The internet touches every aspect of your children's lives. Where you can look up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary, your kids are more likely to use a dictionary website. Where you use the phone, they use instant messaging. An even bigger difference can be found in how they play. Where the games of your parents' generation may have involved a board, cards or, in the most sophisticated, a console system, the games your children play on the net can be much more complex. They mine gold, spread empires, fight dragons and aliens alone or with tens, hundreds and even thousands of their fellow players. All of this creates a confusing mix of names, places, jargon and slang that can leave you with no idea what your kids are actually doing and a vague sense of unease that some part 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 net are issues you must deal with and ultimately decide for your family. While we can't help you make these difficult decisions, we can certainly help you gain the information you need to better understand your children's hobbies, both to make informed judgments about what they should and shouldn't do, and to help him to reach another part of their lives that once felt like a puzzle box.
The easy Stuff
The simplest type of online game is the type of Flash or Java based game you usually see running inside your web browser. This type of game tends to be relatively simple compared to the standalone games discussed later. Common examples include Bejeweled 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 would be rated G, with perhaps the occasional game stretching all the way to PG. If this is the kind of game your kids like, first, be relieved. So, 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 a bonding and learning opportunity as playing a baseball in the backyard, and they have the added bonus of being much easier to get your kids to sit with you and play.
FPS: First-Person Shooter.
FPS stands for First-Person Shooter. They are the first person in it as long 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 he were that character. Shooter comes from the main objective of most of these games, to shoot whatever the villain is. FPS games are among some of the most popular games online. Common examples include Doom, Battlefield:1942 and the X-Box Halo game. From a parent's point of view, these games can be a cause for concern. They vary greatly 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 game in private. If your kids don't want you to watch while they play, start the game when they're not around. There is considerable 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 alien invaders with largely energy weapons and a minimum of realistic human suffering. In contrast, WWII themed games tend to strive to show realistic violence. Given the subject, this is appropriate for the game, but it might not be for your kids. Online gambling presents a potentially greater concern. The goal of online FPS games is almost always to kill other players. While some games have several modes where this is a secondary objective, they all give the player a weapon and encourage them to use it on characters that represent other people.Simulated blood and using violence against others to achieve goals may be things you don't want your children to be exposed to. Again, these are your decisions to make, but we recommend that you make them with as much information as possible. Talk to your kids, find out what they think, in their words, is happening in the game. Make sure they see the line between what happens in the game and what happens in the real world, between what is okay to simulate and what is okay to do. If your kids understand the differences, see real violence as deplorable, and simulated violence as part of the game, FPS games, even online ones, can be a perfectly healthy way to have fun and let 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.
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