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Nintendo Puts Emphasis On Parental Control
Gamespot is reporting that Nintendo will allow parents to control what games can be played on the Revolution based on game ratings and other factors. From the article: "The password-protected system will let parents set which rating categories are acceptable for their children, and prevent the system from running any software outside the approved range. The system is based on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board's industry standard ratings, and each game's rating will be encoded on each Revolution disc. Nintendo says the system will be instituted on every Revolution console worldwide, presumably utilizing the local ratings system of each region."
The Xbox has had this feature in it from the start. It just didn't get much use, for obvious reasons.
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Actually put the responsibility Squarely at the feet of the parents , no fobbing it off to the government to pass legislation or even letting the "MORAL PANIC " groups start a witch burning .
Though I don't know how many parents will actually bother to read the Manuel and discover about this feature , or how quickly the child will find a way to reset the defaults .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
As a game programmer as well as a parent, I think this is a really good idea. I think the public thinks that game developers want kids to buy all the violent or inappropriate games they can, but it's not true. People don't realize how many adult gamers are out there. Developers don't need or want kids to play violent or sexual games.
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bet it gets used about as much as the v chip ie very little.
The ESRB makes me sad. How about giving Violence, Drugs, etc. different ratings? I would let my kids play most things that might get an "M" for violence, but not an "M" for drugs or sexual content. I seriously hopes that Nintendo rethinks this.
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is non-parental control. I wonder how much less greif there'd be in online games if the Mature audiences only recommendation was followed.
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Open Source Sysadmin
...will parental control really help? I'll illustrate with an example. To stop us from watching TV, our parents would lock the TV up with parental control. Naturally, my brother and I began an intensive program of password cracking. Using intelligent brute-forcing, we cracked it on the fourth try. The number? 4444. Another example. My school locked its computer (yes, singular- there were onyl 120 students) with an administrator password. It took 2 minutes to crack it- we just rebooted into safe mode and changed the passwords. As long as kids are more tech-savvy than adults, "parental control" is a joke.
As a shoddy attorney who makes his fame and fortune blaming the gaming industry for society's ills, I must strongly protest anything that puts power and responsibility in the hands of other parties.
Who can I sue if the parents do a poor job raising their children? That's right, either the child or the parents. They don't have any money! We must keep all the responsibility where all the money is: centralized, in the hands of corporations. Decentralized authority only serves to keep the money away from me, a fine, upstanding lawyer, and hell of a guy.
Sincerely,
Jack Thompson
How is this going to work for countries like New Zealand where we have our own ratings that are determined after publication? It can't be encoded on the disc for obvious reasons, and games are sometimes re-rated if published in Australia (e.g. they don't have an R18 rating, but NZ does. R18 games in Australia are banned. R18 games in NZ are restricted sale).
This sounds like fun. Buying a used Revolution? Uh-oh. What if someone locked it? Sounds like a fun prank to do before trading in a system. Speaking of pranks, letting your friend play your system? You better watch them like a hawk, otherwise they might try to be funny and lock your system. But seriously, Nintendo better include a way to reset the password to the factory defaults. Of course, opening the system and shorting something would work, but I mean something less drastic.
I didn't realize there were adult titles available for Nintendo systems. Or is this just in case someone, Microsoft or Sony, mayhaps, releases "Harry Potter Does Hermione," "Yugioh's Big Score" or "Mario gets High?"
Its only as good as you use it to be. My XBox media center (yes, modded) has a "parental control", you just hit 'x' and accept that its a high level. Same for my roommate's (unmodded) PS2. Put in a high rated DVD, and whomever the first person to turn on the system is, sets the password.
Now, if you give a kid this for christmas, who's more likely to be the first to turn it on?
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
The ESRB was formed back in the 16-bit era, so why is this only now being implemented? In retrospect, it's blindingly obvious, isn't it? I mean, even the PS2 has a parental lock out-- for DVDs. (This was a total pain in the ass in my experience, since my friend couldn't figure out how to turn his off, but whatever.) So, why didn't Sony take that extra step and also do ESRB lockouts? Is there any explanation for it that doesn't make the game industry look either absent minded or greedy?
can be played.
If the game won't work at dinner time/homework time, that would
be wonderful
Buying a used Revolution?
Precedent is in the Xbox, where a keypress code unlocks the parental control. If that's not acceptable, then firms that refurbish Nintendo consoles will likely have a utility disc that unlocks the parental control.
One problem is that some parents are stuck-up and won't let a 12-year-old play Super Smash Bros. Melee just because it was rated T in an era when E10+ didn't exist. (The original Super Smash Bros., which had approximately the same amount of fantasy violence, was rated E.) These parents are often unwilling to watch a video of the game to evaluate if it is appropriate for a given child or to consider foreign ratings of the game (SSBM was rated the equivalent of E in most other countries); they put so much faith in the decision of the ratings organization that they practically define "sheeple".
Speaking of E10+, how will this system handle changes to national rating systems after the release of the console, such as the addition of E10+ to the ESRB array in early 2005? Will it just be encoded as a minimum age (E=6, E10+=10, T=13, M=17)?
