Game Junior, with hidden corners of the family behind it

After really delving into the real predicament of this family, Meng Yuan found that the interdependent mother and son had buttons that stabbed each other in their hands, and they both knew how to use the simplest sentence to make each other fall into a collapse situation in an instant. So, she asked the woman to write down "words that made the child sad", and the woman seriously thought on the other end of the phone, and then wrote down three full pages.

At the beginning, on the day he joined Tencent's juvenile protection platform, Meng Yuan gave himself an English name, Echo, which translates to "echo". She said that even a little good response from the family on the other end of the line would make her feel that what she was doing had meaning.

Text | yellow dot

Edit | Yi Fangxing

Operations | Circles

"Don't hit the child yet"

Through the phone, Meng Yuan still sensed the tension of the family on the other side.

The helpless cry of a mother came over the phone. Her child is 16 years old, in the rebellious period, recently fell in love with playing games, put a lot of money into the game, and a fierce conflict is breaking out between mother and son.

With resentment, the mother called Tencent's service platform for minors' parents. The person who picked up the phone was Meng Yuan, and she remembered that the other party demanded the immediate return of her son's money, and then began to ask for help - the child was older, gradually taller and stronger, and would drop the family cup when arguing. When the argument and physical altercation ensued, she felt scared, and most frightened for a while, she had to move out of the house, lived in the office, and has not returned home until now, she does not know what to do next.

This is also Meng Yuan's helpless moment. As an education counseling specialist, she and her colleagues answer many phone calls from parents every day, verify information, check the amount, and return the money charged by the children. Relatively speaking, refunds are easy, but the real difficulty is how to help solve a family's problems thousands of miles away.

The most immediate is the limitation of distance. Just like now, Meng Yuan clearly knows that this mother is in a tense situation, but all she can do is let her pay attention to safety and not aggravate the conflict.

It's just that, like that mother, parents who are in a weak position are still in the minority. Most of the time, the customer service needs to deflatten parents - each of them has heard the roar of parents and the cry of children in their headphones, and when they enter the office area, they will hear the customer service often repeat the same sentence - "You don't hit the child first".

▲ Customer service will communicate with parents and children in a scientific way. Photo / Photo courtesy of interviewee

Feng Sinan, 24, who is also a member of the customer service team, is relatively young in the team, and because he also likes to play games before, it is easier to communicate with children, and many difficult calls will change hands to him.

In his memory, parental outbursts were the norm. The father of a 13-year-old child was extremely angry because the child had stolen an adult's account to charge money in the game, and when Feng Si Nan proposed to chat with the child and confirm the account information, the father directly dragged the child over. The child couldn't stop crying and couldn't say a word, seeing this situation, the father instantly became even more angry, and the sound of hitting the child followed.

▲ Parents prevent children from playing games. Photo / Visual China

"It's broken, it's angry." Feng Si Nan thought to himself, he tried to stop it, but the other party did not listen at all, Feng Si Nan couldn't wait to appear on the scene immediately to grab this father. But at the moment, he has nothing to do but use words to appease. At the same time that the other party hit the child, Feng Sinan had to repeatedly promise that as long as the verification confirmed that there was a possibility of minors' consumption, he would definitely be able to refund, and emphasized: "The more you beat, the more the child resists, the more dare not tell us the truth, and the slower the refund speed." Perhaps worried about delaying the refund, the father finally stopped.

In addition to the barrier of physical distance, what made Feng Sinan feel more helpless and tormented was that the parents' expectations were too heavy and heavy. There were once parents who wanted Feng Si Nan to persuade their children not to play games anymore - the boy was 15 years old and repeatedly recharged in the game, and his parents who worked outside were shocked when they learned about it. The father felt that Feng Si Nan was the official customer service, and what he said, maybe the child was willing to listen to it.

This long consolation lasted for almost 1 hour, and after that, Feng Si Nan did not immediately pick up the next call, he was speechless for a long time, and then sighed - he was more worried than feeling relieved, because after hanging up the phone, it was equivalent to ending this somewhat fragile link, and it was difficult for him to judge whether the boy could make a change from today, and whether the parents were willing to take his advice and really start communicating with the child.

