Tu Hailong is the head of Tencent's growth guardian technology, and his daily work is to set various technical thresholds to prevent minors from becoming addicted to games, commonly known as "the mastermind behind catching children".
The kid on the other side of the screen racks his brains to crack the limits he has set, but he and his team must always prevent them from being breached - even if you're in the middle of the battle in King's Rift, you must go offline when the time comes.
The role is thankless. For a long time, the backstage of Tencent's growth guard official account was full of scolding. But Tencent, one of the world's most used gaming companies, must take that step.
According to the Blue Book on the Protection of Minors in Mainland China (2023) released by the People's Data Research Institute, playing games has become the main online leisure and entertainment activity for minors, accounting for 62.3%. When teenagers are getting into contact with the Internet earlier and earlier, and even more proficient than their parents, how to better guide them scientifically has long been a common challenge for the whole society.
Since the establishment of the team in 2017, the Tencent Growth Guardian Project Team has gone through seven years. They have built up what is arguably the most stringent anti-addiction system in the world. In the first quarter of 2023, Tencent's juvenile game time and turnover accounted for only 0.4% and 0.7% of the total game time in its home market, down 96% and 90% respectively from the same period three years ago.
After overcoming one technical problem after another, Tu Hailong and his team realized that the key challenge in preventing game addiction has never been the confrontation of technology, but the consensus with parents and society. Tencent can use various advanced means to "manage" minors' addiction to games, but it is difficult to solve the complex family and social relationships behind it.
Tu Hailong and his team have a new challenge.
Offense and defense
Game addiction prevention is not a new topic. As early as 2007, in the popular games such as "World of Warcraft" and "Fantasy Journey to the West", the blue pop-up window on the old desktop computer became the common memory of a generation of young people: "You are underage or have not passed the verification of the anti-addiction system, the income from fighting monsters will be halved after 3 hours of being online every day, and the income from fighting monsters will be 0 after 5 hours of being online, please enter your name and ID number for verification." ”
However, due to the imperfection of the real-name system at that time, minors could easily bypass the system authentication by simply entering the ID number of an adult at will. As a result, many people memorize their parents' ID numbers, and some people buy an ID number online at a very low price, and even buy Ma Huateng's own ID number.
The system lasted for almost a decade with limited effect. In the past decade, the rise of mobile games has made more and more minors enter the Internet world with a lower threshold, and hidden dangers have also arisen. With the gradual networking of the anti-addiction system and the public security system, as well as the improvement of the technical capabilities of Internet companies, a more stringent control method has emerged. Tencent was one of the first gaming companies to start doing uninsured work. In 2017, the company established a team for the protection of minors and saw it as a long-term sustainable business, not just to implement a few basic functions. In the same year, Tencent launched the Growth Guardian platform, which allows parents to bind their children's accounts and supervise and view their children's game time at any time.
In response to the problem of fraudulent use of parents' ID cards for real-name authentication, Tencent has been testing the facial recognition function since 2018. Players need to proofread the information through faces, and if they refuse or fail to recognize it, they will not be able to enter the game. However, facial recognition is a costly feature that can be quite costly if every player suspected of being a minor needs to use it once.
Tu Hailong recalled: "We almost never got stuck when we applied for uninsured fees. This is not common within a company. According to Tencent's official data, hundreds of millions of yuan are spent on facial recognition and correction alone every year. Due to the high cost, many game companies will wait and see the effect of the technology implementation of leading companies such as Tencent before deciding whether to take similar measures.
At the same time, relevant policies are also gradually improving. The National Press and Publication Administration has repeatedly issued regulations to limit the amount of recharge and game time for minors, such as the single recharge amount of minors aged 8-16 shall not exceed 50 yuan, and the cumulative monthly recharge shall not exceed 200 yuan. In addition, it is clearly stipulated that the game time should not exceed three hours per week, and the limit is one hour per day on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
Nowadays, if a minor wants to play Tencent games, he needs to go through multiple levels: real-name authentication is only the first step, and if he logs in with a parental account, once the specified game time is exceeded, the face recognition function will also be triggered to determine whether he is a minor. When minors want to recharge, even if they find an elderly person who doesn't know much about the Internet to replace their faces, the platform will also give corresponding voice prompts to prevent mischarging.
