On July 2nd, Tencent announced that it would launch the "strictest" anti-addiction system for Honor of Kings, adopting three major measures to prevent minors from excessive gaming. These measures include limiting players under 12 years old to only one hour of gameplay per day, introducing a hardware binding function to the Growth Guardian Platform to prevent minors from bypassing restrictions by logging into multiple accounts, and strengthening the real-name authentication system to ensure accurate identification of players' identities.
Shortly after the Spring Festival this year, Tencent launched the "Tencent Games Growth Guardian Platform" series of services to assist parents in supervising the healthy gaming behavior of their minor children. This is the first systematic solution for minors' healthy internet access in China's online gaming industry. However, this series of services is not exclusively for Honor of Kings but covers all games under Tencent. Meanwhile, the measures are not strict enough—for example, the daily gameplay limit for minors is more than one hour, and the restrictions can be bypassed by logging into multiple accounts. Therefore, this series of services must be upgraded simultaneously to effectively control the increasingly serious problem of minors' gaming addiction.
Nevertheless, addressing minors' mobile phone addiction requires a multi-faceted approach.
Honor of Kings is the most popular mobile game in the past year, with 200 million registered users and over 50 million daily active users. It often ranks high on the comprehensive App rankings. Whether at a dinner party or in a queue, you can see people around you playing Honor of Kings on their mobile phones. Purely from the perspective of evaluating the game itself, it is extremely successful—far surpassing games of the same period such as Onmyoji and Fantasy Westward Journey. Its popularity is comparable to that of last year's phenomenal game Pokemon Go, but its profitability is even higher. There are rumors that in-game skins sell for 100 million yuan in a single day, and it contributed 12 billion yuan to Tencent's revenue in the first quarter of this year.
Just because it is fun and easy to play, Honor of Kings has become one of the entertainment options for some minors, especially primary school students. During the Spring Festival, some media reported that some children would rather give up lucky money than stop playing mobile games—most likely Honor of Kings. There are many more cases accusing Honor of Kings of causing "physical and mental harm" to minors, with similar plots. Recently, the intensive attention from the media and online influencers has put Tencent in a controversy related to Honor of Kings; some even say that Tencent has opened the "Pandora's box" with Honor of Kings.
However, the fact is probably not the case.
Minors' addiction to games has always been a problem. As early as the PC era, games were labeled "electronic heroin". After mobile games became popular, children have easier access to the internet—they no longer need to climb over walls to sneak into internet cafes. But even before Honor of Kings appeared, many other mobile games had already made children obsessed. Moreover, some children are addicted to mobile phones even without playing games, such as watching animations, listening to children's songs, or even chatting. Therefore, although Honor of Kings is the most popular mobile game, it is not the cause of minors' mobile phone addiction. It is unfair to attribute minors' mobile phone addiction to a single game or a single company.
Since minors are still in the stage of mental development, addiction is a problem that children with insufficient self-control are likely to encounter. This kind of addiction is not brought about by the internet. People born in the 1970s and 1980s might have been addicted to TV, animations, or novels in their childhood. The internet just provides children with more choices, allowing them to be addicted to more things like games. Excessive addiction to anything is not good for children's physical and mental health. Smartphones can be put into schoolbags, taken into campuses, and placed in dormitories, which brings a greater risk of addiction to children.
Therefore, preventing children from being addicted to mobile phones is a very important task and has become extremely urgent—and this is not a problem unique to the game Honor of Kings. Shutting down Honor of Kings will not solve this problem; instead, this problem should be viewed from a systematic perspective.
Technology companies are doing more and more to prevent children from addiction, using both technical and management methods. For example, Google launched "Family Link" this year, allowing parents to control their children's use of smartphones and tablets. As a major player in China's gaming industry, Tencent is also taking active actions: it launched the "Tencent Games Growth Guardian Platform" after the Spring Festival, and recently upgraded the anti-addiction system for Honor of Kings. One of Pony Ma's proposals at this year's Two Sessions was "Suggestions on Strengthening the Construction of a Protection System for Minors' Healthy Internet Access", which also shows attention to minors' healthy internet use.
Can minors bring mobile phones to school? Can they take mobile phones into classrooms? Under what circumstances can mobile phones be used? These are all questions that educational authorities need to consider. With the development of online education technology, especially K12 education, mobile phones now play an increasingly important role in children's learning and education. Some schools assign homework and issue notices through mobile phones, and it is very common for primary school students to use Baidu to search for materials and ask questions. Therefore, it is not feasible to simply ban mobile phones. At present, there is no unified approach among different schools on how to handle this issue, so educational management departments need to issue clearer regulations.
In society, some parents' way of taking care of and amusing their children has become "giving them a mobile phone or a tablet". Some parents themselves play mobile phones happily in front of their children, but are indifferent to their children and lack communication with them. There are also parents who take "allowing you to play Honor of Kings for one hour today" as a reward. These practices are questionable. Is it right to completely ban children from touching mobile phones? Of course not. How to scientifically manage children's rational use of mobile phones is a problem that parents need to pay attention to.
Mobile phones and mobile games, like all tech products, are neutral in themselves and should not be completely rejected. People born in the 1980s did not have smartphones in their childhood, but they had games like Tetris, which also made children addicted at that time.
Mobile phones and mobile games are just products that keep up with the times. In today's era of rapid development of science and technology, it is very necessary for children to have moderate contact with the latest technology. As we all know, every bit of experience in childhood has a subtle impact on a person's life. It is hard to say that there is no connection between Buffett buying his first stock at the age of 11 and his later success as an investment tycoon; Jobs' first contact with a computer at the age of 12 laid the foundation for him to change the world... Similar stories all show the importance of allowing children to come into contact with advanced things.
In fact, the internet does not provide enough tech products for children; instead, there are too few. Providing internet services and tech hardware products that are more suitable for children's physical and mental development is also very important in the long run. If there are more content services such as videos and animations, children may not spend so much time playing games. If there are smartphones customized for children, it can better prevent children from being addicted to mobile games.
Mobile games are a new thing and are beneficial to physical and mental health to a certain extent—they can enhance creativity and imagination. Today, "esports" has become a major in colleges and universities, and the gaming industry is a sunrise industry. Since football can be promoted among minors, why can't children be allowed to come into contact with games? As Pony Ma said in his proposal at the Two Sessions: "Games do have their benefits, but one must not be excessive or addicted to them; the time spent on games must be well-managed."
Ten years ago, some parents were wary of the internet and even regarded internet addiction as a "mental illness", thus forbidding minors from accessing the internet. However, now we can see that the internet is everywhere and has become a part of our life, work, and study. Even children need to use the internet to obtain knowledge, information, and educational services. Therefore, we cannot attribute the problem of children's addiction to games to the games themselves, nor can we solve this problem by simply forbidding children from coming into contact with games or mobile phones. Instead, we should view this problem rationally and adopt a multi-faceted approach to prevent and control it, so as to create a better environment for children's healthy internet use.
