Chinese gaming giant Tencent has announced that the company will use a facial recognition system to prevent Chinese minors from playing games late into the night. The system will automatically block access to your account for minors after 22:00. Thus, the company intends to support the call announced by the government to combat child gambling addiction.
In 2019, China passed a law aimed at preventing minors from engaging in online gaming. It included a ban on video games from 10:00 pm to 8:00 am and a limit on playing time to 90 minutes a day. The law also prohibited minors from spending $ 28 to $ 57 per month on microtransactions (various in-game purchases). In addition, new rules have been introduced requiring all people, regardless of age, to register to play games under their real name, and prohibiting citizens from playing games that include “explicit eroticism, cruelty, violence and gambling.”
The State Printing and Publishing Administration and the Chinese Ministry of Public Security have already announced that they have started a joint project to create a “unified identification system” for games.
Digital Trends reports that Tencent has named the new system “Midnight Patrol” and that it scans players’ faces and compares the result against a database of faces and names. Users marked as minors will be blocked from accessing games whenever they exceed the maximum allowed 90 minutes per day or attempt to play during prohibited hours.
The monitoring system has already been tested in 60 games from Tencent, including Honor of Kings and Game for Peace. Later, face identification will appear in all games of the company.
Photo by katjen / Shutterstock.com: Tencent building in Shenzhen
