“Dad, you have to wait until everything loads before you start clicking on stuff.”
When you get this type of admonishment from a 5-year-old boy, as I did the other day from my son, Grant, you know it’s time to start pondering those big parental questions about setting boundaries on the Internet.
And playing video games.
In this instance, Dad has literally never played a vide game – unless you count Pong – while son Grant, his triplet brother, Max, and sister, Emma, play the kiddie online versions quite regularly and alarmingly well.
Boundaries? Dad doesn’t even know that you’re supposed to wait before clicking on stuff. Duh.
Into the breach this morning steps Clive Thompson with a terrific essay in Wired – You Grew Up Playing Shoot’em-Up Games. Why Can’t Your Kids? – that offers what looks to this layman as terrific commonsense advice for parents who want to set reasonable limits for their children regarding what games are OK and what games are prohibited.
He writes from the perspective of a father with a 15-month-old son who’s soon to be emulating his dad the gamer. From the article:
Gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who’ve blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we’re in a weird position: We’re the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids.
So it turns out that, whoops, now we’ve got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding? I started making calls to my gamer posse find out.
Turns out that making these calls is not unlike deciding which movies are acceptable for what ages, but there are nuances and peculiarities – particularly around the issue of violence.
Chris Anderson, my uber-boss – the editor in chief of Wired magazine and lead editor on Geekdad – suggested an even more intriguing strategy: the “Lego Rule.”
The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. “You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns,” Anderson says. So his four children can play games like Halo, since it contains only futuristic, fantasy war, where you’re killing only green- or blue-blooded aliens. The same goes for Roman swordplay titles. “But it clearly walls off Grand Theft Auto.”
Would you believe that I have never even seen Grand Theft Auto? … I mean outside of the headlines and a clip or two on the TV news?
Thompson also gets into the “addictiveness” of gaming and how that might shape young minds.
One aspect of the larger issue he doesn’t address, though, is this: How is a parent who has absolutely no experience playing video games – as opposed to, say, sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll – supposed to make intelligent decisions regarding his children.
Do I need to buy an Xbox and get cracking? (I barely have time to mow the lawn.)
Anyone have any other advice on that score?
Welcome regulars and passersby. Here are a few more recent Buzzblog items. And, if you’d like to receive Buzzblog via e-mail newsletter, here’s where to sign up.
Microsoft is dead, says Paul Graham. … Phooey, says Microsoft exec.
First there’s news of an initial iPod virus … and then we’re talking iPod ban?
PowerPoint will rot your brain, research proves.
Wal-Mart operates like a mini-CIA, says ex-employee the company fired for spying.
How free Web hosters profit from phishing.
Newspaper pulls plug on “Anti-Christ” contributor.
Maker of anti-Clinton ‘Net ad revealed, linked to Obama, now jobless
The Onion tees up Vista … hilarity fails to ensue.
