The Internet touches every aspect of your children’s lives. When looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary, your kids are more likely to use dictionary.com. Where you use the phone, they use instant messaging. An even bigger difference can be found in the way they play. While the games of your parents’ generation may have involved a board, cards, or, at its most sophisticated, a console system, the games your children play online can be much more complex. They mine for gold, build empires, fight dragons and aliens alone or with tens, hundreds, even thousands of their fellow players. All of this leads to a confusing hodgepodge of names, places, slang, and slang that can leave you with no idea what your kids are really doing, and a vague sense of unease that some of it might not be good for them.
What is appropriate for your children is a decision only you can make. How much violence they are exposed to, how much time they spend in front of a screen and how much contact they have with the faceless strangers so common on the web, are questions that you must solve and, in the end, decide for your family. . While we can’t help you make these rough decisions, we can certainly help you get the information you need to better understand your children’s hobbies, both to make informed judgments about what they should and shouldn’t be doing, and to help you arrive at another part of their lives that previously may have seemed like a puzzle box of sorts.
the easy things
The simplest type of online game is the type of Flash or Java based game that you usually see running inside your web browser. This type of game tends to be relatively simple compared to the indie games discussed below. Common examples include Bejeweled, Zuma, and Diner Dash. These games are almost universally single player and don’t have the kind of violent or mature content that keeps parents up at night. If they were movies, they’d be rated G, with maybe the occasional game extending to PG. If this is the kind of game your kids like, first of all, feel relieved. Then try the game. Many of these games can be a lot of fun for even the most casual gamers. Some, like Bookworm, even have genuine educational content. These games can be as much of an opportunity to bond and learn as throwing a baseball in the backyard, and have the added benefit of being much easier to get your kids to sit with you and play.
FPS: find something to shoot.
FPS stands for First Person Shooter. They are First Person in the same way as a story can be. That is, the player sees the world through the eyes of a single character and interacts with the game environment as if they were that character. Shooter stems from the main goal of most of these games, to shoot whatever the bad guy is. FPS games are among some of the most popular online. Common examples include Doom, Battlefield: 1942, and the X-Box Halo game. From a parent’s perspective, these games may be cause for concern. They vary widely in the amount of realism, degree of violence, language, and general attitude. The only way to get a good idea of content issues is to look at the particular game. If your kids don’t want you to watch while playing, turn on the game yourself sometime when they are not around. There is considerable variation in how violent and personal FPS content can be from game to game. The single-player portion of Halo, for example, has players fighting alien invaders with largely energy weapons and a modicum of realistic human suffering. By contrast, WWII-themed games tend to go to great lengths to depict realistic violence. Given the theme, this is appropriate for the game, but may not be for your children. Online gambling presents a potentially bigger concern. The goal of online FPS games is almost always to kill other players.
While some games have multiple modes where this is a secondary objective, they all give the player a weapon and encourage the player to use it on characters representing other people. Simulated gore and the use of violence against others to achieve goals may be things you don’t want your children to be exposed to. Again, these are your decisions, but we encourage you to make them with as much information as possible. Talk to your children. Find out what they think, in their words, is going on in the game. Make sure they see the line between what is happening in the game and what is happening in the real world, between what is okay to simulate and what is okay to do. The answers might surprise you. If your kids understand the differences, seeing real violence as deplorable and simulated violence as part of the game, then FPS games, even online ones, can be a perfectly healthy way to have fun and blow off steam. In the end, it’s up to you to make sure that what your child gets out of the game is good for him or her.
Next time, we’ll talk about RTS and MMORPG, the other two common types of commercial online games, and touch on the twin demons of addiction and predation.
