No evidence that Chinese playtime mandates reduced heavy gaming in one segment of the video games industry
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
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.
Date Issued
2023-10-01
Date Acceptance
2023-06-27
Citation
Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, 7 (10), pp.1753-1766
ISSN
2397-3374
Publisher
Nature Research
Start Page
1753
End Page
1766
Journal / Book Title
Nature Human Behaviour
Volume
7
Issue
10
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37563302
PII: 10.1038/s41562-023-01669-8
Subjects
Adolescent
Aged
Humans
Asian People
Video Games
Time Factors
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
England
Date Publish Online
2023-08-10