John Smedley On Parental Controls
Can't be too careful with your company
I can feel the devil walking next to me
I rip on Sony a lot. Sometimes it's because dragging others down makes me feel better about myself, but other times…um…actually I just have a very low self esteem, and beating on SOE feels so good.
Well today I'm going to say something nice about Sony. Deep breaths, you can do this Amber.
When it comes to making an honest effort to help parents keep their children safe online, Sony is at the leading edge. They neither take the attitude that they have no responsibility, nor do they take unreasonably restrictive positions. This is a good thing.
In Everquest 2, for example, parents can control the amount of time their kids play, and even what times they're allowed to play. There's lots more that needs done to help parents, but it's a good start.
Last week, John Smedley wrote in his blog:
… Recently one of the things I’ve been seriously considering here at SOE is allowing parents to have other tools as part of their checking up on just what their kids are doing online.
I’d like us to implement a parental control that would allow parents to receive an email once a day of every piece of chat that their child was able to see that particular day.
Now I haven’t vetted this idea with our general counsel or with our technical team. It’s possible that this could be a lot of work to implement and it’s also possible that doing this might not be something that’s entirely smart from a legal perspective. I just know as a parent this sure is something I’d like to see.
John's blog has comments disabled, which is understandable, but unfortunate. I'd love to hear what people think about his idea. Is it really going to help parents see what their children are reading in chat, or is the signal to noise ratio in a typical MMO session simply too much for a parent to effectively parse? Are there better ways to help parents keep their children safe? Perhaps most importantly, should I just go back to posting cutsie-wutsie bunny-wunny videos?
August 28th, 2006 at 6:17 am
One cutsie-wutsie bunny-wunny video per month is plenty, thank you.
August 28th, 2006 at 8:47 am
When my son played, I had his logging turned on so I could see everything that he did or said. It was a nice tool.
August 28th, 2006 at 9:38 am
For must parents I would think it would be an overwhelming amount of nonsensical (almost english) stuff to wade through. Is a “Fiery Enchant” sexual innuendo? Maybe if parents could provide key words with maybe some suggested ones from SOE to help them out and then all the chat info that surrounds these key words, might be more helpful.
August 28th, 2006 at 10:13 am
No, bad parental controls! I want anal psycho parents to keep their kids from playing. I just wish there were more such parents so there’d be even fewer kids playing. Too bad there are still parents that aren’t afraid of their kids seeing the word fuck and turning into evil fuckmonsters or whatever happens to kids who see fuck.
August 28th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Raaaargh. *evil fuckmonster face*
August 28th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
As a father myself, I’d have to say that no amount of parental control is going to satisfy me. The crux of the problem is not my kid, my kid is a fuck’n angel. It’s everyone else that scares the crap out of me. And there, my friends, is why parental controlling an MMO is not going to work.
The very nature of the product means that you can’t control what your child is exposed to, be it suggestive language or actions. Let your child play or not, that’s the only decision you need to make. After that, it’s out of your “control”.
Oh, by the way, I’m not really a father. I was trying to manipulate you. Now go tell mommy.
August 29th, 2006 at 7:15 am
I think it would be just as useful if not more so, in seeing what children were saying rather than what they were seeing. I think it’s far more telling.
Imagine logging on to see that your child had seen thousands of obscenities, but tried to just ignore it and play with others, compared to seeing that they saw them and ripped everyone a new one.
Ignoring all that: The one great thing that I noticed about kids playing MMO’s (my brother really) is that they somehow manage to make massive numbers of friends in short periods. They have no care at all about wandering up to any other avatar and trying to group up with them.
August 29th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
On the one hand, that could be nice.
On the other hand, must parents would be stunned if they were aware of some of the things their kids heard in school, much less in a MMO. Parents might been in for a bit of a culture shock.
August 30th, 2006 at 8:20 am
Really, I think it is important that as parents, you don’t have access to every conversation that your child has. If you question and dissect every blasted thing they do, you’re interrupting their development process. This is no substitute for parent/child communication. They need to be treated as a trusted partner, not as a suspect.
August 30th, 2006 at 8:53 am
I have 3 kids, 2 boys who game a lot, and a daughter who isn’t much of a gamer, but occasionally plays PS2 games such as Kingdom Hearts.
One day I get an email from a popular MMO’s customer support, saying my account had been banned for 1 week due to harrassing behavior. They included a copy of the chat log that led them to make this decision. Here’s what happened: My youngest son, who I had thought had a pretty good grasp on what was good and bad behavior, was being griefed by another player. My son keeps telling him to stop, and the guy keeps baiting him, saying things like “what?” and “I don’t understand.” My son gets frustrated and starts cussing at the griefer. The griefer says a couple times “please don’t use those kinds of words at me,” and then /appeals my son. CSR doesn’t see the griefing of course, but he/she sees the chat log and (afaic) does the right thing. Yeah, the other player was a griefing asshole, but he sucked my son into losing his cool.
A couple lessons learned: First, my son has a filthier mouth than me.
But it also made me realize that I really hadn’t done as good a job as I’d thought in teaching him proper online behavior. We had a talk about what happened, and we talked about what kinds of things he could do to avoid that kind of situation again. In all, it was very positive.
Had the CSR not included the contents of the chat log, that learning opportunity would have been lost. I might have even gone harder on my son, assuming he’d done something really wrong, instead of just losing his cool because he didn’t know how else to deal with the situation. I don’t know if I would read through an entire chat log every single day, or even scan it, but I think Smedley’s idea is a good one, even if it’s only so you can go back and review something with your child. If used as a tool for parenting, it doesn’t have to amount to parental spying. And for parents who don’t know as much about online gaming, it’s a good opportunity for parents to sit down with their kids and ask questions like “what does ‘afk’ and ‘inc’ mean?”