What are the 5 craziest things Chinese parents believe about gaming?

I have been living in China for the last four years and during that time I have spoken to many, many Chinese parents. Almost all of them have very negative views on gaming, regardless of whether they are occasional gamers or not. Chinese parents have many reasons for fearing games, and these go from the bizarre to the misinformed and the tragic. I’ve assembled the most common of these fears for your viewing pleasure.

The VIP room of a internet cafe as imagined by Chinese parents.

It’s bad for your eyes

Any child of the 80s can remember this. I remember my parents worrying, my grandparents preaching, and having fearful conversations with classmates as we contemplated our imminent blindness. I remember we were excited about the possibility of getting a guide dog.

This line of argument was pretty much abandoned when people realised that most of us spend a significant amount of time staring at screens. It’s tough to criticise the entire population for almost everything they do.

In China, this argument hasn’t lost its momentum yet. This is probably because everyone wears glasses. In four years of teaching in China, I have never had a class with less than 50% requiring glasses; most of them are over 75% bespectacled. How crazy is that? When faced with figures like that, computers and gaming are convenient scapegoats.

Almost every student I know wears glasses.

Forget the fact that most students spend most of their days in poorly-lit classrooms, reading tiny text from out-of-date books, it must be Dota’s fault!

You will become a criminal

In western countries, we have the “Fox News argument”, or the “monkey see, monkey do theory.” The idea is simple: if you kill people in a game, eventually you will want to kill people in real life. China has this belief too, but parents are far more concerned with their children becoming thieves and con artists.