In November 2019, China introduced a law requiring online video game providers to prevent under-18s from playing for more than one-and-a-half hours per day (or three hours on a public holiday) or between the hours of 10pm and 8am.

The law was further strengthened in September 2021 to limit under-18s to one hour of playtime between 8pm and 9pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.

However, new research published in the Nature Human Behaviour journal, based on analysis of seven billion hours of playtime data, finds that the ban has not led to a reduction in the prevalence of heavy gaming in China.

After reviewing the data, relating to over a million games and 2.4 billion gamer profiles, researchers “found no evidence of reduced heavy playtime in our sample after China implemented its policy”, their paper states.

The paper suggests that both “player non-compliance and industry non-compliance” are the reason for the law’s apparent failure.

However, the researchers also acknowledge that their data, being anonymised and therefore not segregated by age, does not exclude the possibility that “an increase in heavy gaming among adults could be co-occurring with youth simultaneously playing less heavily”.

The multi-disciplinary research project was led by Dr David Zendle at the University of York in collaboration with Catherine Flick, Elena Gordon-Petrovskaya, Nick Ballou, Leon Y. Xiao — who researches video game law at the IT University of Copenhagen — and Anders Drachen.