The Internet affects every aspect of your children's life. Where you can look up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary, your kids are more likely to use the dictionary.com. When using the phone, they use an instant messenger. An even greater difference can be found in the way they play games. While their parents' generation games may involve a board, cards, or a more sophisticated console system, games your kids play online can be very complex. They dig for gold, scatter kingdoms, fight dragons and unknown nations or do tens of thousands, hundreds, even thousands of their players. All of this creates a confusing mish mash of words, places, jargon and language that can leave you unaware of what your children are really doing and a vague feeling of discomfort that a certain part of you might not be helpful to them.
What your children should be the only decision you can make. How much violence they expose, how much time they spend in front of the screen and how much contact they have with the most common strangers on the net are questions you have to face and, ultimately, decide for your family. . While we may not be able to help you make these difficult decisions, we can certainly help you to get the information you need to better understand your children's interests, to make informed decisions about what they should and should not do, and help you reach what another part of their life may have previously seemed like a puzzle box.
Simple Things
The simplest type of online game is the type of Flash or Java game you often see working within your web browser. This type of game is usually simpler compared to the stand-alone games discussed later. Typical examples include Bejeweled, Zuma, and Diner Dash. These games are virtually single-player and do not have the kind of violent or adult content that keeps parents awake at night. If it were movies, they would be rated by G, and maybe even a seasonal game has reached PG. If this is a game your kids are in then first, relax. Then try the game. Many of these games can be very fun even for ordinary players. Some, like Bookworm, have real educational content. These games can be a great opportunity to meet and learn like throwing a baseball in the backyard, and have the added bonus of being very easy to get your kids to sit down with you and play.
FPS: Finding Something To Shoot.
FPS stands for First Person Shooter. They are the same First Person as the story may be. That is, the player sees the world through the eyes of one character and interacts with the game environment as if he were that character. The shooter comes from the main goal of many such games, the shooting of anything that happens to be a bad person. FPS games are among the most popular online. Typical examples include Doom, Battlefield: 1942, and the X-Box game Halo. From a parent's point of view, these games can be a source of frustration. They vary greatly in the amount of facts, the level of violence, the language, and the general attitude. The only way to get a good view of content news is to watch a particular game. If your children do not want you to watch while they play, start the game yourself sometime when they are not. There is a big difference in how violent and how personal FPS content can be from game to game. The Halo single-player component, for example, has players fighting foreign invaders with a lot of powerful weapons and minimal human suffering. In contrast, games with the WWII theme often go out of their way to reflect real violence. Judging by the title, this is well worth the game, but it may not be for your kids. Playing online raises potential concerns. The goal of online FPS games is likely to always kill other players. While some games have different modes where this is the second goal, they all give the player a gun and encourage him to use it on characters representing other people.
Simulated crime and the use of violence by others to achieve goals may be things you do not want your children to be exposed to. Again, these are your decisions to make, but we encourage you to make them as informed as possible. Talk to your children. Find out what they think, in their own words, is happening 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 right and what is right. The answers may surprise you. If your kids understand the difference, look at real violence as a sad and imagined violence as part of a game where FPS games, even those online, can be a healthy way to have fun and let go of anger. Ultimately, it is up to you to make sure that what your child gets from the game helps him or her.
In the future, we will talk about RTS and MMORPG, two other common types of online trading game and touch the twin demons of addiction and robbery.
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