China to ban minors from playing online games for more than three hours a week

Published on : 08/30/2021 – 17:07

China announced Monday, August 30, that it would ban people under 18 from playing online video games for more than three hours a week, with the stated objective of combating addiction among young people.

Some Chinese children can spend whole days glued to their screens. This phenomenon has long been decried in China for its negative consequences: reduced vision, impact on school results, lack of physical activity or risk of addiction.

Regulations already prohibited minors from playing online between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. The audiovisual, publishing and broadcasting regulator announced on Monday that those under 18 will only be able to play online for one hour a day, and only on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, i.e. three hours maximum. per week.

Days and hours of forced play

Minors will also be able to play “only between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.”, specifies the text. On the other days of the week, online video games will however be inaccessible to under 18s. During the school holidays, they will be able to play for one hour a day.

To prevent minors from circumventing the ban, they will have to log in with an identity document. The timetable for the application of the measure has not been specified. A priori, it only applies to online video games and not to those that do not require internet access.

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In early August, an influential government newspaper ruled that video games had become “a mental opium”. The article notably singled out Tencent, the industry heavyweight, and its popular multiplayer online game “Honor of Kings”, which has more than 100 million daily active users.

The digital giants in Beijing’s sights

Under pressure, the group, which already imposed limits on playing time and facial recognition to prevent under-18s from playing at night, have since tightened the rules even further. Tencent now limits its games to one hour per day for minors.

These measures come at a time when the authorities are showing themselves to be particularly intransigent against the practices of the digital giants. Several behemoths in the sector have thus been pinned down in recent months for practices hitherto tolerated and widespread, particularly in terms of personal data and user rights.

Video games represent an important financial windfall in China: they generated 17 billion euros in turnover in the first half of 2021 alone.

With AFP