Age ratings for cybergames are necessary

YU XINWEI, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee, has proposed a classification system for cybergames. Thepaper.cn comments:

Yu has called for clear standards so that we know which age group of children can play which games, and said that any classification regulation, if passed, must be strictly implemented by a specific government department.

Her proposal is timely because China has already become the largest market globally for mobile and computer games. In 2017, China’s mobile games market exceeded 200 billion yuan ($31.5 billion), and there were 583 million players.

At the same time, there are increasingly more young players between 11 and 20 years old. Unlike adults, these players tend to become more easily addicted to mobile games.

There have already been many cases about pupils getting so addicted to mobile games that they fail in academic work, and some of them are rather extreme. Last June, a 13-year-old pupil in Hangzhou, East China’s Zhejiang province, jumped from the fourth floor after being scolded by his father for playing mobile games. And last April, another 17-year-old boy suffered a stroke after playing video games for 40 hours nonstop.

In order to cope with this, some game companies prohibit children playing certain computer games, but there is no legal support for that. And many young people bypass this by registering under their parents’ identities.

All these call for a better, more effective classification system that distinguishes different age groups and prohibits them from playing certain games. With such a system, it will also be possible for game companies to take technological measures such as realname registration and facial recognition to prevent children from playing cybergames illegally.

In a word, stricter supervision is needed for cybergames and only a classification system will help.