The web touches every aspect of your kid's lives. Where you might look up an unknown word in a dictionary, your kids are more likely to make use of dictionary.com. Where you use the phone, they use instant messenger. An even greater difference can be present 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 process, the games your kids play on the net can be far more complex. They mine gold, spread empires, fight dragons & aliens alone or with tens, hundreds, even thousands of their fellow game enthusiasts. All of this makes for a confusing mish mash of names, places, jargon & lingo that can leave you with no idea what your kids are actually doing & a vague feeling of uneasiness that some part of it might not be nice for them.
What is appropriate for your kids is a call only you can make. How much violence they are exposed to, how much time they spend in front of a screen & how much contact they have with the faceless strangers so common to the net are all questions you must grapple with &, in the finish, select for your relatives. While they cannot help you make these rough decisions, they can definitely help you get the information you require to understand your kid's hobbies better, both to make informed judgments about what they ought to & ought to not be doing, & to help you reach in to another part of their lives that may have historicallyin the past appeared like something of a puzzle box.
The simplest type of online game is the kind of Flash or Java driven game that you usually see walking inside your web browser. This type of game tends to be comparatively simple compared to the stand alone games discussed later. Common examples include Bejeweled, Zuma, & Diner Dash. These games are universally single player & have not of the kind 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 in to then first, be relieved. Then, try the game out. Plenty of of these games can be enjoyable for even the most casual of players. Some, such as Bookworm, even have genuine educational content. These games can be as much a chance for bonding & learning as throwing around a baseball in the yard, & have the added bonus of being much simpler to get your kids to sit down with you & play.
The Simple Stuff
FPSs: Finding Something to Shoot.
FPS stands for First Person Shooter. They are First Person in the same since that a narrative might be. That is, the player sees the world through the eyes of a single character & interacts with the game surroundings as though they were that character. Shooter comes from the primary objective of most such games, the shooting of whatever happens to be the bad man. FPS games are among a quantity of the most popular online. Common examples include Doom, Battlefield:1942, & the X-Box game Halo. From a parental point of view, these games can be cause for concern. They vary widely in the amount of realism, degree of violence, language, & general attitude. The only way to receive a nice suggestion of the content issues is to watch the particular game. If your kids don't require you watching while they play, then fire up the game yourself sometime when they are not around. There is a sizeable variation in how violent & 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 & a maximum of realistic human suffering. In contrast, WWII themed games tend to go out of their way to show realistic violence. Given the subject material, this is appropriate for the game, but may not be for your kids. Online play presents a potentially greater concern. The objective of online FPS games is always killing other players.
While some games do have various modes where this is a secondary objective, all of them give the player a gun & encourage him to make use of it on characters representing other people. Simulated gore & the use of violence against others to accomplish goals may be things you don't require your kids exposed to. Again, these are your decisions to make, but they encourage you to make them with as much information as feasible. 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 & what happens in the actual world, between what it is all right to simulate & what it is all right to do. The answers may surprise you. If your kids understand the differences, see actual violence as deplorable & simulated violence as part of the game then FPS games, even online ones, can be a astoundingly healthy way to have fun & let off steam. In the finish, it falls on you to make sure that what your infant gets out of the game is nice for him or her.
Next time, we'll discuss RTS & MMORPG, the other common types of commercial online game & touch on the twin demons of addiction & predation.
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