to prove that gaming is worse than television just as they tried to prove that television was worse than books (and yes, people also complained about the kids spending all their time reading books when those were newer). That doesn't make it true.
They don't need to. It's drilled into chinese citizens who did it to the point that all you need to do is mention the word and everything associated with it is conjoured up in the minds of the recipient
Imagine the UK government stating that game publishers are a bunch of predatory Jimmy Savilles
It can be argued that gaming is training many of the skills necessary for success in the modern world. There are basic keyboard/mouse skills, planing and working towards long-term objectives, co-operation in teams etc. Games like Civilisation give some background historic information and may lead to insight into the development of societies.
In comparison, most, if not all, of the sports included at the Olympics are obsolete and/or rarely used elsewhere. While it is most impressive to see a person lift 200kg, that is a fraction of what I can lift with a small forklift. A Mauser rifle is more effective than a javelin, and so on, if you will permit the patter. Yet many young people, to varying degrees in different countries, are pressured into intense training that can lead to long-term physical and mental health issues.
A balanced lifestyle is important... how encouraging diversity with a centalthalon, where, alongside traditional sports and gaming, there are compulsory disciplines of "hanging out with friends" and "chilling by the pool"?
What we need in schools are following things:
- budgeting skills
- recognising traps of instant gratification
- principles of critical thinking
- how to recognise propaganda, manipulation techniques
- how to search for information and assess its reliability
- how modern economy works, taxation, models of working
- sales tricks
- how to start a small business
- how to find your skills and how to make a living out of them
- how emotions work, patterns of addiction, how to become aware of oneself
- how to relax, meditate
Most schools train people to become mindless factory or service workers. Schools are incompatible with people looking for more.
Careful with those stones! Here's an article from today in a Swiss publication:
https://www.infosperber.ch/gesellschaft/einkommen-vermoegen/usa-die-grenzen-der-arbeitskraft/
"USA: The limits of labor ...
During the pandemic, working conditions in the U.S. low-wage segment have become inhumane in many companies. …"
To be honest, this didn't start with "the pandemic". Having three jobs, just so you can afford a roof and some pellets for eating is just another form of slavery.
The difference between capitalism and communism is that in capitalism, if you don't want to work - there is your bridge and a blanket, there is your dealer, have fun - whereas in communism, you get loaded on a bus and dropped at a mine and you get whipped every time you think about taking a break.
There is a huge difference:
In communism the government exploits the masses.
In both systems government has monopoly on violence. In communism, if you don't want to work they can force you or whack you and your entire family.
In capitalism if you don't want to work for someone, you can start your own business and work for yourself.
"Having three jobs, just so you can afford a roof and some pellets for eating is just another form of slavery."
I think not. Slave owners need to worry about feeding slaves, housing slaves, providing medical care, etc. Fail to do those things and you'll likely be burying a capital asset.
Capitalists, on the other hand, just need an HR department of sorts in order to hire replacements. If the workers starve or get sick, somebody else will handle funeral costs and such.
I still remember the TNG episode where Riker stupidly brought personal gaming devices onboard the Enterprise after a vacation. Dr. Crusher figured out that the game triggered opiate receptors. This resulted in a stultifying addiction and mind control by the aliens who were using it to take over the ship (and ultimately Starfleet). It was up to the valiant Wesley and a young Ashley Judd to save the day!
I watched a fictional Chinese TV series on Netflix about gaming called The King's War. It was a surprisingly enjoyable show but the heavy hand of the censor was all over the script with exhortations about working hard, the importance of teamwork, etc etc. If it wasn't censored beforehand it definitely came across as written to appeal to the PTB.
I can't imagine Chinese teens will be happy about this . . .
If you thinking gaming is not cerebral, try playing EvE Online without 8 spreadsheets open, 17 metadata websites and some databases with custom made apps just to manage your gaming account.
For those who've never played EvE Online, imagine the old micro computer game Elite but redesigned by a team developers who only write firmware code and have a mate who does game graphics in his spare time!
Even dictatorships have to be careful about antagonising too great a percentage of their citizens.
Taking down stocks and sectors is costing ordinary Chinese people their assets. They aren't just ordering them to clap on demand, they are taking money out of their pockets. Now this, which will not lead to the younger generation embracing Communism.
How would you have felt as a teenager if your gaming had been cut back to one hour a day by the government with an extra hour on the Queen's birthday?
Western governments are careful about taking down sectors like tourism. They get the media on side and stir up support. They restrict imports on the sly using tax laws and restrict migrant labour with fees. All very back door. The Chinese have always believed that their control was solid enough not to bother with this sort of thing. That may be riskier than they think.
"Western governments are careful about taking down sectors like tourism. They get the media on side and stir up support. They restrict imports on the sly using tax laws and restrict migrant labour with fees. All very back door. The Chinese have always believed that their control was solid enough not to bother with this sort of thing. That may be riskier than they think."
Well, that depends on how far each side is willing to go to make their point. For a good example of how far China will go, consider Tienanmen Square. There's something to be said about a state that shows a considerable lack of mercy when defied.
... in asserting that some seek the consequence-free world of gaming, which is in some respects like real life, but less difficult and less threatening.
I've met people like that.
But they constitute a tiny fraction of people who play video games. The rest of them are just fine.
Isn't it just like the CCP to pick out a corner case, then use it to condemn an entire population? You'd almost think they were Republicans.
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