After all, for the most part, Feng Si Nan was just a stranger to the family.

Hidden corners

Feng Sinan's inability to do anything is actually a common feeling of customer service - the problems reflected behind children's games are far from being as simple as refunding the recharge fee, and it is difficult for them to understand the ins and outs of children's love with games over the phone, or "meddle" in a family.

Why and how children put money into the game has always been a mystery in the eyes of many people.

On August 30, 2021, the strictest new anti-addiction regulations in history were introduced, which attracted unprecedented attention - minors' accounts are uniformly managed by the state, and they can only log in to the game during a fixed period, and they will be forced offline for more than 1 hour, up to 3 hours a week.

For most children, the effect of these regulations is undoubtedly significant, and the problem is effectively solved on a large scale - in 2022, according to the "Young Chinese Gamers" report released by research agency Niko Partners, the number of underage players in China has decreased by 39 million. According to other data, more than 80% of parents recognize the effectiveness of anti-addiction work at this stage. At ChinaJoy, the annual large-scale event of the game industry that just ended in July, Zhang Yijun, the first vice president of the China Phonological Association and chairman of the Game Working Committee, said on behalf of the industry that the mainland game industry has built the world's most advanced and efficient anti-addiction system as a whole.

Tencent, which was the first to build a protection system covering the whole process of games for minors before, during, and after the event, has introduced stricter anti-addiction measures than the regulations of the Copyright Administration. For example, in order to truly achieve play restrictions, the face recognition system is used to identify minors who fraudulently use adult accounts, and stricter restrictions on minors' consumption than the new regulations, requiring that children under the age of 12 are prohibited from recharging (the new rules only restrict children under 8 years old and are prohibited from recharging).

Zhu Yunyang, the chief lawyer of Beijing Qinglu Law Firm, told us that due to the particularity of the industry, in the current game industry, there is already the most stringent anti-addiction system for minors, and the strictness and standardization of various laws and regulations far exceed industries such as short video and traditional publishing.

In other words, at present, the game anti-addiction system is already a high wall, and most children can only stand under the wall and look at the wall and sigh. Because of this, when customer service is still receiving calls from parents complaining and asking for refunds, they can't help but wonder and ask, how do these small numbers of children cross the barriers of unlocking mobile phones, logging in to accounts through face recognition, and recharging consumption?

One statistic made the Tencent gaming team wary. According to Niko Partners, 29% of underage gamers still spend more than the required 3 hours playing, because 82% of parents allow their children to play games using their identity information.

That is, when children stand under high walls, it is often parents who open the city gates, intentionally or unintentionally.

On the front lines of communication with parents, customer service has heard various examples. For example, a child borrowed his grandmother's ID number to go online, and when he logged in, he would say to his grandmother that he wanted to take a picture of her, so as to deceive the face recognition system. There are also mothers who are surprised, always thinking that their children do not know their mobile phone passwords, only to find out later that the child was sitting in the back of the car, secretly spied on his mother's gesture to unlock the mobile phone.

Generation Z children are also more "smart" than people think. They will remind all recharge records to be deleted uniformly; After knowing that there is an audible prompt for consumption, set the phone to silent mode in advance; secretly unlocked the phone with his fingerprint while his parents were asleep; Some parents out of doting on their children, can not stand the soft and hard bubbles of their children, and take the initiative to help their children bypass the anti-addiction system through face recognition. There are even children who will tell their parents, "I can return anyway if I charge the money, you just let me play", in order for the children not to make a fuss, parents readily agreed.

