Young Minecraft fans across South Korea have been breathing a sigh of relief over the past
week, as their government has announced that a controversial gaming law will be repealed.
As we covered in a previous video, the so-called “Cinderella Law” forbids those under nineteen
in South Korea from playing games between midnight and 6am.
Some companies ban underage players entirely for the sake of ease, which is what Microsoft
has recently done with Minecraft.
The Cinderella Law will be repealed later this year, and while not all of the details
are clear yet, it helps that South Korea actually already has a much more appropriate system
for policing child screen time enshrined in law.
That said, South Korea is not the only country debating children and gaming, and this issue
could have ramifications for gaming laws around the world.
Concerns over children playing too many computer games go back decades, but games like Minecraft
are not the catalyst for South Korea’s controversial solution.
The culprits are mass multiplayer online roleplaying games which are designed to be highly addictive.
These games reward repetitive play, forcing the player to grind for hours in order to
progress.
There have been cases of teenagers and young adults playing these games in internet cafes
to the point of exhaustion and even death.
This is absolutely an issue that needs to be addressed, but many parents don’t see
the difference between this kind of psychological trap, and the fact that some children simply
enjoy playing a lot of Minecraft because it’s fun.
Of course, this isn’t just an issue in South Korea.
A recent opinion piece in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph claimed that “every
parent” knows that gaming is a “dangerous obsession”, which is perhaps a bit of an
overstatement.
While the Cinderella Law is the primary form of policing underage gaming time in South
Korea, it’s not the only solution.
Another law allows parents to set specific play time hours for their children, which
games companies must honour.
This Selective Shutdown Policy is not currently widely used in South Korea, as only a fraction
of parents understand how to make use of it, but it will be the primary means of policing
children going forward.
It does remain to be seen how many games companies actually bother to adhere to it.
If the Cinderella Law was too much effort for companies like Microsoft to follow, this
tailored system may actually be more difficult to implement in practice.
What’s more, it’s unclear whether arbitrarily locking children out of games at certain times
is a useful strategy.
One academic study conducted in South Africa found that children who were locked out of
a game at a certain time became more fixated on the game, because it was now forbidden.
So what solution is best for combating genuine cases of video game addiction?
One solution which was previously used in China involved varying player rewards based
on play time.
Games would give out less experience points after three hours of gameplay, and no experience
at all after five hours.
This helped players to make the decision to turn off the game themselves.
The big problem with this solution?
It reduces the revenue that games companies can make.
Truly psychologically addictive games are designed that way on purpose, unethical as
it may be.
It’s a matter for a rigorous academic study to test whether this technique is helpful
in the treatment of genuine gaming addiction, however, it stands to reason that it may have
little impact on a child who simply enjoys the experience of playing, and is reluctant
for the fun to be brought to an end.
China has now moved away from this strategy, in favour of something far more restrictive:
legally forbidding all children from having more than one hour’s gaming time per school
day.
That, though, is a story for another day – and one which is well worth telling, as the Chinese
government’s restrictions has wider ramifications for many Western companies, including Ubisoft,
Activision Blizzard, and Epic Games.
For now, though, the moral of this story is that governments can’t raise your kids for
you.
If you’re worried about your child having too much screen time, the best solution is
to talk to them, perhaps play games with them so that you can understand them better, and
agree together on some healthy boundaries that suit your family’s needs.