China restricts all citizens under the age of 18 from playing online video games from Monday to Thursday and will only allow one hour of play on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays between 8pm and 9pm.
This new policy was announced on Monday by the National Administration of Press and Publications of China and will be rolled out on September 1st. Chinese state media recently referred to gambling as “spiritual opium,” somewhat foreshadowing this move to restrict playing time.
This will apply through companies that provide online gaming services. These companies will not be able to provide services to users unless they have created an account (revealing their age) and will then have to limit the accounts of children and adolescents under the age of 18 to the time periods mentioned.
While this move is a repression in the game, it may not be as drastic a change as one would think. In 2019, minors had restrictions of 1.5 hours any day of the week and 3 hours on public holidays, and China had most gaming consoles banned directly from 2000 to 2015.
“Implementation measures were not detailed, but in response to previous government measures to limit video game play by young people, Tencent Holdings … has used a combination of technologies, automatically booting players after a certain period of time and using real name registration and facial recognition technology to limit minors ’play,” the Wall Street Journal explained in its recent coverage of the issue.
These restrictions apply not only to personal computers and game consoles, but also to smartphones. Given the massive Chinese population, this will surely have an impact on the emerging eSports market and culture.