▲ A little boy playing with his mobile phone. Photo / Visual China

Customer service Chen Jia also shared an example that worries her the most. It was a young couple, and compared to many parents, their attitude seemed very calm, and they only asked for a refund of their son's consumption money as soon as possible. When Chen Jia checked the account information, he found that the child's recharge frequency was very high, so he asked: "Does the child usually live with you?" ”

The answer is no. Chen Jia, who asked this sentence, finally walked into the secret corner of this family. It turned out that the couple opened an auto repair shop in the county, had just given birth to a second child, and put almost all their energy on the second child, so they had to let the eldest live with the grandmother in the countryside. They even go back to see their children very often, and when they need to pay living expenses, they directly transfer money to their grandma on their mobile phones. However, grandma was old and did not understand the use of smartphones, so she had to ask her children to help collect and withdraw money.

Unknowingly, the child not only knows all the mobile phone passwords, but also masters the control of mobile phones and money. The final result was that the child recharged nearly 7,000 yuan into it.

Hearing this, Chen Jia felt lucky, because this pair of parents is still honest and willing to tell the real situation of the family, if the other party is not willing to disclose more information, these unspeakable secrets belonging to a family will forever be buried under the surface of the child's game play, no one approached, and no one solved. But at the same time, for this case, Chen Jia is still a little difficult to measure - is the frequency of such frequent recharge, are adults really unaware?

The guardian is the first person responsible for the management of the child's play. At present, the mainland has promulgated a number of laws and regulations that target or include the protection of minors. The Law on the Protection of Minors, enacted in 1991, and the Family Education Promotion Law, implemented in 2021, show great importance to the problem of minors' online addiction, and both emphasize the duties of guardians.

Among them, the Law on the Protection of Minors, which has only undergone two revisions in the past 30 years, was revised for the second time in 2020, a new chapter on online protection was specially added, which put forward clear requirements for the duties of guardians: parents or other guardians are the first responsible persons for the protection of minors, and the family is the first place where minors begin to live and study. In the revised draft, the responsibilities of family guardianship have been further refined, various precautions have been listed, and the weight of family education has become more prominent.

However, Li Jing, head of Tencent's game parent service platform, said that although the law is constantly strengthening the requirement for guardians to improve their online literacy and fulfill their guardianship responsibilities, at the practical level, customer service sometimes feels embarrassed. The platform has also done internal research, 98% of minors use adult accounts to play games, and 76% of accounts pass the test after triggering the face recognition mechanism. In this case, it is still difficult to determine how to define the responsibilities of enterprises and families. For example, across a telephone line, how to determine the truth without evidence? Is the customer service's encouragement and admonition to parents effective? If you blindly only support refunds, does it mean that the problem is solved?

Every question points to a hidden corner, and the staff is worried that after completing the refund, no one cares.

Step into deep water

The staff at Tencent Games began to think about how to go beyond the surface to really solve the thorny problems.

There are clearly two ways to put it on the surface. One way is to build existing walls higher, such as face recognition more often. The other way is to allow children to see a wider world outside of play.

The previous path is related to strengthening the anti-addiction system. Tencent Games' strategy is to screen accounts suspected of being minors on the premise of complying with compliance, avoiding technology abuse, and minimizing interference with ordinary users.

In this regard, they have to take a cautious step, one of the reasons is to follow the "principle of minimum necessity" for facial recognition technology. Lawyer Zhu Yunyang explained that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between face recognition and personal privacy, and if you want to carry out face recognition anytime and anywhere, it is inevitable to store a large number of minors' biological information, and these sensitive data are more likely to be leaked by non-standard small game companies, but are not an effective means to protect minors.

Therefore, Tencent began to build the wall more tightly and use the "blocking" method to strengthen protection. For example, in some cases, children will choose to buy accounts online and find ways to train to obtain adult accounts, and cracking down on such gray and black products has become a key measure for Tencent Games.

As for the second way, how to keep children away from games is not a simple matter.

Customer service Chen Jia once called a child she had been following for a long time. Chen Jia knew that the child's parents were both in Shenzhen, and he lived alone with his grandmother in the countryside of Hubei Province, and he could easily use his grandmother's mobile phone to play games. On the phone, the child described his boring life at two o'clock and one line, as the village withered, there were no children of the same age around to play with him, there were no entertainment facilities for entertainment, and the only way to play was games.

