The Richter Scale^®

I enjoy playing video games as much, if not more as my kids. I also review dozens if not hundreds of titles a year. So, I tend to be the one in my family to determine (with occasional spousal collaboration) which games are okay for my kids to play and which are not.

My son is 8, and my daughter will be 10 in a couple of weeks, and both have excellent hand/eye coordination and have the potential to become excellent game players, although my daughter gets bored more easily with games where the plot or story isn’t obvious or well intertwined with the game play.

While in some cases I use the ESRB rating on games to determine suitability, most often I first play the games I let my kids play, or at least read some reviews on the games to see if they would be suitable for my kids to play.

The criteria I use are ones that some politicians might find objectionable. There are “M” (Mature) rated games, like Halo and Halo 2, that I let my kids play (in limited amounts), just as there are “E” games I won’t (mostly because they are inane, such as Monster Rancher or Harvest Moon). Some violence is okay when it’s not against current day humans or against definable “good guys”, but foul language is not, nor is excessive carnage (e.g. Mortal Kombat, Tekken) or sexual themes (e.g. Leisure Suit Larry).

You may disagree with my approach, but at least I am involved in what my kids play at home. But my wife and I have recently learned that our level of involvement is quite unusual compared to that of other parents.

Case in point. Our son and one of his friends were discussing a game they played at yet another friend’s house a few days ago, and as they were getting into the details, I was getting this uncomfortable feeling about the game they were talking about. I started asking some more probing questions, like “do you play a bad guy?”, “do you shoot at police officers?”, “do you steal things like cars from other people?”, “do the characters swear a lot at each other?” - sadly each of my questions was answered with a “yes”. Turns out they had been playing some variant of Grand Theft Auto - a game that is definitely well against all the rules in our household for them. Further, it turns out that the child which owns this game, got it as a present from an aunt in France, and said child’s father just assumed it was “just a game”.

We ended up discussing this with the mother of child number 2, who happened to have seen her son playing the game at home when he borrowed it from child number 3, and she had similar misgivings, and had already called the father of child number 3 about the content and subject matter, but so far to no avail. Today is my turn to talk with him.

Laws in various U.S. states are being proposed to ban game sales of certain types of games to minors - I oppose these laws. Parents should take responsibility for what their kids watch and play instead of relying on politicians to raise their children for them. However, as I’ve learned, one must be vigilant not only with what’s played in one’s own home but also at the home of other children whose parents are either less involved, or simply too naive or ignorant to realize that dubbing something a “video game” does not mean it’s harmless and safe for children of any age to play without possible causing some real warped value system from coming into being, especially among younger children who may be unable to separate game play from current day real life.