Last updated on September 8, 2020
Do you know what should know about online gaming? Online gaming is extremely popular more than ever before with millions playing online games on a regular basis. In the United States alone, over 150 million people, that is almost 59 percent of the entire population, play games online.
Source: https://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/2014-global-gaming-stats-whos-playing-what-and-why/
Here’s another fact. The average age of a gamer is 31. But that’s not important. What’s fascinating is the fact despite the assumption that most gamers are male, the number of female gamers has been soaring. Various reports show that female gamers constitute around 48 percent of the gaming population. If you’re asking which online games are popular now—it’s OSRS Gold, League of Legends, and most recently Fortnight. Fortnight is so popular right now, that it has become a global phenomenon. The game has made its creator Tim Sweeney a billionaire!
Well, those were some facts about online gaming in the United States. If anyone has to play the crucial part in online gaming platform then it is the parents. Especially, those parents whose kids are almost at the end of it’s school year. As such kids will find a lot of free time on their hands to play online games non-stop. While everything has two sides-good and bad, so does online games. On the good side, online games can help your kids to develop skills from teamwork to multi-tasking. On the bad side, there are certain risks available in the online world which being a parent is essential to understand.
The environment in the online gaming world is anonymous. This criterion creates the possibility for your kids to meet fraudulent activity, offensive content and problematic communications from an anonymous player or any third-party in the online gaming world. With such risks involved in online gaming, a parent must know to take some precautions by learning more about online gaming.
To tell you more about online gaming and the precaution you can take, below I am sharing some valuable knowledge with you that you can look forward to when looking for guidance to guide your kids in the online gaming world.
- Invest your time beforehand
In the beginning, it is always difficult to take time from your busy schedule and help set up your kids’ gaming device and gaming accounts. But being a parent you must involve some of your valuable time before it too late. Nowadays there are multiple gaming devices and platforms available, such as Xbox Live, Xbox One and Xbox 360. Such devices offer you many parental controls and tools that will aid you to choose the content your kids will be seeing, the kind of communication they will have with online players and the sharing capabilities that will be right for your kids. At the initiation stage, you should set your kids account as a child account. By doing this, you will be able to limit the adult or “A” rated content and experience to your kids. To do this, you need to set up the parental controls on the gaming console.
In the United States, there is an Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) that uses either alphabetical or numerical rating scales for games or various apps. Such rating indicates the age appropriateness for the content. You can see the rating on the left corner of the cover page of any game or app. This sort of rating will tell you whether the content inside is right for your kids or not without even opening the game.
- Secure the guidelines for communication
Often online and multi-player games have the feature of text communication or in-game voice chat. The first thing you need to do is advice your kids about the type of communication they should do with their opponents in the online gaming world. Second, set the controls in their account that will enable or disable certain communication features. For example, the Xbox One offers you an extra security feature that will need your approval for accepting any new friend requests.
- Do you know your set of tools?
If you want to know about the latest tools used by the gaming community in today’s date then it is very likely that you will have to invest some of your time. For example, the tool used to mute a player or to block someone annoying.
- The code of conduct
It is not only you worried about the online gaming environment but also the online gaming platforms. In order to keep up a safe gaming environment, online gaming platforms watch the users and their account for any suspicious behavior. For example, in Xbox Live if a player continuously breaks the code of conduct then his/her accounts will be permanently suspended or far worse they may ban the gaming console.
Two major reasons for account suspension or banned gaming console
Account change
Offences, like buying, selling, and using modified games or hardware, are the common reasons for account suspension. Kids sometimes use third-party tools to unlock the game rewards or rankings instead of earning them. This kind of activity is considered as cheating and it is against the rules of the games. The result of such activity is either a suspended account or a banned console which means your kids’ gaming experience will be severely affected.
Bullying and Harassment
Abusive comments, threats, bullying or user-generated inappropriate content is not allowed in online gaming. Most of the parents might say, “No, not at all! My kid won’t do such type of activity” but the reality is parents should realize that the opportunity and the online anonymity may make the kids bold enough to behave differently than they would do in person. On other hands, if your kid is the prey of such online bullying or harassment you must recommend him/her to block the player on the other end.
Conclusion
Just because of all such issue discussed above, you cannot throw online gaming out of your kids’ life. You must treat online gaming similar to any sport or art class you would do. Get involved with them in their gaming world as much as you can. Find out about their online friends as you would do for their physical friends. Also to show a sustained interest you can host a fun competition among your family members during the weekends. With all such lovely tools, you won’t need any sort of parental control tools.
Raul H. Powel is a well-rounded blogger who has a wide variety of interests and specializes in doing in-depth research for video games coin. He notorious Writer, Editor, Blogger. Love to play games. He currently is a blogger for https://www.piegp.com/ in a genuine effort to provide the best quality content to his readers.
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