Chinese video game draws rule breakers

SHANGHAI — In China, teenagers can purchase a fake ID online for as little as $2. Is it for buying booze? Subverting the state? Many simply want to play a game on their phones.

More than 200 million people in China play “Honor of Kings,” the social media-focused app that has become the biggest moneymaking smartphone game in the world. Last week, its creator, the Chinese Internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings, said that “Honor of Kings” helped power a nearly 40 percent rise in its game revenue in

the three months that ended in June.

But the game’s popularity among the young has alarmed Chinese officials. In response, Tencent has added restrictions that limit those under age 12 to an hour of play a day, and those between 12 and 18 to two hours a day.

Like savvy Chinese Internet users have done for years, many players have found workarounds.

One is Min Jingxi, a 17-year-old student. She plays the game as many as five or six hours a day during her summer vacation — often as a character named Wang Zhaojun, a famous beauty from Chinese history — thanks to a fake identity she has established online.

“If you don’t do real-name verification for your new accounts, the system has no way to know how old you are, so there won’t be any limits,” Min said. “I have two accounts, and most of my friends also do this to bypass the restrictions.”

“Honor of Kings” offers swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery action through characters familiar to Chinese players. The game pits one team of up to five players against another in a magical land. Adding to its addictive gameplay, friends can fight with or against one another in private rooms and see each others’ scores on social media.

Tencent already allowed parents to monitor their children’s use of the game, but it imposed the tougher restrictions last month, one day after People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper, called “Honor of Kings” “poison to the teenager.” This month, an official military newspaper warned that the game could distract soldiers from their duties.

The game reflects the paternalistic side of Chinese censorship, one that addresses the impact of modern media on society rather than on politics. Previous censorship drives included crackdowns on larger topics like pornography and violence, as well as smaller targets like onscreen smoking and displays of cleavage, as China’s leaders sought to channel the country’s culture in ways that it considered healthy and productive.

Those efforts are effective to an extent, but the various ways that young Chinese have found to play “Honor of Kings” show how difficult it can be to guide culture. In shadowy pockets of China’s Internet, users teach one another how to surmount a vast censorship apparatus. On video sites, uncensored versions of U.S. television shows are available to download, often under different titles — “Scandal” becomes “The Bossy President in Love With Me,” and “Breaking Bad” is renamed “Coke Daddy.”

So it goes with “Honor of Kings.”

Xianyu, an online secondhand trading site, carries listings that offer to sell adult IDs for as little as $2, and tutorials on more ways to circumvent the restrictions. Game accounts started by others can sell for $30 to $500, depending on how powerful and wellequipped the accounts are.

Tencent said it wants to stop workarounds by younger players. “We are going to continue to cooperate with the government and make a joint effort to tackle this problem,” the company said.

Xianyu is owned by the Alibaba Group, China’s e-commerce giant. A representative for Alibaba did not respond to requests for comment.