When kids game excessively, I'd wager it's an escape for them. It's an escape just as much as it was for the geeky / nerdy kids of America, as it is for the kids in China who have goukou.
You can try to enforce whatever culture you're gonna enforce, but I think we've seen from the war on drugs that these kinds of things don't really work. There's always some deep psychological and/or physiological deficit whenever there is an "addiction" at play. And you're trying to treat the disease by treating the symptoms. You can try to tighten control so that you can try to force that "ideal" society, but when you do that, things have a way of becoming authoritarian in a handbasket. Everything messed up about China is about socialist idealism turning authoritarian, and you can say that about other countries too.
People should have figured that out when they did that study on rats, where the rats that lived in some enriched environment, with plenty of playtime, did not get addicted to sugar water the way that the rats trapped in cages did.
People have been making a lot of prediction about China, such that market economy would lead to more political openness or a middle class would demand more political freedom - all good guess but turn out wrong.
I think we're bad at prediction - so why not let them experiment and see how it turns out 50 years later.
So, in a way, you could be seen as arguing for authoritarianism.
> And you're trying to treat the disease by treating the symptoms
So, for example, Opiods. In the United States we're treating the symptoms by banning it (and this is pretty much supported by both political parties). Yet we know the root cause: People that are effectively feeling worthless, do not feel connected to a specific social group and/or disengaged from culture.
Other aspects of our entire culture is causing people to feel like that: 1. Changing family values, 2. Disconnected from people, connected to devices and online popularity, 3. Impossible to succeed and feel valuable.
I feel like we have a really weird problem: Our capitalistic environment or, greed in general, are driving these problems. So the solution is authoritarianism.
Sorry that's just the way my mind works. I see right through issues to their root causes and it makes my worldview weird.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM6hEOtV92E
When kids game excessively, I'd wager it's an escape for them. It's an escape just as much as it was for the geeky / nerdy kids of America, as it is for the kids in China who have goukou.
You can try to enforce whatever culture you're gonna enforce, but I think we've seen from the war on drugs that these kinds of things don't really work. There's always some deep psychological and/or physiological deficit whenever there is an "addiction" at play. And you're trying to treat the disease by treating the symptoms. You can try to tighten control so that you can try to force that "ideal" society, but when you do that, things have a way of becoming authoritarian in a handbasket. Everything messed up about China is about socialist idealism turning authoritarian, and you can say that about other countries too.
People should have figured that out when they did that study on rats, where the rats that lived in some enriched environment, with plenty of playtime, did not get addicted to sugar water the way that the rats trapped in cages did.