Future Timeline

wjfox wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 6:38 pm

Shenzhen, China-based gaming giant Tencent has announced it will use a face recognition system to prevent minors in its home country from playing video games late into the night.

Tencent is attempting to keep ahead of recent regulations designed to stamp out what the Chinese government defines as excessive and unhealthy gaming habits. In 2019, China passed a law ostensibly intended to prevent minors “from indulging in online games.” According to NPR, that includes a ban on minors playing video games from 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., as well as limiting their playtime to 90 minutes a day. The law also prohibited minors from spending more than $28 to $57 a month on micro-transactions. New rules requiring all individuals, regardless of age, to register for games using their real identities and prohibiting citizens from playing games that include “sexual explicitness, goriness, violence, and gambling” were also implemented.

At the time, NPR reported the State Administration of Press and Publication and the Ministry of Public Security said they were collaborating to build a “unified identification system” for games. Tencent is one of the many Chinese tech companies involved in enforcing their government’s draconian censorship laws which prohibit a wide range of speech considered sensitive by authorities. But it’s also been on the other end of the stick, as when it lost out on massive amounts of revenue due to a regulatory moratorium on licensing new games in 2018.