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FTC Says Virtual Worlds Bad For Minors
eldavojohn writes "A new report from the FTC is claiming minors have access to explicit content via online virtual worlds such as those found in online games. The report makes five recommendations to keep little Johnny away from the harms of Barrens chat: Use more effective age-screening mechanisms to prevent children from registering in adult virtual worlds; Use or enhance age-segregation techniques to make sure that people interact only with others in their age group; Re-examine language filters to ensure that they detect and eliminate messages that violate rules of behavior in virtual worlds; Provide more guidance to community enforcers in virtual worlds so they are better able to review and rate virtual world content, report potential underage users, and report any users who appear to be violating rules of behavior; and Employ a staff of specially trained moderators who are equipped to take swift action against rule violations."
Or parents could be parents. Don't want you kids looking at something? Act as the filter don't let them buy/play games that expose them to things you don't want 'em to see....
Take some responsibility here folks!
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
All this is necessary because kids never hang out with older kids in REAL LIFE and hear those words from them! How about just teaching your kids what is and isn't appropriate -- eventually they are going to have to learn to cope with these bad influences anyway.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Don't blame us parents, this is the FTC talking about control.
Surely seeing profane language and a few distended assholes is much worse than smoking cigarettes, sneaking booze from your parents liquor cabinet, hearing older kids use profane language, and looking at some stolen porno magizines...
Kids have, and will always be kids. They will hear and do things before their parents willingly expose them to it... all except the distended assholes. That is definitely an unfortunate consequence of the internet.
Champions Online would let my daughter create a cat themed hero, but wouldn't let her name it "Pussy Cat"... I haven't tried naming a character "Dick Cheney" yet.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
We already know the details of nanny government and all that jazz... but when are the businesses going to stand up, pool their money and fight being pushed into becoming nannys themselves? They may think its cool now to have a little power, but soon they will start getting sued by parents for not keeping their little dissident children in line. It won't be facebook, craigslist, and myspace being sued. It will be the companies that run games like WOW, Everquest, EVE, and the rest getting sued for the GM's and Dev's not keeping predators out of the game world.
People are a sleep at the wheel here!
the most irritating people in these virtual worlds are the damn teenagers - I'm all for separating out the populations or at least allowing me to filter out messages from kids. Most adults have at least some level of decorum.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I'm of the opinion that the "real world" with all its war, police brutality, marketing, religion, fear and suffering is worse.
Really... are sex and swear words that bad?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I'm convinced that most adults, especially those who claim the mantle of "protecting the children" forget what it's like to be a child.
I mean, come on. Don't you guys remember the ribald jokes told as early as the first grade, and the whole fascination with that mysterious, taboo subject that nobody who talked about it really understood, and nobody who understood it talked about it?
I am a parent of a five year old, and I'm far more concerned about advertisements and commercials than I am worried that he'll overhear a reference to boobies or weiners. Exposure to "adult subjects?" Please. Like you never told a joke about headlights or train tunnels when you were six, or sung the "Miss Lucy" song.
And as for chat rooms and other "predator" hangouts, well, that's another level of threat... one that the media has a whole other set of objectivity problems with. (And common sense and involvement with your child is all it takes to manage that threat.)
I can see the fnords!
I remember when I was a minor on the internet I had access to explicit content.
You know what they're really missing here? Teenaged boys are looking for explicit content and you'll never be able to stop them from finding it.
This whole segregation thing is crap. 95% of interactions between a child and an adult are positive. Segregation leads to 'Lord of the Flies' inbreeding of immature thought. Mixed company is the proper company for a child to have to learn how to grow up to be a sane, responsible, rounded individual.
Look at our history... children didn't grow up in segregated 'child only' areas... they grew up working with their parents and community members. They were exposed to life.
I'm of the opinion that over 95% of interactions between a child and adult are positive. How many of you have grouped with an obviously young kid, and helped them through an instance? Asked them to please be more polite, or type neatly, or don't ninja all the loot? Grouping, chatting, and talking with more mature players is what helps children learn maturity (at least in the context of an MMO).
Perhaps some of the other points of the article have merit, but I'm quite against age segregation. We are a community... act like it.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
[...] minors have access to explicit content via online virtual worlds [...]
Minors have access to "explicit" content in the real world, too. How is this any different? Are these concerns merely puritanical in nature, or is there evidence that this is actually harmful?
Who needs terrorists when children are doing such a great job of destroying our society?
I would much rather not have to deal with other people's children or silly rules to protect them. Build kiddie pools and throw the little snots and the content filters in them.
Except that isn't how it will work.
The reason we need things like this in the first place is because parents aren't doing their job. If parents were paying enough attention to realize that Grand Theft Auto probably wasn't child safe... Or if parents were actually explaining what is appropriate language and behavior... It wouldn't be necessary to come up with these rules and filters to protect them.