For the last year and a half, they've but putting warning screens at the very beginning of their games to consult the precautions manual, too. They just keep making their case more airtight.
Wonder if the Revo will just put that warning in its hardware (that'd be a good screen to show while the game is loading)?
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
When you input the password onto Xbox Live with the ABXYLR buttons, how will you enter the parent password onto the revolution? Rotate it around, throw it in the wall, punch and slash?
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...but the PS2's parental control system has a universal reset password clearly printed in the manual. Now call me crazy, but I think more kids read these manuals than parents. I have fond memories of my dad going crazy trying to set up the NES.
I strongly doubt any parental control system will be particularly "stronger" than the PS2's either. People forget passwords, especially when they only use it once on Christmas day. Unless Nintendo wants a lot of dead boxen out there, there'll be some sort of back door, so the system won't be very deterent to the determined, and by "determined" I mean "taking three seconds to Google it".
But seriously, why would anyone want this feature to work anyway? Parents presumably buy their kids games, or at least live in the same damn house. Paying attention to what your kids are doing will always be more effective than trying to regulate it with some machine.
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Is there any explanation for it that doesn't make the game industry look either absent minded or greedy?
Having been a child in those days, I believe I can answer this question.
The answer is yes.
Parents, even now, will have their own movies. Being adults, they would have adult movies. These aren't movies for junior, these are movies for mom and dad.
However, kids being kids, they'll find some way to reach you movies if they want to (barring you locking them up in a safe). Making it important to have some way to keep kids from playing inappropriate DVDs on the PS2, as they are very likely to be lying around the house.
Until recently, very few gamers were parents, let along parents of children who might play games. Beyond the whole issue of parents buying M rated games for their children, there are now parents who want to play M rated games. However, they would rather not let their kids do so. Having a parental lock is important to these people.
The parental lock is also useful for non-gaming parents, but the non-greedy reason for its lack of appearing before now is as above.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Last week or so some parents wanted to take legal action against a school district that was forcing their child to learn about sex in some way the parents didn't approve of. This isn't high school or even middle school, it's an elementary school.
Found the story, anyway these guys told them they didn't have a right to tell the state what they could or could not teach their children.When I tried to find a different news source, but nobody was covering it. None the less, the quotes say enough as they are directly from the appeals court.
When the parents asked what they could do to keep it from happening, as they couldn't afford private school. The court basically said, oh well.
Not to troll, but the only other culture I can think that didn't allow parents to raise thier kids was the communists.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
...kids being "more tech-savvy" than parents is indeed an "issue" for parental controls, but the solution is parents need to be just plain interested in their children and what they're spending their time doing. Simply put, a well-chosen password of reasonable length and character combination just won't be guessed. However, I know what MY response to this type of parental control would have been: resentment and embarrassment (when friends come over and you have to call "HEY MOM! CAN YOU COME ENTER THE PASSWORD PLEASE???"). It's plastic, sterile control, the kind you use for burglars and animals, not the sort that ought to be part of a parent's relationship with their child. First, the rating system should be slightly more complex. Violence, sexual content, language, and horror-type content affect different people in different ways. They should be separately rated (by numbers, 1-10?) on games, and not lumped together in four or five categories of movie-type ratings. Second, retailers need to be forced to abide by the ratings. Don't sell games with such-and-such ratings to minors. It should be law, and it should be well-enforced. Third, and in my opinion most important, parents should play the games with their kids. Everybody wins. Parents see that the game has value beyond what Pat Robertson decries, spend time with their children, and are able to identify specific concerns they may have and address them with their child directly and specifically. "I don't want you playing violent games" is empty, authoritarian, and, frankly, unreasonable in many cases.
Systems like this are only useful if parents actually know what the ratings are and what they mean. For example, Timmy wants KillTron 9000 for Christmas this year. KillTron 9000 has 65% better gore physics than its prequel KillTron 8500. Every other kid on the block knows this, Timmy knows this, but Mom and Dad don't know this. All Mom and Dad know is that Timmy wants this game more that life itself. And what do most parents do? If mine were any example, they buy the little brat the game he wants to make him happy. I've questioned these ratings since I was Timmy's age. Who is to say what is appropriate for what agegroups anyway? Bottom line is, parents have to get more involved in researching the content that their kids are going to consume if these systems are going to prove to be worth anything. I can imagine another possibility for a system of control like this. Nintendo starts advertising to parents about new control features that allows the system to be locked, say, during certain times of the day. Imagine this: Timmy's on level 9 of Killtron 9000, he has almost got the 3rd boss, and CLICK. Off goes the Nintendo, cause it's 9:00 and thats what Mom set as the cut off time. He can't play again till he gets his daily access code tomorrow, AFTER he shows his Mom he finished his homework. Or hey, say that Timmy has been a little snot lately. His grades are dropping and he won't clean his room. What better way for Mom to get his butt in gear than to lock up the Nintendo? It won't work until she types in her access code. My parents did the same to me, I was just on the honor system to not go within and armss length of it.