China seeks gaming ban on children playing after midnight

Managing teenagers’ screen time on their cellphones, tablets or game playing is a challenge for any parent.

In China, authorities seem to think the answer to allaying fears over addictive teen gamers is in regulating the gaming industry.

The country’s video game industry is the biggest in the world, clocking US$30bn. Bloomberg pins the industry’s global earnings at US$100bn a year.

China’s government is proposing a ban on children under 18 playing games between midnight and 8am.

The draft law also proposes that computers and smartphones be fitted with software that would track youngsters who flout the gaming ban.

Players are already required to use their government IDs to register with online gaming sites.

In theory, the software and ID checks will prompt gaming companies to identify minors who are still online, and shut them off. Companies who do not follow the law will be fined or shut down.

Chinese newspapers have run articles on the government’s attempts to dissuade people from playing games. Gaming consoles, such as Xbox and PlayStation were only allowed to be used two years ago.

But since many Chinese can’t afford the cost of a personal computer or internet connection, internet cafes popped up everywhere.

Some games are still banned, while several have had their content screened to remove certain imagery.

Shareholders at Tencent Holdings, China’s big whale of the IT industry and the world’s biggest video game company, are wearily watching the ruling party’s next move.

People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, fired off a harpoon at “Honour of Kings,” Tencent’s biggest game.

An editorial in the paper slammed the game, played by one in seven Chinese, as “poison...spreading negative energy.” It linked the game to recent reports in which children stole money and even committed suicide due to “addictive” game play.

Bloomberg reported that Tencent’s stock fell by more than 5% when the editorial was published. Although it recovered, the incident should be a wake-up call to investors and gamers alike.

In the past 10 years, China’s government has taken various measures to control the use of the internet and games.

Experts watching closely viewed the swipe at Tencent, one of the country’s most valuable companies, as an indication that a formidable campaign is under way to transform the gaming industry.

In 2008 doctors in China approved an official description called Internet Addiction Disorder. Health officials divided the disease into five categories of addiction: online games, social networking, shopping, pornography, and the vague “internet information” category.

State media has increasingly linked juvenile crimes to excessive internet use and the government even shut down 16 000 internet cafes frequented by teens in 2004 to protect impressionable youth. Three years later, developers were ordered to install “anti-addiction” systems in their games. New internet cafes were banned in 2008.

The country also offers boot camps to beat internet addiction. One online news site reported that one clinic had gone as far as administering electro-shock therapy to at least 6 000 patients.

But China is not singular in its clinical treatment. Addiction clinics in the US and UK also admit patients for video game addiction at a neat price.

Many question whether all this has had any effect as Internet cafes remain popular and games are easily accessible on cellphones.

Last year the cellphone industry accounted for more than half of all gaming revenue in China, up from about 40% the previous year.

In South Africa the video game market is forecast to grow to R3.7bn in 2020, according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In South Africa "LAN” (local area network) parties are popular. Friends get together and binge on video games for 12 or more hours non-stop.

Some addiction clinics in South Africa offer treatment and various websites offer advice against prolonged video game playing.

One website warned that the high from two hours on a game station was equivalent to snorting a line of cocaine.

But then again, the very same parts of the brain triggered by heroine or cocaine when on a sugar high lights up like a Christmas tree.

A new study conducted at Université de Montréal in Canada suggests in many cases, gaming can do more harm than good.

In the study, published in the scientific publication Molecular Psychiatry, lead author Greg West, an associate professor of psychology at Université de Montréal, revealed that habitual players of action games have less grey matter in their hippocampus, a major part of the brain.

And the more depleted the hippocampus becomes, the more the player is at risk of developing brain illnesses and diseases ranging from depression to schizophrenia, PTSD and Alzheimer’s disease.

Although stacks of scientific papers are published on the subject each year, gaming and internet addiction remains a fierce debate.

Many scientists have yet to reach a consensus on whether internet addiction is a clinical disorder, likened to say, heroin addiction.

Melanie Peters is the Live Editor of Weekend Argus. She is on a 10-month scholarship with the China Africa Press Centre. Instagram: mels_chinese_takeout