- While it has owned a controlling stake in Riot since 2011, Tencent has generally been hands-off when it comes to the company’s products. But facing increasing pressure from Chinese state media and regulators over its role in a supposed epidemic of video game addiction, Tencent needed a way to track how much time individual gamers in China spent playing “League of Legends” — and kick out minors who exceeded two hours per day. If Riot engineers didn’t supply an “anti-addiction system” for “League of Legends,” they might lose access to the Chinese market altogether.
Within weeks, an update brought these features to the Chinese version of “League of Legends.”
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Over the last year, one game company after another has quietly acceded to Chinese government demands to limit the amount of time young people spend on their games. Chinese players of American hits such as “League of Legends,” “Fortnite” and “World of Warcraft” are having their playtime tracked according to their national ID number. Those younger than 18 face heavy in-game penalties or outright expulsions if they play too long.
U.S. tech giants such as Google and Facebook have faced similar difficult choices about whether to create censored versions of their platforms in order to gain access to China. Google left the country in 2010 amid disputes over censored search results and a major hacking incident. Last year’s revelation that the company had secretly begun work on a censor-compliant Chinese search engine, code-named Project Dragonfly, sparked an outcry from Google employees and U.S. politicians. (A Google official told Congress last week that it has terminated the project.) Facebook has reportedly given up on entering China after years of courting Beijing failed to win the company a reprieve from a 2009 ban. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers have begun to call for an end to American investor money being channeled toward development of Chinese surveillance systems used in the repression of religious and ethnic minorities.
The anti-addiction regulations referenced in the Riot documents appear to refer to a Chinese Ministry of Education statement released last year. In it, the ministry said it would take steps to control the number of online games available, explore age-based restrictions and limit the amount of time adolescents spend gaming. No specifics or timeline were given, but many major game publishers in China rolled out their own solutions in anticipation of government action.
Tencent started requiring mandatory age and ID authentication on its top-grossing mobile game “Honor of Kings” in 2018, making players provide their Chinese national ID information for verification against police databases. The company has said the checks will be applied to all of its games this year and has been conducting trials of additional verification methods including mandatory facial recognition checks.
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Looming over all this is China’s planned rollout of a social credit system, which will assign citizens a score incorporating both standard financial metrics, such as debt repayment, and more personal information such as shopping habits and online behavior. Once a nationwide system debuts in 2020, a citizen with a low score could reportedly face penalties such as losing the right to buy plane and high-speed rail tickets, take out loans or purchase property. Excessive time spent playing video games is one specific behavior that could lower your score with Sesame Credit — one of the system’s main private pilot programs. This applies not only to minors but gamers of all ages.