Govt might limit time to play and money spent to cure gaming addiction

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While parents are often at their wit’s end to tackle gaming addiction from their young ones, the government is contemplating measures such as introducing time limits on online and real money games among children and young adults.

India is one of the biggest gaming markets and gaming often triggers uncontrollable urge among children. The Economic Times has reported that a consensus on the imposition of time limits is emerging in internal meetings of the ministry of electronics and information technology.

The Chinese administration has also reportedly adopted such measures to control the addiction.

Officials told the newspaper that enforcing time limits can be a far more effective method than merely certifying games as permissible or non-permissible through self-regulatory organisations (SRO). “Despite claims, it is a very real possibility that any or all (gaming) SROs which are formed will be industry influenced. That is not a desirable set up for policy decisions, especially when so many young children are involved,” said a bureaucrat.

The enormity of the problem can be gauged from the fact that there are about 57 crore active gamers in the entire country – a number higher than the entire population of the US, UK and Russia put together. A report by Winzo (a real money gaming firm) and Interactive Entertainment and Innovation Council (a non-profit firm) in March 2024 estimated that about 14 crore gamers paid for the games or spend money in some ways related to these games.

Only in 2023, users in India downloaded over 950 crore gaming apps on their mobile devices.

If the government eventually sticks to imposition of time and money spent on online and real money games, the onus will be on gaming companies to implement mechanism to ensure these measures are followed. For example, the limit on the money spent per day by a player could be decided based on the trend of expenditure of the player, said a bureaucrat.

“The mechanisms (to control or check the time and money spent) should be fairly easy to implement. We will work with the industry to find the best possible solution,” the official said.

If the plan to form an SRO (self-regulatory organisation) would have been successful, the government wouldn’t have to get involved in it. Though last year the IT ministry had given gaming companies and industry 90 days to form an SRO, all the three proposals received by the government was heavily tilted in the favour of the industry players.