Dozens of Chinese phone games now require facial scans to play at night

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Tencent, the world's largest Chinese video game publisher, has taken an extreme step to comply with its nation's rules about limiting minors' access to video games. As of this week, the publisher has added a facial recognition system, dubbed "Midnight Patrol," to over 60 of its China-specific smartphone games, and it will disable gameplay in popular titles like Honor of Kings if users either decline the facial check or fail it.

In all affected games, once a gameplay session during the nation's official gaming curfew hours (10 pm to 8 am) exceeds an unspecified amount of time, the game in question will be interrupted by a prompt to scan the player's face. Should an adult fail the test for any reason, Tencent makes its "too bad, so sad" attitude clear in its announcement: users can try to play again the next day.

This week's change doubles down on a limited facial-scan system implemented by Tencent in the Chinese version of Honor of Kings in 2018. Since that rollout, we've yet to hear exactly how the system works. Does it determine a user's age based on facial highlights? Does it cross-reference existing facial data—and possibly leverage any of its home nation's public facial-scanning systems? Tencent has not clarified any of Midnight Patrol's technical details.

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