China to gamers: get a life
25 Aug 2005 
just before lunchtime 
Matt Winckler
The Chinese government has stepped in to regulate online gaming in the country, placing an effective limit on the amount of time at a stretch people can spend playing online games. The gist is that after three hours, gamers will be shown a message saying something to the effect of “that’s enough games for now, TimmyChang. Go do something healthy! Your government loves you!”, and their online character’s abilities will begin to degrade. After five hours straight, the character will become “severely limited”. This evidently in an effort to stop people from dying after 50-hour marathon gaming sessions.
Of course, you already know what I’m going to say about this: if you want to go kill yourself by spending 50 straight hours playing video games, be my guest. It’s not like you feel fine up to hour #49, then all of a sudden you drop dead. There are warning signs. Sheesh–for me, the warning signs kick in after about 9 hours straight at a LAN party, at the point where I can no longer think coherently and have difficulty keeping my eyes open. After playing a game for 50 hours, I would want to die. On the other hand, while I’ve never gotten into online games, after 3 hours of playing with friends on a LAN, things are just starting to get fun. I think that in this case, as in many other cases, the government of China is simply a pack of phenomenal losers.
(Interestingly, I note at the bottom of the BBC article that most readers don’t agree with me…they consider limits like this “healthy”. How disturbing! While I don’t dispute that it would be healthy to take a break, I think it should be up to the gamer…a case of “all things are lawful for me, but not all things are good for me…”)