Chinese gaming giant Tencent is introducing facial recognition to prevent children from gaming at night. The intervention is intended to combat game addiction.
Today in China, it is already forbidden for minors to play online games between 22:00 and 08:00. With this measure, the government wants to counter vision problems in children and an addiction to online gaming. But in practice, children often circumvent the mandatory age registration by using a false profile.
That is why Tencent, the market leader in China for video games, is tightening up its approach. Anyone who wants to game online after 10 pm will have to pass a facial recognition test to prove they are an adult. Such a test will also be used when adjusting the rules that parents can set to determine how long their children can play.
The new rule will apply to some sixty games, including the hugely popular Honor of Kings. That title has more than a hundred million active daily users in China. In addition, many of the games are played on smartphones, allowing facial recognition through the phone’s camera to be applied.
