China's kids can only play three hours of video games a week

China compared video games to opium, declaring gaming an addiction and limiting the time children could spend on them. Whether this 'cures' addicted youth remains to be seen. — 123rf.com

It's rare indeed that a nationwide addiction is declared cured. But that’s exactly what happened in China this week. A report from the China Game Industry Group Committee states that “Young people in China have curbed their addiction to video games”.

That’s terrific, but you can colour me officially sceptical.

In 2021, China limited its youths to playing video games for only three hours a week. This rule was announced with some broader directives, like media cutting back on “effeminate” images of men and crackdowns on entertainers with “incorrect political” positions.

The Chinese government was definitely trying to shape the country’s youths in the image they saw fit (well, the boys, anyway – girls, as usual, were ignored, though in this case perhaps that's a good thing).

Now, setting aside the attempt to make their boys “manlier” and, I assume, less politically volatile, the desire to curb video-game playing in kids is as old as time. Because before video games, it was TV, before TV it was radio, before radio it was books.

Humans are always wary of what their offspring are spending their time doing, as we should be.

In New York City, pinball machines were banned and called “insidious nickel stealers” in 1942 because of just how addicted the city’s youth was to them. These days, pinball machines aren’t stealing very many nickels since video games have largely put them out of business.

Certainly, China’s targeting of video games on a national level isn’t unique. Germany and Australia haven’t limited video- game playing but their governments have introduced regulations to make video games less violent by cutting down on the amount of gore and adult-themed behaviour that can be depicted in games sold to children.

In China the limitation on playing video games was accompanied by a statement comparing them to being “digital opium” and, indeed, this comparison would have helped the Chinese population get behind the regulation. The 19th century Opium Wars, when Western colonial powers – mostly the British – pushed opium on the Chinese population, was just one in a series of terrible examples of Western nations imposing their will on Asia.

So video games are equated with opium, and practically banned in China and a year later it’s declared that there is no more youth video-gaming addiction.

I’m not so certain.

The report stated that 75% of young gamers now spent fewer than three hours a week playing. I suppose the idea is that this generation, after one year of limited game-playing, has discovered other pursuits – sports, the outdoors, maybe just watching plain old TV (which is probably worse than gaming).

But as soon as the limit on gaming is lifted you know what will probably make a huge comeback? Gaming.

It isn’t so easy to cure an addiction to video games because of what they do to us when we interact with them: playing video games releases tiny amounts of dopamine. Dopa-mine is a neurotransmitter and hormone that makes us feel good and is released in small amounts when we eat or have sex. In other words, dopamine encourages us to do the things we need to do to survive and procreate.

It’s also released in huge amounts when humans take illicit drugs – this is what makes drugs addictive. And dopamine is also what drives gaming addiction.

So is China’s video- gaming addiction among its youth over? Probably not. And as of right now the Chinese government isn’t budging on its three-hour a week limit.

Part of that limit was also restricting the number of new game titles that could be released, and who gets hurt because of that? Gaming companies. Companies like China’s Tencent, one of the world’s biggest gaming companies.

At the end of the day, the report – which comes from an independent group, not the Chinese government – appears, to me anyway, to be an attempt to convince the government that the video-gaming addiction is over and they can open up the market and gaming companies can start making money again.

I doubt the Chinese government will listen.

In any case, the comparison to the opium wars is interesting and it could be China is getting its revenge on the West. If you ask me, though, if anything is digital opium, it’s TikTok, which the West is clearly addicted to it – and that’s all China.

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Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.