Chen Jia felt distressed: "During the summer vacation, do you want to go to Shenzhen for a while?" The child replied "yes." She then asked, "Do you want your parents to accompany you or do you want to play games?" The child hesitated and said, "Mom and Dad." Then, the third-grade child revealed great vulnerability to her for the first time: "Auntie, let me tell you the truth, I think I am lonely." ”

There are too many similar cases, which makes Tencent realize that even if it is deeply involved in the game, the confusion in children's hearts has never been truly faced and released. Therefore, when upgrading the anti-addiction system and family service plan at the same time, Tencent began to explore a third way, that is, to let the children's interest shift - if the children's lives are not only over the wall, it may mean that the children do not need too many restrictions, and can also find more interesting worlds in addition to playing.

▲ The football field formed by the project. Photo / Photo courtesy of interviewee

At the beginning of the decision to make this attempt, the project team members had visited many villages, and they found that not only in rural primary schools, but even in the entire village, there was no place suitable for children's activities, and parents were hidden in it, often appearing as an image of brushing short videos and playing games. But children obviously have a demand for various public spaces and entertainment facilities, which is not only the need for play, but also the need for companionship and socialization.

In September 2021, Tencent Growth Guardian, Tencent Games and Tencent SSV launched the "Double Hundred Intellectual-Physical" program, building future sports fields and classrooms in the hardest-hit areas of user feedback, such as some remote small cities and villages, to increase the richness of children's after-school activities, so that they can explore more interests and more possibilities.

In a rural village in Kashgar, Xinjiang, after the project set up a safe soccer field, parents were willing to let girls participate in sports, so the local primary school formed the first girls' soccer team, and the children were attracted to new things outside of games. In the county towns of the North China Plain, children can learn programming in future classrooms, cultivate a love of science and technology, and have repeatedly shown their prominence in national science and technology competitions.

▲ Children play happily on the soccer field. Photo / Photo courtesy of interviewee

However, relying on the power of one enterprise alone obviously cannot reach every corner of the country. It has been nearly two years since the project was launched, but there are still children who show loneliness on the phone. This cruel and real dilemma made the project team members feel sad - the construction of software and hardware takes time and requires the joint efforts of many parties, and in this long process, children in some remote areas and whose parents are not around can still easily enter the high wall without too many tricks, because there is no one to guard outside the tight city gates.

The existence of a data also worries the project team members.

On Tencent's service platform for parents of minors, case data is counted every year, and they find that when various situations are improving, the number of repeated refund applications has not been controlled (that is, 2 or more repeated refunds), and this number is still rising month by month and year by year.

Li Jing, the person in charge of the parent service platform, and others then realized that after the customer service staff completed a refund, the problem of children playing games was not completely solved, but became the easiest "shortcut" for parents to rely on, feeling that "if the child plays the game and recharges money, then the platform refunds the fee."

This became an important opportunity for the project team to step into the deep water area of family education, and it was also the work that the project team had to face and undertake when both "blocking" and "dredging" encountered difficulties. Since 2021, Tencent Games has launched the Tencent Parent Service Platform Mini Program for Minors, where parents can seek help from customer service, experts, and parents who solve problems. Since the beginning of this year, the team has gone one step further and launched the "Family Communication Plan", sending out a "care questionnaire" to parents who have given feedback on their children's education problems to the platform, clarifying the problems in each family, and taking the initiative to intervene.

"There is no point in pulling", Li Jing said, she is also a father of a 13-year-old child, for parents who are difficult or even unwilling to solve the problem, they are not willing to blame or shirk responsibility, but prefer to give each other an opportunity to face up to family problems, after all, parents are the guardians of their children.

