Tencent, the largest Chinese video game publisher in the world, has taken extreme steps to comply with its country’s rules about limiting children’s access to underage to video games. This week, the publisher has added a face recognition system, nicknamed “Midnight Patrol,” to more than 60 of China’s special smartphone games, and it will disable gameplay in popular titles such as Kings Honor if the user rejects facial checks or fails.

In all the affected games, after the gameplay session during the official state curfew curfew (10 nights to 8am) exceeded an unspecified amount of time, the game in question would be disturbed by the prompt to scan the player’s face. If adults fail in any test, Tencent made a “too bad, very sad” attitude “clearly in the announcement: Users can try playing again the next day.

This week’s change multiplied in a limited face scanning system applied by Tencent in the Honorary version of China Kings in 2018. Since the launch, we have not heard exactly how the system works. Does this determine the age of the user based on face highlight? Is it crossed in existing facial data references – and maybe use one of the public face scanning systems in the country? Tencent has not clarified the technical details of the Midnight patrol.

In addition, parents can now turn on the face recognition system that specifically checks for the face of parents approved before allowing gameplay to unlock – although it is not clear why parents will choose to do this rather than turning on something like a password or PIN system.