Imagine if your entertainment was limited to only a few hours a week. How would you feel? You would probably feel that the time is not enough. In China, there's a regulation that limits online gaming time for minors. Their gaming time is only on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 8pm to 9pm, three hours in total each week. Nowadays, playing online games is one of the main forms of entertainment for minors, but this rule restricts entertainment for minors. Should the government introduce rules to limit the gaming time for them? My answer is no.

First of all, online games are a form of entertainment, which is essentially similar to the  games parents played before when they were children, such as jumping rubber bands, hide-and-seek, and making Bamboo Man. So, let’s think about it from a different side. If these games also had playing time limits, parents would certainly not have been happy. It’s certainly not a good idea to limit your childhood entertainment.

Playing games also has many benefits. Online games can help minors relax, make friends, and exercise their logical thinking and imagination. In the twenty-first century, many families have only one child. They generally live far away from their classmates, and it would be very difficult for them to find peers to play with. Meeting offline doesn't seem to be a good option during the pandemic. As online games become more and more developed, it has become a way for minors to play with their friends, chat on common topics, and even make new friends. I returned back to China in June 2022, during the quarantine I connected with my friends and played with them online. This brings a lot of fun to the boredom in quarantine, and it really helped me in meeting my friends and chatting with them offline later.

Some people may say: Online games also have disadvantages, such as violence, eye damage, and addiction, and minors will pay a lot of money into games, etc. These disadvantages do exist, but they can be avoided if parents are well disciplined and minors play games properly and healthily. For example, parents could set a play time for their children, asking them to play for a while and rest. Also, minors won’t hurt their eyes if they keep their eyes a certain distance from the screen. 

What is the purpose of the government restricting gaming time? I think the main purpose is to let minors focus on their most important task - studying. However, the facts show that some minors have no intention to study even if the gaming time is limited.  In Soo’s article about limiting gaming time, she introduces a quote from a mother: “As long as children don’t want to study, they will find some way to play” (Soo). This is totally true. Instead of playing games, they spend their time on social media, playing with toys, watching movies, reading online novels, or even sitting in front of the desk and doing nothing, but they just don’t study.

Some minors can't control themselves. They will try their best to cross the line. One main method is to use the ID number or phone number of the elderly to register accounts, and then let them show up in front of the screen to pass the system's face recognition. Like Mozur and Chen said in their article, “Many just borrowed or took their parents’ or grandparents’ phones” (Mozur and Chen). So recently, you can often see news on the Internet saying, "the 60-year-old man has five kills at three in the morning", as well as the overwhelming video on Douyin which is about "letting the elderly pass face recognition".

Others, on the other hand, control themselves very well. But if the government only restricts playing games at a certain time, they may not be free during this time period, thus losing precious time to play games. Moreover, some college students are not yet adults, and their learning tasks are not that heavy. It is unfair to include them in the game time management rules for minors.

Although some other minors can be controlled by the regulations, I don't think the government should restrict gaming time, but should leave the matter to their parents. In an article edited by The Learning Network, it says that “The government should not interfere with video gaming through laws, the amount of time a kid spends online should be decided by and enforced by the parents as they have a better understanding of their child, better than the government ever will” (The Learning Network). In order to take care of their children, parents have to take care of this matter. Some people may say that their children are already addicted to games, and they can't control them if the government doesn't make rules. What I want to say is that it's not that you can't, it's that you don't want to do it. I used to lose my grades because of my addiction to playing games, but when my mother knew, she didn’t yell at me and throw away my phone like some parents, but calmly discussed it with me and told me some disadvantages if I was addicted to video games. So we made a deal: as long as my grades improved a lot at the end of the semester, I would be allowed to play as much as I wanted during the vacation. Instead of confiscating my phone, she limited the use of entertainment apps on my phone through "screen time." This is obviously more effective than the government's rules. I started to focus on my studies, got a good grade at the end of the semester, and got my gaming time back.

When it comes to minors being addicted to games, I think it's still the parent's problem. I agree with this statement stated by the Zheng in his article about limiting gaming time: [There are many parents, in order to keep their children from causing trouble, to reduce their stress, and to find an excuse for themselves to relax, they will just let their children play with their phones]. If parents limit the amount of time their kids play games from the start, then they won't be addicted later. Therefore, in order to prevent children from addictive games, parents can spend more time with their children and divert their attention.