Honor of Kings experiments with facial recognition to identify players

Tencent on edge after game addiction warning from Chinese state media

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Honor of Kings experiments with facial recognition to identify players

Karen Chiu

Published: 7:12pm, 1 Oct 2018Updated: 8:40am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Last month when Tencent said they were going to check the name and national ID of gamers against police records, some people suggested they might as well scan their faces too.

Turns out, that’s exactly what Tencent is thinking.

The company says a test is now underway in Honor of Kings -- its blockbuster smartphone game, known as Arena of Valor outside of China -- to verify players’ identity with facial recognition.

Arena of Valor, China’s mobile League of Legends, is aiming to be the world’s go-to mobile esport

The system will select around 1,000 new users at random in Beijing and Tencent’s home turf of Shenzhen. Video of each player’s face, captured in real time by the phone’s camera, will be checked along with information from a national security database.

Tencent has said it wants to identify children among players, to make sure that they follow in-game curfews and time limits for minors. Measures like these have become more urgent after state media voiced concerns over game addiction among children.

App blurs video if you hold the smartphone too close to your face

But it looks like a lot of gamers in China aren’t comfortable with this latest experiment.