 Young Minecraft fans across South Korea have been breathing a sigh of relief over the past week, as their government has announced that a controversial gaming law will be repealed. As we covered in a previous video, the so-called Cinderella law forbids those under 19 in South Korea from playing games between midnight and 6am. Some companies ban underage players entirely for the sake of ease, which is what Microsoft has recently done with Minecraft. The Cinderella law will be repealed later this year, and while not all of the details are clear yet, it helps that South Korea actually already has a much more appropriate system for policing child screen time enshrined in law. That said, South Korea is not the only country debating children and gaming, and this issue could have ramification for gaming laws around the world. Concerns over children playing too many computer games go back decades, but games like Minecraft are not the catalyst for South Korea's controversial solution. The culprits are mass multiplayer online role-playing games, which are designed to be highly addictive. These games reward repetitive play, forcing the player to grind for hours in order to progress. There have been cases of teenagers and young adults playing these games in internet cafes to the point of exhaustion and even death. This is absolutely an issue that needs to be addressed, but many parents don't see the difference between this kind of psychological trap and the fact that some children simply enjoy playing a lot of Minecraft because it's fun. Of course, this isn't just an issue in South Korea. A recent opinion piece in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph claimed that every parent knows that gaming is a dangerous obsession, which is perhaps a bit of an overstatement. While the Cinderella law is the primary form of policing underage gaming time in South Korea, it's not the only solution. Another law allows parents to set specific playtime hours for their children, which games companies must honour, as only a fraction of parents understand how to make use of it, but it will be the primary means of policing children going forward. It does remain to be seen how many games companies actually bother to adhere to it. If the Cinderella law was too much effort for companies like Microsoft to follow, this tailored system may actually be more difficult to implement in practice. What's more, it's unclear whether arbitrarily locking children out of games at certain times is a useful strategy. One academic study conducted in South Africa found that children who were locked out of a game at a certain time became more fixated on the game because it was now forbidden. So what solution is best for combating genuine cases of video game addiction? One solution which was previously used in China involved varying player rewards based on playtime. Games would give out less experience points after three hours of gameplay, and no experience at all after five hours. This helped players to make the decision to turn off the game themselves. The big problem with this solution? It reduces the revenue that games companies can make. Truly psychologically addictive games are designed that way on purpose, unethical as it may be. It's a matter for a rigorous academic study to test whether this technique is helpful in the treatment of genuine gaming addiction. However, it stands to reason that it may have little impact on a child who simply enjoys the experience of playing and is reluctant for the fun to be brought to an end. China has now moved away from this strategy in favour of something far more restrictive, legally forbidding all children from having more than one hour's gaming time per school day. That, though, is a story for another day, and one which is well worth telling, as the Chinese government's restrictions has wider ramifications for many western companies, including Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, and Epic Games. For now, though, the moral of this story is that governments can't raise your children for you. If you're worried about your child having too much screen time, the best solution is to talk to them, perhaps play games with them so that you can understand them better, and agree together on some healthy boundaries that suit your family's needs.