With all the hoopla about violence in video games following the Newtown, Connecticut shooting and the devastating loss of 28 people, I thought we’d visit this question in this week’s Friday Free-for-All. Should kids play Star Wars: The Old Republic? It turns out the answer can be as individual as the child.
Is your child too young to play SWTOR? (1)
Gaming with your family can be tremendous fun. When I purchased The Beatles Rock Band, I invited my then 69-year-old dad, my sister and her fiance over to game with our family, which includes a teen and pre-teen. We spent the evening trading off instruments, singing, laughing, and enjoying our time together. It will forever be a treasured moment for me. If you have not gamed with your family members, you are missing an extraordinary opportunity to connect with them.
This brings us to the main question–should kids play SWTOR? While the game is rated Teen, some kids can play at a younger age. There are a number of things parents should keep in mind before letting their kids, even teens, play the game.
First, does your child have some underlying health problems, like ADD/ADHD, insomnia, night terrors, anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorder, or epilepsy? If so, you should consult your child’s pediatrician or health care provider for more advice. My daughter has ADHD, and she needs a good hour and a half with no media prior to bedtime. She has to have the down time or she has problems sleeping. Some people with epilepsy find that a strobe-type flashing in games will trigger seizures. You as the parent might need to play SWTOR yourself in order to screen the game for any areas that might be problematic for your child. Your health care provider will evaluate your child and provide you better advice than anyone else can on your child’s specific issues and gaming. You may have to limit game time to specific hours or days to prevent health problems.
Does your child have problems with specific fears? Let’s face it, while most of the monsters’ appearances in SWTOR are fairly tame compared to some other games, some of them could be very frightening for kids with specific phobias. The Colicoid insects are not exactly arachnophobe friendly, for example.
Can your child handle some of the more mature themes? Some of the choices in SWTOR are pretty black-and-white. Some of the Dark side choices, however, involve committing violence against innocent people, dealing with slavery, and willful killing. While the brutality is not explicit in many cases, it certainly is implicit in many of the Imperial stories, and even some of the Republic storylines. In addition, the Smuggler storyline can include a lot of ‘fooling around’. Sex scenes are never shown, of course, but it’s something a parent wants to keep in mind when deciding if his or her child can deal appropriately with those quest and dialogue choices. Some kids can handle these issues fine. Some are not yet mature enough. Only you as a parent can know for sure.
Is gutting a downed enemy too scary for your child? (2)
Is your child old enough to handle the implicit and sometimes explicit violence? Stabbing slaves with lightsabers is not exactly a non-violent activity. Some kids are completely unaffected by this. Some kids don’t have the emotional control to play through those quests. When my son was a pre-schooler, we let him view what we thought were quite innocent episodes of a kid’s show called ‘Bibleman‘. Before you roll your eyes at this, I have to tell you that it’s so campy, it was hilarious for us parents to watch it. Yes, LarryBoy and VeggieTales are still better. Bibleman has some play-acted lightsaber-like battle scenes. The characters never hit each other (the sabers touch only the other saber or an inanimate object) or hurt each other. However, we had to stop watching the videos for awhile when the pre-school teacher told us our son was acting out the Bibleman battle scenes on his fellow pre-schoolers. We waited for a year, and by then he’d matured enough not to whack on fellow students with anything that resembled a sword. If your child can’t prevent himself or herself from re-enacting the fight scenes on others without hurting them, then she or he isn’t ready for the game. Note that teens will frequently re-enact battle scenes with whatever looks like a lightsaber. I used tomato stakes when I was a teen. My friends and I got a fair number of bruises when we accidentally struck each other. The difference was that we tried to control ourselves to prevent injury, and we knew when it was time to call it quits.
Super suction ears, away! (3)
Can your child handle the game difficulty when playing solo? We’ve found that my pre-teen gets extremely frustrated when dealing with some of the gold-star mobs. She hasn’t yet developed the strategic thinking skills needed to set up her skill bar correctly, follow a rotation, and do controlled pulls of enemies. She’s a Leeroy Jenkins at heart. When she gets overly frustrated, she has to take a break from the game, regain her cool, and then play with one of us in those sections so that we can work through it together. Sometimes she’ll read up on an article here on TORWars.com or swtor.com to figure it out on her own. We encourage that kind of research for her. She won’t be ready to handle an Operation or a Warzone for a few more years, however. She despises dying, and those parts of the game would drive her crazy.
