On Fridays, weekends, and holidays, online gamers under the age of 18 will be limited to an hour of play, according to China's video game regulator.
You might think this sounds rough but kids are wonderful negotiators and I’m sure all they heard was ‘no limits on offline gaming Monday - Sunday’.
Suddenly dad’s Nintendo 64 doesn’t seem so boring after all and its time to slouch into the couch and smash out 10 hours of Crash Bandicoot.
According to Chinese news outlet Xinhua, youths in China will only be able to play online games between the hours of 8pm and 9pm.
I believe parents will be divided into two groups in their response to this being the hour of allowed play.
Group one will be rightly furious that their kids will be all geared up right before bedtime.
Group two will be ecstatic that their kids will do all the boring levels, and then the parents can jump on after hours and finish it.
As a terrible gamer, I feel for the kids who aren’t as good at playing. This must be quite frustrating. It takes me half a day just to get through ¼ of a level; with these sorts of limitations I would never advance past ‘choose your character’.
On average, Minecraft takes 60hrs to complete which means it’s now about 6 months and that’s if you play at an average level. By then a new game will be out. Ok, I’m about to have an empathetic tantrum.
Along with the playing time limit inspections of online gaming companies will also increase, to ensure that the time limits are being enforced.
The move reflects a long-running concern about the effect of excessive gaming on children and adolescents.
The Chinese government hopes that by enforcing these new laws, it will instill "good energy" in young people and influence them to have the correct values.
While many Chinese parents support the gaming restriction, some on China's social media platform Weibo criticize the government's intervention as "unreasonable" and "arbitrary."
Perhaps the latter has realised that if the government can enforce this ban, what’s to stop them from limiting Mums from watching soaps for 3 hours a night or Dads from watching Basketball all weekend.
They should definitely get online to share their grievances now because limitations on Weibo commenting hours could be next!
Main image: Pixabay