A Parent's Guide to Online Gaming, Part 1
The internet touches every aspect of your children's lives.
Where you might look up an unknown word in a dictionary, your
kids are more likely to use dictionary.com. Where you use the
telephone, they use instant messenger. An even greater
difference can be found in how they play games. Where the games
of their parent's generation may have involved a board, cards,
or at their most sophisticated a console system, the games your
children play on the net can be far more complex. They mine
gold, spread empires, fight dragons and aliens alone or with
tens, hundreds, even thousands of their fellow gamers. All of
this makes for a confusing mish mash of names, places, jargon
and lingo that can leave you with no idea what your kids are
actually doing and a vague feeling of uneasiness that some part
of it might not be good for them.
What's appropriate for your kids 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 to the net are all questions
you must grapple with 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 understand
your children's hobbies better, both to make informed judgments
about what they should and should not be doing, and to help you
reach into another part of their lives that may have previously
seemed like something of a puzzle box.
The Easy Stuff
The simplest type of online game is the sort of Flash or Java
driven game that you generally see running inside your web
browser. This type of game tends to be relatively simple
compared to the stand alone games discussed later. Common
examples include Bejeweled, Zuma, and Diner Dash. These games
are almost universally single player and have none of the sort
of violent or mature content that keeps parents up at night.
Were they movies, they would be G Rated, with perhaps the
occasional game stretching to PG. If this is the type of game
your kids are into then first, be relieved. Then, try the game
out. Many of these games can be very enjoyable for even the most
casual of players. Some, such as Bookworm, even have genuine
educational content. These games can be as much an opportunity
for bonding and learning as throwing around a baseball in the
backyard, and have the added bonus of being much easier to get
your kids to sit down with you and play.
FPSs: Finding Something to Shoot
FPS stands for First Person Shooter. They are First Person in
the same since that a story might be. That is, the player sees
the world through the eyes of a single character and interacts
with the game environment as though he were that character.
Shooter comes from the primary goal of most such games, the
shooting of whatever happens to be the bad guy. FPS games are
among some of the most popular online. Common examples include
Doom, Battlefield:1942, and the X-Box game Halo. From a parental
perspective, these games can 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 the
content issues is to watch the particular game. If your kids
don't want you watching while they play, then fire up the game
yourself sometime when they aren't around. There is a sizeable
variation in how violent and how personal FPS content can be
from game to game. The single player portion of Halo, for
example, has players fighting against alien invaders with
largely energy weapons and a minimum of realistic human
suffering. In contrast, WWII themed games tend to go out of
their way to show realistic violence. Given the subject matter,
this is appropriate for the game, but may not be for your kids.
Online play presents a potentially greater concern. The goal of
online FPS games is almost always killing other players. While
some games do have various modes where this is a secondary goal,
all of them give the player a gun and encourage him 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 kids exposed to. Again, these are your decisions
to make, but we encourage you to make them with as much
information as possible. Talk to your kids. Find out what they
think, in their words, is going on in the game. Make sure they
see the line between what happens in the game and what happens
in the real world, between what it's okay to simulate and what
it's okay to do. The answers may surprise you. If your children
understand the differences, see 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 let
off steam. In the end, it falls on 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 two other common
types of commercial online game and touch on the twin demons of
addiction and predation.