But even the most advanced systems always have their mistakes. Tu Hailong and his team not only have to face the minors who are active, but also beware of the undercurrent of the "selling account" black industry. These intermediary platforms that rent and sell game accounts are committed to studying the system vulnerabilities of leading game companies, and every time the team cracks a bug, there is a new black market to provide game convenience for minors.
"As long as there is a black industry, we have to block it in time, and the "enemies" behind the screen and we are not children. Tu Hailong said.
沉疴
The technical challenges were never the trickiest part for this experienced uninsured team. "We can always cope with the past, no matter what the strictest new rules in history, but we will never be able to address the family and social relationships behind our children." Zheng Zhong, head of Tencent's growth guardian platform, pointed out.
As the technical leader, Tu Hailong remembers a scene vividly, during an inspection, the team found that a game user who was shown to be elderly had undergone a face scan at 3 a.m. His experience taught him that it must have been done after a child woke his grandparents from their sleep. "I'm ashamed of the fact that we put so much effort into making an old man sleep badly in the end."
The team realized that game addiction was not a simple game of cat and mouse. No amount of money invested in setting up a facial recognition system will stop parents who are willing to go out of their way to get their children's faces done.
Tu Hailong was deeply touched by this. He was born into a large family in rural Fujian, where there are many left-behind children who are under the care of their grandparents, and they are reluctant to go to school in order to play with their mobile phones, and only obey when they get them. Whenever this happens, grandparents are always happy to meet the needs of their grandchildren. Even in these actions, grandparents will feel happy that they are being needed by their grandchildren.
In less developed regions, the lack of communication between children and parents is particularly significant. Since 2018, Tencent's growth guardian team has intensively investigated the situation in rural areas, and even used the most traditional big-character posters to paint the walls to promote the importance of anti-addiction to parents.
The team remembers a 40-year-old mother who was intrigued by Tencent's parental control tools but was never able to log in. In the end, it was found that it was because her phone was not connected to the Internet. The reason is that she is worried about the increased cost of using cellular networks in non-Wi-Fi environments, so she always takes the initiative to turn off the cellular network. Such parents are not uncommon, and even if they want to control their children, they often feel powerless because their children are far more familiar with the Internet and mobile phones than their parents.
In some urban families where children are more disciplined, the opposite may be true. Excessive control of children by parents will provoke the latter's sense of resistance, and eventually turn into a lose-lose situation.
Since 2020, Tencent Growth Guardian Platform has launched its first user council, inviting parents and children's representatives to discuss game control issues. A college student named Wu Yupeng also brought his mother to participate. In the past, Wu Yupeng was addicted to games and had many conflicts with his mother over this. But after full communication with each other, my mother also changed from the previous strong order to wait for him to finish playing a game in his hand and then call him to dinner. Today, Wu Yupeng is a graduate student at Tsinghua University.
For Internet companies, cultivating the Internet usage skills of different parents, and even teaching parents how to get along with their children, is a challenge that goes beyond the norm. In addition to the council, Tencent has also launched a "Parent Classroom" on the Growth Guardian platform, which provides a lot of content on how to communicate with children and grow together.
For parents who lack awareness of the Internet, the Tencent Growth Guardian Platform also provides many low-threshold management tools. For example, parents can check the game time by binding their children's accounts, and provide functions such as "one-click ban on play" and "one-click ban on payment". If a more detailed explanation is needed, the platform also provides a parent service assistant that can provide 1v1 guidance to parents, including video guidance for parents on each step by step.
In the past, there was a slogan on Tencent's growth guardian platform: "Behind every addiction, there is a lack of love." Zheng Zhong said that he hopes that through this kind of course guidance, coupled with perfect parental management tools, parents will be called on to join in this guardian action, and finally reach the consensus of the platform, parents and society.
Another kind of growth
When technology has been able to reduce the gaming time of minors to a low enough level, what else can Tencent do as a platform?
This question inspired a rural survey in 2018. For underdeveloped areas, Tencent's uninsured team visited more than 20 regions in 5 provinces and interviewed more than 100 teachers and more than 300 students. During the visit, the team found that the children are far more intelligent and energetic than they imagined, but due to resource constraints, their understanding of the outside world can only be games and short videos.
"We asked a lot of students the question, what do you want to do when you grow up? Everyone replied that they wanted to be an Internet celebrity, and not even a single one said that they wanted to be a scientist or a doctor. I believe that many people will be silent when they see such an answer.
However, Tencent's uninsured team did not give up, but launched the "Smart Sports Double Hundred" plan.
In September 2021, Tencent's Growth Guardian Team, together with Tencent Games and Tencent Foundation, launched the "Smart and Sports Double Hundred" program to provide "Future Classrooms" and "Future Sports Grounds" for urban and rural youth. "Intelligence" and "Physique" are two eternal themes in the growth of teenagers, and Tencent hopes to enrich their digital lives and exercise their physical fitness outside of games with the support of software and hardware.
"Many children are addicted to their phones because they haven't seen the bigger world. As long as it is guided in a fun way, children will realize that it is also fun to complete a technological creation and play a sports competition. Zheng Lei, head of Tencent's juvenile protection system, said.
In the classroom of the future, Tencent provides teachers and students with 3D printing, programming and other science and technology courses. Considering that many science teachers in low-resource areas are art teachers and physical education teachers, Tencent has prepared all low-threshold teaching materials to make it easy for anyone with no basic knowledge to get started. In the future stadium, students can not only perform regular sports, but also use technology to enable sports data detection, and even realize cross-regional online sports activities and events.
In the "Smart and Physical Double 100" project, the team has seen so many touching moments. The child who once ranked first in the exam found his interest in invention and finally won the first prize in the science and technology innovation competition; The sheep herding baby in the remote pastoral area made a "sheep face recognition", which helped the grandfather solve the problem of counting sheep and losing sheep, and even one of the students who participated in the production was the child who was kicked out of the game by Tencent's anti-addiction system.
As of April 2024, the "Smart and Sports Double Hundred" program has implemented a total of 95 future classrooms and future sports fields, covering 22 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country, with a total of more than 110,000 classes and more than 4.76 million teachers and students participating. At the same time, the Future Stadium and Future Classroom held regional events across the country, with a total of 692,000 people participating.
For Tencent, the "Smart Sports Double Hundred" has never been a simple public welfare project, but a business team that has to memorize KPIs, and the team needs to be responsible for long-term indicators such as the occupancy rate of classrooms, the popularity of the curriculum and the reasons for it, and the number of feedback from teachers and students.
From the indiscriminate crackdown that began in 2017, to the emphasis on companionship in 2019, to the "Wisdom and Sports Double Hundred" launched in 2021, Tencent's uninsured team is also growing together with minors: doing more work of companionship and guidance in addition to technology.
Tencent's Growth Guardian platform often has a large number of messages. At the beginning, the messages were mixed with personal attacks, but under the patient answers and companionship of "Sister Xiaoyezi" who is responsible for backstage management again and again, the platform has gradually become a place for parents and children to express their daily emotions, and "Sister Xiaoyezi" has also become a friend of the children.
A little boy impressed Sister Xiaoyezi. He used to complain backstage that Tencent was too strict, but later he began to confide in his secrets: his father was irresponsible to the family, his mother and grandmother became the pillars of the family, and he hoped that he could grow up quickly and have a job to support the family so that he could protect his mother and grandmother. He loves games and uses them as his way to vent.
In the years he has interacted with the Growth Guardian platform, he has come to understand adults and platforms, and sees games as a way to encourage himself. His favorite hero of "Glory of Kings" is Pei Baohu of Messi's skin, Pei Baohu has a classic line: "This green field has never lacked genius, and hard work is the ultimate ticket." Now, the phrase "hard work is the ticket" has become his motto.
This little boy is like a projection of all the Tencent insured. If you could go back 20 years, every colleague on the team would have experienced all sorts of rebellion and opposition to their parents. Especially when questioned by minors, almost everyone has wondered: "Am I killing the child's happiness by doing such a thing?" ”
However, after witnessing the growth stories of countless children from incomprehension to understanding, Tu Hailong and his colleagues understand the significance of this incident even more. "It doesn't matter if you are scolded, it is also a very happy thing to be able to accompany them to grow up in different ways."