China Sets a Timer on Online Play

Unhealthy Game Time Warning

Link leads to a radio bit heard on NPR, the gist is that China has come up with an idea to curb game time by having a pop up warning interrupt game play: "You have entered unhealthy game time, please go offline immediately to rest." The time limit per day they've decided on is 3 hours a day. I'd be interested in seeing how they came up with that figure.

This brings to mind special situation "gaming". What I mean by that is when one might be logged into the game on the computer but not really playing it, for instance it could be up while you were waiting for your friends to come online, you might be using it as a chat client, or you might sporadically do tradeskills but not want to log in and out all the time. Folks with two computers might even have the game up on one while they work on the other... or just have the game up on one and not even be in the same room while doing chores etc. I suppose these situations are pretty rare and maybe even rarer in China.

On the other hand in EverQuest now, there is a timer you can set to remind you when a certain amount of time has elapsed. It doesn't penalize you like the Chinese system if you play beyond your timed session but just acts as a simple timer. I like this concept much better.

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gaming, mmorpg, online games