A 13-year-old junior high school girl in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, used her mother’s identity card to register for a girl’s game and made a large amount of in-game purchases. After her account was controlled by her mother, she continued playing by purchasing a “ready-made account” with someone else’s real-name authentication through an e-commerce platform, spending nearly 30,000 yuan in total. The case attracted widespread attention to the online supervision of minors after it was exposed.
Girl’s games, which target female players with a focus on “romantic development” and “emotional interaction”, have become popular among adult women in recent years. They are also known as “girl games”. According to the CCTV’s “Rule of Law Online” report, girl games have rapidly gained popularity among adult women in recent years, attracting many minors to become addicted to them.
According to Mrs. Wu, last September, she discovered that her 13-year-old daughter had registered for a girl’s game using her identity card. Within just three months, her daughter had spent over 7,000 yuan on in-game purchases. Mrs. Wu took control of the account after finding out, but her daughter turned around and continued playing by purchasing a “ready-made account” registered by someone else on the internet. She even bought a phone privately to evade parental supervision, often staying up late playing until one or two in the morning, severely affecting her academic performance and health.
According to Mrs. Wu’s calculations, her daughter has spent nearly 30,000 yuan on the game and related products. What she finds most unacceptable is that in some scenes of this game, there are virtual characters that are “semi-nude”, exhibit ambiguous behavior, and even contain suggestive content, seriously affecting the physical and mental health of minors.
However, cases like Mrs. Wu’s daughter becoming addicted to adult games are not isolated incidents. Mrs. Wu learned that many of her daughter’s peers were also using their parents’ identities to play games.
Investigations reveal that this girl’s game called “Love and Deep Space” is developed by Shanghai Diezhi Huyu Network Technology Co., Ltd. (Diezhi Games). Although it clearly sets a threshold of “18 and above”, minors can easily bypass real-name authentication by using their parents’ identities or purchasing game accounts online. Moreover, several e-commerce platforms openly sell ready-made accounts for girl games, rendering real-name authentication virtually ineffective.
Public records show that Shanghai Diezhi Huyu was established in 2021, headquartered in Yangpu District, Shanghai. It operates several popular games and has been selected as a key enterprise for cultural exports by the Chinese government. However, the company faced strong backlash in the past due to issues such as romanticizing illegal acts of breaking into private homes in the game plot and designating the villain’s human experiment file number as A-0731, leading to a significant loss of followers on its official video account within a short period of time.