ArticleNature human behaviour2023
No evidence that Chinese playtime mandates reduced heavy gaming in one segment of the video games industry.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond the debate: toward pragmatic evaluation of Australia's social media age restrictions.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2026Review
- The Association Between Daily Screen Time and Childhood Overweight and Obesity: Current Evidence and Potential Mechanisms.International journal of general medicine · 2026Review
- Better than industry self-regulation: Compliance of mobile games with newly adopted and actively enforced loot box probability disclosure law in South Korea.Acta psychologica · 2025Article
- Mainland China's 2021 restrictions on under-18s' video game time were imposed when older 2019 restrictions already applied: Omitting the historical regulatory context is misleading.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- High compliance and reduced online gaming time among Chinese adolescents after the 2021 gaming policy: Effects across all gamers, not just heavy users.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Perceived value of video games, but not hours played, predicts mental well-being in casual adult Nintendo players.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- How much gaming is too much? An analysis based on psychological distress.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2024Article
- Causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan 2020-2022.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Effect of online game policy on smartphone game play time, addiction, and emotion in rural adolescents of China.BMC psychiatry · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Governments around the world are considering regulatory measures to reduce young people's time spent on digital devices, particularly video games. This raises the question of whether proposed regulatory measures would be effective. Since the early 2000s, the Chinese government has been enacting regulations to directly restrict young people's playtime. In November 2019, it limited players aged under 18 to 1.5 hours of daily playtime and 3 hours on public holidays. Using telemetry data on over seven billion hours of playtime provided by a stakeholder from the video games industry, we found no credible evidence for overall reduction in the prevalence of heavy playtime following the implementation of regulations: individual accounts became 1.14 times more likely to play heavily in any given week (95% confidence interval 1.139-1.141). This falls below our preregistered smallest effect size of interest (2.0) and thus is not interpreted as a practically meaningful increase. Results remain robust across a variety of sensitivity analyses, including an analysis of more recent (2021) adjustments to playtime regulation. This casts doubt on the effectiveness of such state-controlled playtime mandates.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.