There are several pieces of advice for parents. First, play the game yourself. That way, you know what your child is getting into. Second, monitor your child’s gaming. Don’t be afraid to turn it off until your child is mature enough to handle the game. It’s not going to hurt them one bit to wait a year or two until they’ve matured. Third, know your child’s specific health needs. Fourth, turn on the chat filters in game. Some of the general chat on the Fleet stations can be pretty raunchy and filled with expletives. You might find it better to turn off general chat entirely. Make sure your child isn’t being abusive to other players, too. Teach them how to speak respectfully to fellow gamers.
Can you as a parent deal with the frustrations that younger kids experience when they’re not successful in a part of the game? Younger kids are going to have problems with parts of the game. If you as a parent can’t work through it with them patiently, spare both of you the frustration and find a game more suitable for their age ranges. There are many great choices available.
Do you have favorite tips on determining whether or not your child is prepared to play a game? Do you let your child play SWTOR? How did you decide they were old enough? Share your ideas here! Feel free to follow me @JaeOnasi on Twitter.
Image sources: (1) mmorpg.com, (2) swtor.com, (3) veggietales.wikia.com
TORWars Podcast #151: Aren't You the Pretty Kitty?
I mean this in the nicest possible way… but can we please get back on topic and cover some of the news? Like the repair costs debacle?
I’ve seen this transition a hundred times before, where a good, specific game news site sees a slip in viewers/readers, and tries to reverse the trend and court controversy and publicity (and therefore views) by introducing hot button issues, all the while readers who actually visit for the news, and have so for years, wind up having to look elsewhere for it.
Trust me, the news is getting covered and then some! I enjoy tackling some of the tougher topics, however. If you’ve had to deal with foul-mouthed disrespectful brats harassing nice kids, you’ve already learned a lot about parenting and kids playing SWTOR.
It’s good to discuss ideas rather than events or people once in a while
As someone that is afraid of spiders, and to a larger extent, stuff with 8 legs, fighting those type of monsters as a kid was pretty terrifying. But I did eventually overcome it after going through it over and over, since insectoid/spider based mobs provide what must easily be 70% of all video game monsters :p That said, it’s more like I grit my teeth and barrel through, but at least I can do that because of video games. But that’s not to say I still don’t find them revolting.
I actually started playing Command & Conquer as a four year old, I would come home from nursery then fight against the NOD. I loved the strategic element and still do, but it never really occurred to me what it actually meant as I was nuking Russia or something. It was only later that I understood the wider context of that, but because I didn’t grasp that concept it never really did me any harm.
I got into shooters when I was about 9 and that was something that I understood to be something a bit more drastic, especially because by 2000 FPS’s were looking better and started incorporating a decent story. As for the rage element that really comes with ego, which can get a bit out of whack as teen/pre-teen. But it’s something I learnt to deal with and because of it I’m far more patient than I could have ever hoped to have been without online games.
For me, MMOs are where the line can get really blurry. In RTS it’s more like a form of chess, it develops a strategic mind and actively makes you think. FPS is along those lines (some game modes enforce it more than others), but arguably less so – but FPSs are about more than just running round and shooting stuff for the sake of it. MMOs actually produce an alternate reality that is, well maybe less so now, that is actively separated from the real world. MMOs are still quite taboo in normal conversation, the reputation of ‘an MMO player’ still lingers in the social conscious. That’s not say MMOs don’t have the qualities of RTSs for FPSs, because it’s clear GW2 has both in very large chunks, but MMOs always have a grind element, regardless of how well masked that is.
All MMOs are huge time-syncs. And that’s the real issue of MMOs and why they are so ‘dangerous’ to anyone that isn’t disciplined enough to control the urge to play, because an MMO world is constant and will always be there. At least in FPS servers ebb and flow and you just get tired of playing, and with RTS you can just get sick of rushing, but because of the methods of play in MMOs – such as the grind element which goal is based (meaning you can focus your attention on one thing and know exactly how to get there) – you can keep going for hours, especially in group play where long hours can practically be mandatory.
Ultimately it is down to person playing and how they interpret what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Good point on the addictive qualities. I’ve put hundreds of hours into MMOs. My kids get bored of the grinding long before I do, however.
I have to grit my teeth running through anything resembling 8-legged creatures, too. They’re definitely not my favored areas.
I actually really struggle with grinding and always have, I struggle with the idea that so much time is being invested/wasted for a digital product – I understand the pleasure that comes from it but I can’t shake the feeling of time being wasted, though I say that now as a person with responsibility and work to do – back when I was 12 through 17 I probably wouldn’t have cast much thought on it
I do feel slightly sad that GW2/SWTOR didn’t arrive sooner by a few years, because I just don’t have the time anymore.
