Tencent updates system that kicks off 17.84 million kid gamers per day with ‘midnight patrol’

Imagine, if you will, a neighbourhood watch patrolling cyberspace in the dead of night, searching out ne’er-do-wells lurking in the dead of night.

Except, these culprits sneaking around are kids, using an adult’s accounts to play games at night and skirt China’s anti-gaming addiction rules.

On Tuesday (July 13), the Chinese gaming giant Tencent launched an update to its neighbourhood watch with a programme called “midnight patrol”, which aims to seek out accounts that may be kids, and then use facial recognition technology to verify their identity.

The new updates will be rolled out for 60 titles, such as Honour of Kings, one of the most successful mobile games in history, and Game For Peace, the slightly altered Chinese version of PUBG Mobile.

In a post on WeChat, Tencent said: “For accounts that have been played at night for more than a certain period of time, and whose real names are adults, we will conduct a focused face screening”.

“Anyone who refuses or fails the face verification will be treated as a minor, included in Tencent’s anti-addiction supervision and kicked offline,” it said.

Under a Chinese law passed in 2019, minors cannot play video games between 10pm and 8am. The law also says minors can only play games for 1.5 hours per day or three hours during a holiday.

“Because of the very strict nature of the system, which has been implemented over the past few years in mobile games across the board, it is now a lot harder for people to circumvent the system,” said Daniel Ahmad, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, who covers the China and Asia video game industry.

[[nid:495406]]

Tencent’s use of facial recognition technology to find kids pretending to be an adult is nothing new, as the programme was first launched in June 2020.

The new updates are meant to scour cyberspace at night to find suspicious account activity.

Ahmad said that Tencent is ahead of the game in using facial recognition technology to comply with restrictions on minors.

It first started using facial recognition technology in 2018, when it pioneered the practice by limiting minors playing Honour of Kings to one hour per day for children under 12 years old and two hours a day for kids older than 12.

Tencent has created an infrastructure called the Balanced Online Entertainment System, which gives parents more control over how their kids play, such as setting time and spending limits and in-game behaviour monitoring.

The Chinese laws, and subsequent rules from Tencent, appear to be effective in adding hurdles and reducing the number of kids playing games.

Ampere Analysis, a market research firm, said Tencent kicked off 17.84 million accounts every day as of February from minors playing too long.

But kids have been clever about circumventing these rules, and Tencent itself poked fun at the loopholes in those early days.

It published a WeChat post that featured stories of kids scanning their parents’ faces while they slept or pinching their throat to sound older while talking to a customer service representative.

Chundi Zhang, a Video Games Research Analyst at Ampere, said, “Loopholes are being closed.

But the problem is not solved because the system can not stop kids from switching between games, playing games that haven’t introduced the facial recognition system or playing console games.”

South Korea has a similar “shut down law” that bans kids from getting online between 12am and 6am, and it has been criticised for being ineffective.

[[nid:531300]]

For “midnight patrol”, Tencent matches the facial scans with information from China’s national system, but the company does not store the data.

The data is used to verify the user’s identity but nothing else.

In October 2020, the China Security and Protection Industry Association, an industry group, said facial recognition does pose potential threats to privacy, echoing a sentiment from many people in China that the technology has become too ubiquitous.

While the new rules certainly make it harder for kids to play games, they may not effectively curb gaming addiction overall.

Amos Cheung, a lecturer from the Department of Psychology at the University of Hong Kong, said the worry is that “these sort of imposed restrictions come from the outside, they are not created from within”.

“So, we are not cultivating a sense of internal control. We notice that at the university, some of our students have real difficulties in controlling themselves and managing their own schedules,” he said.

He said parents could help their children learn how to control their time spent gaming, and their parental role should be to remind them about self-imposed limits.

“Parents will have to be there to help the child keep their promise, not simply to punish them afterwards for not following through,” he said.

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.