The fact of the matter is that many parents just toss their kids in front of videogames. It's easier than actually parenting them yourself. It keeps them distracted and quiet while you go do your thing. Except that not all videogames are child-safe. And weeding out the child-safe ones from the adult titles would require effort these folks are obviously not interested in expending. So the ultimate goal here would be to render absolutely everything child-safe.
Which means that all your videogames would become kiddie pools. And even though you're an adult, you'd have to put up with the content filters and rules that are designed to protect the children of these lazy parents.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Is "profane" language really such a concern anymore? Every I know who is under 40 tends to swear quite freely... having kids turns them into a hypocrite about the subject or what?
These concerns have always struck me as very unsophisticated... a belief in magical "bad" words seems pretty backward even by general religious standards... and if you're not religious, than what possible justification is used for the belief in "bad" words? Tradition?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I've got four kids and I've taught them that there is not such things as bad words. Words are a tool of language; its how you use them that matters. There is nothing wrong with the word bitch, especially when used in the proper context. Our genitalia have proper anatomically correct terms, penis and vagina. There is a proper place to use words, you don't talk about penises and vagina in proper company or in public places, the words are not bad, but it is rude because it might offend or embarrass others. The idea that a word is naughty or bad is just as wrong as saying that sex is naughty or bad. None of us would be here without sex, including test-tube babies since at some point in history their grandparents or great-grandparents weren't test tube babies.
Censorship of thoughts and language of any kind is a bad thing. If you censor a word or call it bad, it will just be replaced by an innuendo or another innocent word will acquire its meaning. Language is like the internet, it too views censorship as damage and routes around it.
Sounds like someone at the FTC got ninja looted by a minor.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
I can see a lot of truth in many of the comments posted here.
I know one of the problem I continually face is in trying to let my kid "go out in the real world and BE a kid". Personally, I'm a big proponent of what Penn & Teller were trying to say in one of their episodes of "Bullshit" .... that the world is NOT more dangerous for kids today than it was in previous generations. In fact, statistically, it's more probable that your kid will randomly be struck by lightning than become a victim of a predator, while playing outside. But my own beliefs and opinions don't dictate what the rest of the community believes either.
As one example, my girlfriend's 3 year old wanted to play outside, a few weeks ago. We live on a dead-end street, where there are at least 4 other families around with young kids. In fact, the people next-door to us have a 3 year old who loves playing with her 3 year old. So she let her go play, since my daughter and her 6 year old son were already playing outside anyway. Seems reasonable enough, right?
Well, not more than 10 minutes later, I get a frantic knocking on my front door. One of the neighbors a few houses down was basically demanding I run out and get her kid, because she was standing outside, on the sidewalk, in front of his house, with no other kids around! When I went to get her, she looked a bit puzzled, and didn't even want to come back in. She was simply standing around because she WANTED to, and was in no danger I could see. (Apparently, the 6 and 7 year olds decided to play in a neighbor's back yard, and didn't want her to go with them since she was "too young" to play whatever they were playing.)
This isn't the first time I've dealt with this sort of thing, either. On several previous occasions, my kid was outside playing, only to be taken by the hand, by an angry parent, and led up to my doorstep. Basically, they tried to tell me I was being irresponsible, because I let my kid play outside and their kid(s) had to go in for dinner, or because they were leaving to go someplace, or what-not. It never occurred to them it might actually be OK for my daughter to walk up and down our street and find her own way back home, when she wanted to come home!
This is in a low-crime, middle-class suburb, mind you .... I do find it interesting that when I used to live in a rougher, lower-income part of town, I *never* saw these issues. Whether it was because parents were too busy to be bothered with hovering over their kids constantly, or because they just had more common sense and less fear of the "real world", I don't know? But kids of all ages played outside, both during the day and even after dark, on a street that WASN'T dead-end and had no sidewalks -- and everyone got along just fine.
It's not just video games, and it's not just for children. I recently spent several hours trying to find out how to disable the child protection restrictions on my parent PVR so they could watch their recording of "Downfall", which had been rated 15s. Their complete inability to figure out how to watch a restricted program is I think pretty typical of most users. In short, these restrictions are not just for children. They are for everybody. Like the Great firewall of China, if you can get 90+% of people to just give up on watching what you don't want them to watch, your measures have been a success.
I should note that the "Downfall" program (criticised as being sympathetic to the Nazi's), was the only program they had ever recorded which had implemented such a restriction. One of the Die Hard films sat on right there on the same screen, completely unrated. Downfall was being broadcast on a British television station, at around the time when far right elements like the BNP were on the rise in England, so I'm fairly suspicious of the whole affair.
Censorship is not just for kids. It's for everyone too busy or too unskilled to get around it.
May the Maths Be with you!
I'd be more concerned with what sort of effect being plugged into a virtual world does on brain development, physical coordination, compulsive behaviours, addiction, muscle tone and face to face socialization.
The focus on dirty words makes this whole thing a stupid joke.