The same about addiction can be said the same for anything really, tv, films, books and reading. I think addiction takes place on two fronts, one where you wish the world you’re playing in was real that you become unhappy with the real word (more MMO/tv/film/reading based), and two where you just use it as an escape and strike deals with yourself – but not healthy deals, more like, ‘if I get x then I’ll start work’, but getting x involves a vast amount of time, rather than the healthy approach of ‘well I’ll put in an hour and then do 2 hours of work’. The really bad thing is you can’t just ‘put in an hour in’ for an MMO, I mean you can, but time moves really fast, at least in other game formats you have round time limits so you feel time passing.
Yeah, I remember Bibleman….and Veggietales and LarryBoy. LOVED those when I was a kid.
With some restrictions. I’m not sure a toddler would do any good. But as long as they can understand what’s going on, i’d say school age and higher should be fine.
We had a guy in our guild who would let his son play for him now and then. I’m not sure how old he was, but when chatting with him, he didn’t sound much older then 8 I would think.
His kid didn’t understand the story or how to do quests, although, I’m sure with time he could figure it out. Basically, his dad would put him in an area, and tell him to just go kill all the things he could find and pick up all the stuff they drop and scavenge the bodies. Lol, he basically used his kid as a bot to farm mats, but his kid was having a great old time.
I think the main thing* is that, if your kid is actually playing the stories and such, you should be ready to explain the birds and the bees or be REALLY good at dancing around it, because the amount of innuendo in this game is thick enough to block lightsabers.
From what I’ve heard the Republic content doesn’t tend towards murky, lesser-of-two-evils type scenarios quite as much as the Empire, so as expected if you’re worried about the moral themes than it helps to be playing the good guys (though watch out for Belsavis).
* At least with how much more weight is given to sex than violence for some strange reason (at least in the U.S., I’m sure it varies a lot by country).
Tbh, no.
There is no good from video gaming for kids who have yet to develop life skills. And an MMO takes too much of their time to develop other life skills to better contribute to society.
In fact video games are like social media in the work place, it affects productivity in the work place, that the work place has to censor social media all together. And the work place can be an analogy to life and being productive with life skills… and at a certain point, developing life skills early on has a much bigger impact than later on… so imagine on the turnover on someones life in terms of productivity.
Countries like Russia, China, and a lot of other poor countries not used to video game distractions among their populous have a very productive mentality due to growing up spending thier time reading and developing other skills rather more time doing repetitive actions that to a point ad nauseum has no benefit other than entertainment.
Thats just one point so far.
I can make several more why not.
-Health reasons. Anyone sitting for too long can develop thrombosis. Kids are small and probably get away with it easier and therefore it is less noticeable but they are still human. Therefore their blood is not circulating as well while they are developing.
Also most likely developing bad posture in the process is likely, and stressing the eyes too much as well from bad lighting and staring too long at a screen.
Also kids are not very good at taking care of themselves, so something that can add to their health problems will have a stronger impact than someone who is aware of ergonomics and of course has lived a healthy life to have a relative way to reflect the difference as well, and know when to really stop to not over do it.
- Addiction. This is not just any game, its an MMO. It takes a lot of time. Its about offering a lot of content that is very time consuming. This goes back to the original point somewhat, but MMOs are not really for kids in this sense they are addictive.
-Content. Is the online atmosphere to dangerous for a childs mind? I have seen parents not care believing their child can be exposed to anything, as long as they also set a good example of appropriate real life behavior. I think this mostly works with privileged families. If a kid grows up exposed to profanity, and has a hard life as well, that negative external environment will bring out a lot of the rehearsed negative internal environment of profanity as well.
Also what about the actual game content? I can point out some class stories that have content which is subtle but… has topics which may be not suitable for a kid… which again depends on the parent. E.g. SI. Should I spell it out? Actually there are two somewhat situations with the SI story alone which parents may find inappropriate for their kid. Hint: Both situations deal with sexuality and one is from the story, and the other is from a companion.
- Upbringing – I think this is also important. How is that kid prepared for the online environment, and how will the parents react as well? Are they going to pursue the full extent of the law when someone on the internet says something offensive? I am not talking about harassment but rather one time occurrences.
Overall though… in moderation, in a good ideal world, video gaming in swtor is not necessarily bad since bad situations would be rare and normally kids are with their parents, or have access to their parents. However, setting an expectation that swtor will babysit their kids to protect them might cause more problems as well for the game as well. So its also important that parents be ready for the reality of the situation and deal with it as best as rationally possible.
