China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week
People talking about the benefits of games reminds me of people talking about the benefits of, say, a glass of wine with every meal: it&#x27;s worth looking into but at the same time it&#x27;s the sort of thing that obviously doesn&#x27;t scale linearly with the amount&#x2F;intensity of consumption.<p>I similarly have mixed feelings as well, but for slightly different reasons. I&#x27;ve read about studies that say that musical training (which is often believed to translate to improvements in other cognitive aspects of life) doesn&#x27;t actually correlate to said improvements, and I suspect that the same might be true for games (e.g. solving game puzzles doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean you get better at school math or whatever)<p>This line of reasoning is also supported by research on correlation between games and violence (i.e. the consensus is that no such causation relationship exists).<p>All of these suggest (to me) that gaming is just its own activity without much impact on life other than opportunity cost itself.<p>However, there <i>are</i> some aspects of gaming that can affect overall well-being, specifically aspects related to repetitiveness (e.g. grinding). Repetitiveness is something that does come up in a lot of disciplines (e.g. its soothing effect in autist kids, or repetitiveness as tool in the context of meditation, etc).<p>The &quot;addictive&quot; aspect isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing either, IMHO. Games are, almost by definition, <i>supposed</i> to be engaging. But that addictiveness may come in a form of trade-offs, for example, back in the day of grindy RPGs, delayed gratification was basically the entire point of grinding. The one aspect that I think is justly vilified is monetization strategies that tie to addictive elements of gameplay (especially the gacha variety) and this is something that I&#x27;d actually commend China for trying to address via regulation.