Tencent announced yesterday that it will limit the daily time for youngsters to play its popular King of Glory game after parents and schools in Shanghai and other areas complained their children had become addicted to playing it.

From tomorrow, children younger than 12 will only be allowed to play the game for a maximum (最大值) of one hour a day, and after 9 p.m., they will be banned from logging into it, said Tencent. Those older than 12 will be able to play a maximum two hours a day.

The game system will remind players the time they have been playing and young players will be forced to log out when the time is up.

Tencent claimed these were the strictest measures in China’s game industry to prevent addiction and the company expected they would ease parents’ anxiety.

The company also said it had updated its system for parents to keep tabs on their children using its games.

Since February, parents can receive messages when children log in and spend money on the game after they connect children’s game accounts with their mobile phone numbers.

Now, parents can connect phones, tablets or computers that their children use to play games, so that they can keep an eye on the children even if they have several game accounts, Tencent said.

Song Zhe, a father of a Shanghai high school student, welcomed the measures but was not sure if they would be sufficiently effective. “I like the system that could lock up the devices as children can register many accounts,” he said, “but children are so clever that they can always think out counter measures.”

The Internet of Thing (IoT) aims to get everything and everyone talking. Attaching sensors to “things”, such as cows, cars and refrigerator, and then assigning them unique IP addresses allow then to “talk” to the Internet. Of course, the IoT will involve much more than a handful of sensors. Networking company Cisco estimates that 50 billion Internet - connected devices and objects will be sending over date by 2020.

As for old people, some of the applications are hard to use because they didn’t grow up with them. They don’t have simple models of how they should work, what to do when something doesn’t work or where to go for help. We make it as easy as possible to be used for people who are not familiar with the technology.

I think there is huge potential (潜力) and we are designing it. The ability to connect to friends, who remember the same movies and news and music, is really important, especially as people get old. They end up in retirement homes and they aren’t always close to their friends. Allowing the network to help them connect with friends and family is a really powerful thing.

My mother is an enthusiastic user of the Internet, although it took me years to get her to use e-mail. She was born with normal hearing, but lost it when she was 3. She was totally deaf for many years, until age 53, when she got ear aids. They work really well. That is a big change for her. But before then, her friends couldn’t call her on the phone, so they insisted she use e-mail to communicate with them.

Young people don’t even think of the Internet as technology. It’s just there, and they use it. There’s been a very interesting change in communications styles between old people and young people. There are some kids who are now in their teens and aren’t willing to make phone calls. And they think of e-mail as old-fashioned and slow.

The reason why teens don’t make phone calls seems to be that they don’t know what to say. When they call they often stop for a while and there’s this silence. On the other hand, texting is considered proper, and it’s okay if you don’t answer. You might have been distracted. It’s not considered rude. But it is considered strange if you’re in this kind of voice conversation and simply stop talking.