New Parental Controls Limit Xbox Time

An anonymous reader writes "As part of a new marketing blitz to promote the Xbox 360 as a "family friendly" video game console, Microsoft on Wednesday rolled out a new feature called Family Timer, which will show up in the Family Settings Screen. The Timer will let parents limit the number of hours their kids can play the Xbox on a daily or weekly basis. When the time limit is reached, the console will automatically shut off, ostensibly after saving the game."

Comments

Re:not the root of the problem...

[vishbar]

It's not only good for parents. It's also good for those of us who have busy schedules and short attention spans...set the timer to 1 hour, play away, and no risk of losing track of the clock. I learned this with WoW.

Shutdown mechanism?

[grantek]

Actual software quality aside, I'd hope Microsoft is using its experience with OSes to implement this sudden shutdown has a suspend-to-disk type operation (or suspend to RAM if all else fails) - many games aren't designed around constant save points, and if these things are going to throw away hours of hard-earned work, I can see tons more kids going postal in the future :/

Re:Shutdown mechanism?

[TiggsPanther]

Oddly, that's exactly why I think this is something best implemented in the console. Many times (past and present), I've found that the pause function has been essential when a mealtime or sudden bout of winter tiredness hits nowhere near a save-point. Just going to prove that current games (and consoles) are not geared around stopping at an arbitrary time. Not unless you want to lose any progress you've made.

I've seen devices on sale here in the UK that basically sit between the console and the power socket, and shut off after a set time. Forget whether the person is near a save-point, it would have no concept of if a save was in-progress at the time. Say hello to potential memory-card corruption.

Actually, I think the best thing would be if all consoles could support a (reliable) hibernate/sleep/standby/whatever mode like that.
I've seen many an point in this discussion about monitoring or trusting your own kids, rather than having to use the console itself to enforce it. Well if more ocnsoles would support some sort of state-saving to allow a nowhere-near-a-savepoint quicksave mode, it would peobably help a fair bit. Especially in those games that tend to put unskippable story-modes after a really difficult Boss fight but before the next save-point. And usually right around mealtime/bedtime/visit from relative. Allow gamers (of any age) to save and switch off at any time regardless of where they are and you're more likely to get cooperation when asking someone stop gaming for the day.

Yeah, that's going to end well...

[nick_davison]

The parents told deputies their son was playing Halo 3, and it was getting late and he needed to shut it off. When the son refused to turn off the game, the parents reportedly took the air card out of his machine so he couldn't play anymore.

Reports show the son became enraged, went through the house looking for the air card, and then punched his mother, prompting the parents to call the Sheriff's Office.

After the boy retreated to his bedroom and locked it, the mother knocked on the door and told him he needed to come out and talk to the deputies, the report stated. But the juvenile allegedly responded with profanity.

Harnage and another deputy entered the room using a key from the parents to arrest the son, according to the report. The son fought the deputies - at one time punching Harnage on the lip - until they handcuffed him. www.sun-sentinel.com

The ironic thing is that any parent that's self-excusing enough to want to use parental controls rather than take responsibility for what Junior can and can't do will be just as likely to consider it Microsoft's fault that they got punched in the face by their own child for activating one of Microsoft's features. Rather than take the blame for raising a brat, why not just sue? It's the American way.

Now you want truly un-American thinking? Release a treadmill or other exercise equipment that can be set to automatically give the little tubs o' lard more game time in exchange for actually exercising.

In my day, we had to run ten miles up hill before we were allowed to call the other kids "teh gey" on Halo. And we were grateful!

Re:Because they don't work

[4D6963]

Lets face it, if you need the help of a machine to deal with a child, you are a miserable failure.

Oh come on. These type of posts on Slashdot crack me up. The "be a super-parent FFS!" type of post. The problem with "parenting" is not that people rely on machines to enforce rules, the problem is the lack of firm rules. You just need to watch an episode of Super Nanny to know what time it is, that is, a lot of children don't have any fixed set of rules, they can do whatever they want and it makes them very unhappy. In the real world, most people are far from being perfect parents, and they have trouble getting their authority respected. Such solutions help with that, by firmly enforcing rules that parents don't manage to enforce this firmly on their own.

By the way, that's "of course", not "offcourse".