China to crush secondary market providing forbidden gaming accounts to kids China's National Internet Information Office has revisited some of the government's recent internet crackdowns, to put a stop to workarounds such as renting or selling accounts for online games to minors in order to circumvent the three-hours-per-week play time imposed by Beijing. China's lawmakers introduced the play time …
At least that's better than the school aged groupies we had to deal with when I worked for some pop stars in the seventies.
They would climb over the (high) garden walls and would frequently offer themselves to the star of their dreams.
We had a hot line to the local nick who would send a police woman or two to deal with them.
Hysterical teenies are not easy to deal with online or off.
I imposed a ban on Computer game playing after spending nearly an entire day every week playing Adventure back in those days ... I totally stopped wasting time at work after my ban went into effect.
I did not impose the same ban on my family but I did tell them about my gaming addiction problems - I thought the weird thing was that I'd grown up inhaling and ingesting a huge variety of fun things (I still remember Orange Sunshine - icon) as a teenager but I never had any addition issues at all until I installed Adventure on my PDP-11 at work in the early 80's.
Me three. Never looked at it as addiction ('til now), but a similar experience maybe 10yrs back when I stumbled on a copy of Lode Runner. That was difficult to put down, no funning.
Likewise (thanks for the memories) regarding the Orange Sunshine. To this very moment my diet consists of leafy green roughage. No cravings like that old game, though.
I bought all 3 Mass Effect games in 2018. I promised myself not to play them until I finish this 7 year long project I'm wrestling with. I suspect if I do, the project is titsup.
It's up to yourself to know the skin you're in.
All well and good, except gaming addiction is a genuine problem, one that is deliberately used and exacerbated by game studios to sell more product. Especially the freemium games with their online purchases for season passes, loot boxes and all that other worthless crap.
[Edited for typos]
Especially the freemium games with their online purchases for season passes, loot boxes and all that other worthless crap.
The correct way to go about it would be to simply ban such business model. If you allow companies to push products with addictive mechanisms built in, then you get people addicted to it.
Simply adding restrictions just make it even more attractive - the forbidden fruit effect plus use of addictive design patterns only exacerbates the problem and creates black market.
If you reflect on a thing which has up sides and massive social involvement but also is known to do bad things to some and generally not very great things to others. limiting exposure by age restrictions, operating hours and policing black-markets, this looks a lot like most governments approaches to alcohol.
The gaming and social media genies are out of the bottles, better regulate now than bury heads and deny the potential harms ad infinitum
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