Chinese Gaming Time Limit

Submission 16,895

Part of a series on China. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Chinese Gaming Time Limit refers to a set of guidelines introduced by the Chinese authorities on November 5th, 2019, which limit the amount of time Chinese citizens below the age of 18 are allowed to spend playing video games and restrict the amount of money they can spend on in-game transactions.

Background

On November 5th, 2019, the Chinese government released a notice containing a set of guidelines aimed at tackling video game addiction in the country, with Xinhua News Agency reporting on the news on the same day.^[1] The guidelines are as follows:

Those under the age of 18 are banned from playing video games between 22:00 and 08:00;
Those under the age of 18 are allowed to play 90 minutes on weekdays and 3 hours on weekend days and holidays;
Gamers in the 8-16 age bracket can spend up to 200 yuan ($28.5) on in-game transactions per month;
Gamers in the 16-18 age bracket can spend up to 400 yuan ($57) on in-game transactions per month.
A real-name registration system is to be implemented, requiring companies to verify ages of gamers against a national database

Online Reactions

In the following days, the news was covered by multiple news outlets globally, including articles by BBC,^[2] ABC^[3] and The New York Times.^[4]

On November 6th, game developer Mark Kern posted several tweets about the development,^[5]^[6]^[7] with one post gaining over 460 retweets and 2,300 likes in one day (shown below). A repost of the tweet to /r/KotakuInAction subreddit received over 590 upvotes in one day.^[8]