Happy Nice Mall

Many in China’s gaming industry agree that games have some disadvantages. The most popular games in the country are made for smartphones and are free to play, meaning businesses make them live and die based on how well they attract users and pay for the extras. Game makers have specialized in deceiving players.

But top-down attempts to distract children from games – what the state media has dubbed “poison” and “spiritual pollution” – have sometimes been worse than the problem itself. Training camps devoted to military discipline proliferated. There are also statements in the Chinese media about abuses such as beatings, electroconvulsive therapy and solitary confinement.

Mr. Shi said that even the country’s past ban on consoles like the PlayStation made things worse. This ban has helped boost the popularity of free-to-play mobile games. Studios that sell games for consoles are motivated to make high-quality games like blockbuster movies. Not so, he said, with free games motivated to maximize what they can get from players.

For Mr. Shi, the government’s new boundaries are similar to the ones his mother imposed on him growing up. On weekdays, his PlayStation 2 was locked in a locker. Every disc he bought was inspected. Many were deemed inappropriate.

When he moved to university, he entered a period he called “paying” and tried to make up for the years when he had strict limits. Even now, he sometimes indulges or overspends on his gaming habits. Crucially, he said, for a generation that grew up largely without siblings, many with parents who worked late, video games offered a portal to a social world beyond the woes of school pressures.

“I used to finish dinner by myself after school, and it sounds pathetic. But what made it less pathetic was that I had playmates.” When her parents stopped her from playing games, she remembered going online and watching other people’s games.

“Forbidding people to do something doesn’t mean people will do what you want them to do,” he said.