No evidence that Chinese playtime mandates reduced heavy gaming in one segment of the video games industry

Abstract

Governments around the world are considering regulatory measures to reduce young people’s time spent on digital devices, particularly video games. This raises the question of whether proposed regulatory measures would be effective. Since the early 2000s, the Chinese government has been enacting regulations to directly restrict young people’s playtime. In November 2019, it limited players aged under 18 to 1.5 hours of daily playtime and 3 hours on public holidays. Using telemetry data on over seven billion hours of playtime provided by a stakeholder from the video games industry, we found no credible evidence for overall reduction in the prevalence of heavy playtime following the implementation of regulations: individual accounts became 1.14 times more likely to play heavily in any given week (95% confidence interval 1.139–1.141). This falls below our preregistered smallest effect size of interest (2.0) and thus is not interpreted as a practically meaningful increase. Results remain robust across a variety of sensitivity analyses, including an analysis of more recent (2021) adjustments to playtime regulation. This casts doubt on the effectiveness of such state-controlled playtime mandates.

Analysis Hybrid Learning on Learning Motivation Students and Mental Disorders as Moderator Variables During COVID-19

“…This research is supported by (Wong et al, 2020) who explains that the trend of internet gaming disorder is experienced by most adult men aged 12 to 20 years old. BBC data in 2007 reported by Zendle et al (2023) that the Chinese government considered the emergency department to be an epidemic and passed a ban on playing online games. The desire to isolate oneself from the social environment, entertain and make friends in cyber space is a key factor that causes the occurrence of IGD (Lee et al, 2017).…”