China’s New Law on Video Gaming
China is inflicting new regulations and setting curfew hours involving minors playing video games.
Officials of the Chinese government are hitting very hard on the issue of youth gaming online. According to them, online gaming and its effect on us is on a negative aspect on the health and learning ability especially on minors. The guidelines created by the Chinese leaders were officially released recently outlining a new hour for curfew and time limit for gamers aging 18 years old and below.
Chinese Guidelines on Minors Online Gaming
Generally, there are measures delineated in the guidelines imposed by the Chinese Officials. The goal of these measures is to prevent minors from engaging themselves into online games. Below are the measures included on the guidelines:
1. Time restriction for minors
Minors are banned to play online video games between 10:00 pm and 8:00 am. They should also limit their playing hours to about 90 minutes of gaming per day. However, this excludes national holiday in which minors are permitted to play for a maximum of three hours.
2. Microtransactions through online gaming
According to the Chinese government microtransactions through the use of the internet is some kind of lucrative. That’s the reason why they are targeting it as well.
3. Also imputes adult gamers
The new regulation on online gaming in China mandates that everyone is involved with this law no matter the age was. Even adult is prohibited from engaging on online gaming especially those that represent sexual exploitation and violence. This law has no exemption even those who have $1000 gaming laptops.
4. Online gaming account registration
With this new law, the Chinese government are mandating everyone who’s on gaming to register for an online gaming account. They should have to encode their real name with phone numbers. Their playing time would be easily regulated by the Chinese government through this measure.
Building a unified identification system is the goal of the Chinese State Administration of Press and Publication. Through the help of the Ministry of Public Security they aim to give user identification services to all of the video games business companies. The purpose of this is for the easy identification of minors engaging on the online game.