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I think it's also an issue because everyone in a kid's friend group will be playing online all the time. If you try to regulate their time in game, you risk th

I think it's also an issue because everyone in a kid's friend group will be playing online all the time. If you try to regulate their time in game, you risk them becoming ostracised in the group of friends they have at school. Unless -everyone- does the same thing, it's going to be extremely difficult to do anything about it. I say this as a step-parent of four, two of who are male and game a lot, and one of whom I now think is suffering the consequences of being online too much - despite my best attempts to teach (and demonstrate) what I consider to be a decent balance between on and offline. I hate to think what the effect on the younger boy will be as everything is even more weaponised against him than the older (they are 17 and 12).

jerf 7y ago
"If you try to regulate their time in game, you risk them becoming ostracised in the group of friends they have at school." I acknowledge this isn't 100% fair, but I don't know how to put words together to shape the exact point I'm trying to make, but: This sounds perilously close to me to "If you try to regulate the drugs your children do, they risk becoming ostracized in the group of friends they have at school." Well... yeah. It will. That's overdoing it, because I don't think these games are quite on par with drugs... although as they continue to be tuned and refined by lots of smart people with effectively unlimited budgets to make more addictive things, combined with the less-developed brains of people in school (human brains aren't really fully grown until 25 years or so), I get less certain in that assessment. Still, I'm going to go with saying it's overdoing it at least a little. Nothing I would consider precisely analogous to gaming leaps to mind. But, well... maybe that's part of my job as a parent, to exercise and instill the judgment my children don't yet have, even if all the other parents decline to do it themselves? I don't isolate my kids from everything that didn't exist in my youth by any means, but I do find myself exercising a lot of judgment. I do steer pretty hard away from anything that involves a lot of advertising, which has gotten a lot smarter and more targeted since I was a kid. I steer away from anything involving many microtransactions. And that's not 100% either; they've put their toes in and bought a couple of Minecraft packs, but I'm regulating this so they don't go crazy one day and buy all the things with all their money, but have time to evaluate what they really purchased and how satisfactory the purchase was based on their limited funds. I tend to focus on the still-multitudinous games that are up-front purchases. I don't really see this as any sort of Puritanism, though; the mental image that comes to mind is shielding them from a pack of wolves more than shielding them from evil, morality-rotting pleasures or something. The advertisers and crafters of addictive experiences have gotten wildly more powerful since my youth, and I think parenting practice has not caught up to that. Not only that, but the gap is opening wider every day, too; the first derivative of this difference is still solidly in the advertiser's favor. I'm not trying to isolate them, but I am trying to guide them down the paths where the bang-for-the-buck is much, much greater.

jerf 7y ago

"If you try to regulate their time in game, you risk them becoming ostracised in the group of friends they have at school." I acknowledge this isn't 100% fair, but I don't know how to put words together to shape the exact point I'm trying to make, but: This sounds perilously close to me to "If you try to regulate the drugs your children do, they risk becoming ostracized in the group of friends they have at school." Well... yeah. It will. That's overdoing it, because I don't think these games are quite on par with drugs... although as they continue to be tuned and refined by lots of smart people with effectively unlimited budgets to make more addictive things, combined with the less-developed brains of people in school (human brains aren't really fully grown until 25 years or so), I get less certain in that assessment. Still, I'm going to go with saying it's overdoing it at least a little. Nothing I would consider precisely analogous to gaming leaps to mind. But, well... maybe that's part of my job as a parent, to exercise and instill the judgment my children don't yet have, even if all the other parents decline to do it themselves? I don't isolate my kids from everything that didn't exist in my youth by any means, but I do find myself exercising a lot of judgment. I do steer pretty hard away from anything that involves a lot of advertising, which has gotten a lot smarter and more targeted since I was a kid. I steer away from anything involving many microtransactions. And that's not 100% either; they've put their toes in and bought a couple of Minecraft packs, but I'm regulating this so they don't go crazy one day and buy all the things with all their money, but have time to evaluate what they really purchased and how satisfactory the purchase was based on their limited funds. I tend to focus on the still-multitudinous games that are up-front purchases. I don't really see this as any sort of Puritanism, though; the mental image that comes to mind is shielding them from a pack of wolves more than shielding them from evil, morality-rotting pleasures or something. The advertisers and crafters of addictive experiences have gotten wildly more powerful since my youth, and I think parenting practice has not caught up to that. Not only that, but the gap is opening wider every day, too; the first derivative of this difference is still solidly in the advertiser's favor. I'm not trying to isolate them, but I am trying to guide them down the paths where the bang-for-the-buck is much, much greater.