Not only did Nathan and Jen Glemboski use the lure of sweet, puffy marshmallows to lure their child into playing a real-life version of the arcade classic Pac-Man, they then sent the link into a gaming blog for our amusement. As long as you’re living under my roof you’ll eat those marshmallows! More »
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Being the parent of a nine-year-old boy and a gamer, I’m a huge fan of parental settings. More »
It’s okay to work all night and sleep all day with Go Play Lumberjax, the first game in Majesco’s new line of family friendly games for the Nintendo Wii.
In June, Yahoo’s ‘lifestyle’ site Shine hosted a Sony Online Entertainment survey into the gaming habits of US families.
As well as the heart-warming finding that 87% of parents regularly play videogames with their children, the survey also looked at how parents perceived their child’s development being affected by gaming.
Perhaps surprisingly, the survey conducted by a major games console manufacturer found that many parents noticed improvements in their kids that they attributed directly to gaming!
75% of surveyed parents think that their children’s hand/eye coordination has been improved by gaming, while 84% say that PC gaming has boosted their kid’s typing skills.
Parents See Benefit of Children Playing Video Games [GameSpy]
I’m not sure if it is a good thing that the best MMO at E3 2008 could be a game aimed at 9-14 year-olds, but I am sure that Sony Online Entertainment’s Free Realms is a very good thing indeed. There are plenty of free MMOs aimed at the kid market out there, but they all tend to share certain bad traits. Shoddy graphics, poor-quality interfaces, and an overall lack of polish. SOE is taking the social children’s game concept, applying a World of Warcraft level of polish, packing it with personality and mini-games, and unleashing it upon the computing family for free. They are going to tear the kid’s MMO sector apart.
Installing Free Realms will be simple enough that even the most clueless parent can do it. Prospective players will go to the web page, sign up for an account, and begin to customise their character while the client downloads directly from the game’s site. Once completed, players will be able to launch the game directly from a MySpace-like profile page, complete with lists of their online friends and news about the latest game updates.
One of the things I enjoy about the internet, and gaming in particular, is getting other people’s views on games and how they see them, because let’s face it, everybody plays and enjoys games differently. Play.tm has a great little article up from the perspective of a family gamer. A guy with a wife and a couple kids and how they enjoy gaming together is quite different from say, the way I enjoy games with my friends. It’s a smart and funny that and takes a look at current gen gaming through the eyes of a parent:
