Chinese Govt To Promote Parental Supervision Project In Online Game Industry

Eight Chinese administrations, including the Ministry of Culture, Central Civilization Office, and the Ministry of Education, have jointly issued an implementation plan to launch a new project to enable parents to supervise their children who play online games.

Effective from March 1, 2011, this new project will be applied in the online game industry across the entire country. With the launch of the project, if the children are addicted to online games, parents will be able to submit applications to the online game operating units to limit the playing duration and periods of their children, or even ban them from the games completely.

According to the implementation plan, parents need to understand, guide, and control their children’s gaming activities. If the parents provide the legal guardian qualifications, the names of the online games, and their children’s gaming IDs, they can limit their children’s daily or weekly gaming duration and periods.

The plan asks online game operating units to limit the IDs of minors in accordance with the requirements of their parents while tracking these IDs and giving feedback to the parents to help parents prevent their children from inappropriate gaming activities.

Under the requirement of the plan, online game operating units should establish special service web pages and hotlines for the implementation of this new project. At the same time, they should train special service staff to offer professional consulting services to people who are interested in the supervision project.