The fun of playing video games at night might be uncertain in the coming days for kids in China. Tech giant Tencent has developed a time-sensitive facial recognition system that doesn’t allow minors to play video games late at night.

The platform called “Midnight Patrol” has been launched amid a moral panic over gaming addiction in kinds in China. People aged below 18 won’t be allowed to play games between 10 PM and 8 AM and must register for games under their original names and government ID numbers.

New system to stop late-night gaming sessions

Tencent’s new system leverages facial recognition that is connected to a public identity database to determine if minors are posing as adults to play video games during the restricted hours. “We will conduct a face screening for accounts registered with real names and that have played for a certain period of time at night,” Tencent said, according to a Sixth Tone. 

“Anyone who refuses or fails the face verification will be treated as a minor, and as outlined in the anti-addiction supervision of Tencent’s game health system, and kicked offline.”

List of games to increase in future

The new feature will cover more than 60 most played games in the initial days. These gaming titles include Honor of Kings and Game for Peace, and the company has plans to add more to the list in the coming days.

The system will also allow the company to know when, what, and how much gamers are playing, as per a tweet by Yulong Cui, an analyst at Ark Investment Management.

Facial recognition is becoming a go-to technology for many areas. Japan is planning to use facial recognition to control the rise in the number of bear attacks in the town of Shibetsu. To train the system, the tech needs at least 30 images of each bear’s face taken from the front. Cameras have been placed at known bear trails to extract images, but so far it hasn’t managed to capture enough images to run facial recognition and put a hold on these attacks.