▲ Tencent Minors Parent Service Platform Mini Program. Figure / Screenshot of the applet

Within the team, many customer services have children, so it is easier to empathize with parents, and they are willing to invest their feelings in the case again and again - the guidance for each parent has reached an extremely subtle and specific point, and the methods given are more practical and effective, and gradually systematic. For example, teach grandparents how to change their mobile phone passwords and store their ID cards and household registration books; Teach parents how to cultivate their children's concept of money, so that children know how much rice can be bought with 100 yuan recharged; In order to enhance the contact between the staff and each family, for different cases, the customer service will take the form of long-term follow-up and return visits, sometimes up to more than half a year.

However, solving the educational problems existing in a family is more complicated. As mentioned above, physical distance restrictions, parents' lies, difficult household chores... are amplifying the difficulty. Almost every customer service has also been questioned in the process of handling cases. Including Meng Yuan, counseling experts who began to deal with these family problems have obtained psychological counselor certificates and have rich experience in communicating with young people, but at the moment of conflict outbreak, the other party's sentence "You don't care about my family's affairs" or "What do you know as a customer service" can block everyone back.

At such moments, the staff once again felt like they were walking on thin ice. Of course, they are willing to make some more difficult but advanced attempts, but when a company needs to solve family communication problems or parent-child conflicts, but there is no clear guidance in the industry, the staff cannot find a standard answer, they do not know how long it will take to wait for an echo after flowing into these real deep waters.

The echo I want to hear the most

On the day he joined Tencent's juvenile protection platform, Meng Yuan gave himself an English name, Echo, which translates to "echo". She said that even a little good response from the family on the other end of the line would make her feel that what she was doing had meaning.

Fortunately, with the improvement and upgrading of the project, the echoes of the project team members are increasing. In the six months of education and counseling for the mother, Meng Yuan taught her almost little by little how to communicate and get along with her children, and the woman also reshaped the intimate relationship with her son in the process.

Some ugly words, will not be said again. After really delving into the real predicament of this family, Meng Yuan found that the interdependent mother and son had buttons that stabbed each other in their hands, and they both knew how to use the simplest sentence to make each other fall into a collapse situation in an instant. So, she asked the woman to write down "words that made the child sad", and the woman seriously thought on the other end of the phone, and then wrote down three full pages.

The crux of the problem was found, and the situation gradually became clearer. Every once in a while, the woman would call Meng Yuan to talk about her recent progress, she began to learn to breathe deeply when she was emotional, not to impose her own requirements on the child, and the child began to change his attitude, and there was no more violent conflict between the two. Later, there is no need to give money to the child, and the child will take the initiative to call his mother.

Meng Yuan's impression of the last phone call lingers in the happy annunciation of the woman when she called—her son had previously taken two breaks from school, but now that she had returned to school normally, she had moved back home from the office. Women feel that their families are truly back on track.

For a long time, the woman did not call again. Meng Yuan felt relieved, this was the echo she was expecting.

▲ Tencent's service platform for parents and children of popular science content. Photo / Photo courtesy of interviewee

More importantly, in this process, parents themselves do get echoes from their children, even if it is just a small change, it will make parents realize that as long as they are willing to communicate with their children and face problems, many things will turn around. These good starts will make a real change in their perceptions, take the initiative to try more, and solve problems much faster and effectively.

Facing the second-child family who ignored their eldest son, Chen Jia understood their difficulties. Previously, the husband and wife went to the county to work, the auto repair shop was busy with work, the economy was tight, and there was no extra room in the rented house, and they felt that letting their children stay in their hometown might be the only way. But obviously, the game is clearly highlighting the family's contradictions, and Chen Jia encourages them that it is time to reformulate a better plan, call regularly, go home regularly, and take the children to their side when business is good.

The couple decided to make a change. During the return visit, the man told Chen Jia that they rented a new house, had an extra room, and took the child into the city during a certain holiday. After a period of getting along day and night, the eldest son who used to go home without saying a word is now willing to talk to them, "It is no longer the attitude that it doesn't matter to me whether you come or go."

On the phone, the man felt content, and one day when he went out, the child said to him, "Daddy, go slowly." His tears couldn't help but fall.

The article is original by Daily People, and infringement must be investigated.