So I think its better for kids to read book, solve puzzles, get hobbies, etc, but as an alternative video gaming can be a better option than some alternatives.. which again giving advice on how to raise kids really depends on the environment and specific situations as well.
I don’t want to snuff out debate on this post, but there are a couple things I need to correct. I don’t play a doctor on TV, but I am one in Real Life ™.
“-Health reasons. Anyone sitting for too long can develop thrombosis. Kids are small and probably get away with it easier and therefore it is less noticeable but they are still human. Therefore their blood is not circulating as well while they are developing.”
Healthy, younger kids are extremely unlikely to develop thrombosis (blood clots for the rest of us). They tend not to sit still as long as teens and adults. They also have better circulation than adults in general. Young arteries and veins work better than older ones on average. All of these factors put them at much lower risk for thrombosis than other age groups.
“Also most likely developing bad posture in the process is likely, and stressing the eyes too much as well from bad lighting and staring too long at a screen.”
Bad lighting does not damage the eyes (I did learn this in eye doctor school.) Eyestrain can come from any kind of near work, not just computer gaming. Computer use does not automatically translate to ‘bad lighting,’ either. We have good lighting by all our computers, with the exception of me using my smartphone to check Twitter in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. Posture is highly dependent on a number of issues, including genetics, back and abdominal muscle tone, injury history, and so on. People had posture problems thousands of years before computers were invented. Note that I do have an ergonomic chair (easier on my hip and knees), but my posture is definitely not always in the ‘perfect’ category!
“Also kids are not very good at taking care of themselves, so something that can add to their health problems will have a stronger impact than someone who is aware of ergonomics and of course has lived a healthy life to have a relative way to reflect the difference as well, and know when to really stop to not over do it.”
The up-front assumption for this article was ‘normal kid with no health problems’ so that there were no health problems there in the first place.
“Also kids are not very good at taking care of themselves”
Well, that’s my job as a parent, isn’t it? I send the kids outside for physical activity and feed them fruits and veggies instead of Doritoes and Mountain Dew. They don’t game all day long, although they certainly might try if I wasn’t looking.
This is also why I specified early on in the article that parents check with their child’s medical professional for medical advice. Kids with medical problems may indeed need to have significantly different limits on game time.
For a trade mark doctor you sound like you have it all figured out and there is no room for error.
There are no absolutes when you have possiblities, and video gaming is not something that is recommended for a kid to do like reading a book.
There are disadvantages to video gaming.
You can argue for the sake of arguing, but the points I offered are valid, and you just sound like you want to show that you can argue.
Except a kids life is not about you winning a debate, and does require some objectivity… unless you can play God and fix everything ignoring other aspects/possibilities offering absolutes, or have an answer which will undo other possible errors to never occur. Thats when the logic may change on why possible reasons as to why not, should not be considered.
And… you did not bring up the content issue or video game addiction. Kids can develop addictive personalities much easier than an adult. In fact I would say most kids I know have addictive personalities when it comes to video gaming, and not necessarily to one specific game… which goes to show their maturity and commitment is in questionable already.
Not sure why you opened up the debate, if you are too determined to argue against reasonable points as to why a kid should not play MMOs… and MMOs take a considerable amount of time… so most likely being addicted playing for many hours in one sitting. That fits the scenario where the points I mentioned would have an affect on a kid.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘trade mark doctor’. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to use ad hominems (even if implied) to try to make debate points. It doesn’t help your case.
I do correct medical misinformation when I see it, particularly the visual misinformation, since that’s my specialty.
I made some assertions in my article, you brought up some points, I showed where some of your points are incorrect. By definition, that’s _debate_.
You stated that gaming causes specific problems like eye damage and thrombosis. I debunked those specifically because I don’t want to be responsible for misinformation being passed around. If you’d like to provide medical studies from reliable research organizations like universities supporting your claims, I’ll be happy to debate it with you further. I enjoy a good medical debate.
I didn’t address the addiction aspect because I wasn’t objecting to it specifically, and I had noted in my response to you that I was merely addressing SOME issues. I did not intend to address them all. I know that some people do become addicted to gaming, but I don’t know how prevalent a problem it is for kids. It sounds like an interesting question for next week’s Free-for-All, however.
Great article. Thanks for putting it up. I have two kids that I allow limited play time of SWTOR, a young teen and pre-teen. My pre-teen never gets past level 8, she likes creating new characters over and over. As for my son, the older one, I frequently engage him in conversation about the story line and his choices. It makes for interesting dinner conversation and allows us to talk about some subjects like slavery for instance in a context he could understand.