toolbar
Search this site!
 


November 30, 2001

Dear Subscribers:

Welcome back! As promised in our pre-Thanksgiving issue, this week we have Part 2 of our teen gamers series, with their advice for parents. Not only might their comments be useful to you, they may also have real credibility with gamers in your homes and classrooms! Here's our lineup for this final week of November:


~~~~~~~~~~Support NetFamilyNews.org!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To support this free, nonprofit service, please visit our contributions page at one of these locations....

  Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay Learn More

(Making a donation is fast, easy, secure, and tax-deductible!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Gamers' advice for parents

Avid gamers Jake (15), Sean (19), and Glen (15) all told us games can be addictive (pls see our 11/16 issue). Given their candor - and thoughtfulness - on this and other questions, we thought it would be interesting to ask them what advice they have for parents on gamers and games, based on their own experiences at home. We think you'll appreciate their comments as much as we did:

"At first my parents didn't have rules about the games I played, till my grades started faltering," Sean told us. That was back in "6th-10th grade, really the farthest back I can remember. That's when they were the most strict ... basically, that I could only play on weekends,... homework had to be done, and all that jazz. Right about the 10th grade they started to ease up, and in 11th grade I had my gaming under full control. That's when all rules eased up and they stopped worrying about my gaming habits."

During the time when they were still worrying, Sean told us, "my parents were always nervous about me playing violent games - till I hit 17 ["17+" is considered "Mature" by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), he explained to us]." So he offered some thoughtful advice for this common concern: "I would worry about [violence] only if the game is labeled for 'Mature' gamers. I 'd want to look at the rating before I let my child play it. I also would want to watch my child's mental state," Sean added. "If they had a violent nature already, I probably wouldn't let them play violent games. Also, make sure they know it's not real - when they're old enough to know what 'real' means [he later added, "If I had a child, of course I'm not going to let them play violent games when they're nine years old"]. When they hit a certain age and they know their values and [those values] are set inside them, then I'd let them choose what games they want to play or not."

[Here's the ESRB's info for parents on video and computer games and online games and Web sites. There's a link at the bottom of each page, where you can click to search by title for ratings and content descriptions of individual games.]

As for Jake, "if the homework's done and whatever else I have to do is done, then it's fine. But if I do games a lot and I'm not practicing [his saxophone] or doing homework or getting outside a couple of minutes every now and then," Jake trailed off, suggesting that some rules would kick in. We smiled when he added: "I'm in my room a lot. Sometimes you kind of forget to open windows and doors." Glen painted a similar picture: "Actually, I'm not a terribly social person, and [games are] where I can interact with a lot of people."

Clearly, because online games are increasingly an outlet for social interaction as well as entertainment, "addiction" is an issue for kids as well as parents. "That's the main factor," Sean said. "For some kids, parents use games as a babysitter. Parents should worry about that. They should keep game-playing down to maybe an hour or two a day - try to keep them from being addicted. Kids can play games too much and not actually go out and be sociable. For people who are already anti-social, games probably fuel that anti-social behavior. It can also be a problem with TV, though. If anything, playing games is probably a bit more healthy than TV."

By far the best way to deal with avid gamers, Sean says, goes beyond rules to involvement. In our interview he seemed to know he's fortunate: "My mom's interested and loves to watch me play games, and my dad's actually a very accomplished gamer. He started playing after I did. He was really addicted for a while. Now he's not as interested, but he could probably kick my butt on some of the games we play."

For a more in-depth look at family rules and practices - and for Sean's view on violence, profanity, etc. in today's games, click here. And please send us your experiences and views as parents and teachers of gamers!

* * * *

Family Tech

  1. College entrance exam help

    Aspiring university students are awash in computer-based aids for entrance-exam prep. In this week's column for the San Jose Mercury News, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid shares the conclusion he's arrived at while watching the high school senior in his house go through the process. "Any of them can help," he writes, "but the amount of time and effort you put into the preparation, not the actual product you use, is the key to improving your score." Larry suggests that, before spending any money on software or online courses, students should check out the free sample courses and other resources on the Web - then he links to the best of them.

  2. Gifts for PC users

    Larry says he has it on good authority that Santa Claus is loading lots of PCs on his sleigh this year, "because he can get them cheap." In his column for the Los Angeles Times, he has recommendations for everything from LCD screens to digital cameras to complete computer systems. If you don't want to rely entirely on Santa, Jupiter Media Metrix lists the most popular shopping sites for Week 1 of this holiday shopping season.

  3. Super searching (in more ways than 1!)

    Move over Google - make room for AlltheWeb.com! ZDNet calls it the "best search engine you've never heard of," glowingly describing it this way: "The interface is sleek and streamlined, the results extensive and on-target, and the multiplicity of options - which include searching for Web sites, news, images, and even MP3 files - allowed me to find just about anything and everything I wanted." The best part for us news junkies is the way it highlights the most recent news stories related to your search. And key to parental peace of mind is the fact that filtering is on all the time. "Offensive content reduction" functions by default at AlltheWeb (meaning you have to drill down two levels to turn it off!). See the ZDNet piece to see why it can claim to be "twice as fresh as Google." Here's the New York Times's brief writeup. Another fast, multilingual, next-generation search engine we've run across lately is WiseNut. It, too, has a filtered-search option, but you have to switch it on. Turn on "WiseWatch" at the bottom of the Preferences page (click on "Set preferences" under the search box) before each search. Do tell us your favorite search engine and why!

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. COPA before US Supreme Court

    The US's highest court deliberated this week on the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a milestone case for First Amendment law in the United States. It's a major test not just because it involves, as the Christian Science Monitor put it, "two of the most passionate causes in American life - the protection of children and the promotion of free speech." It also tests one of the "bedrock principles" of obscenity law, Wired News points out: local community standards. This narrow focus occupied much of the hour-long discussion about whether the law should stand, with the justices wondering whether Congress should be allowed to establish a national standard for what is or isn't appropriate content for kids (instead of allowing local juries to decide what's appropriate for their communities). Wired reported that the Supreme Court doesn't appear ready yet to say that - with the Internet - the principle of local community standards has outlived its usefulness in First Amendment law. The Court has until the end of the term - late June or early July '02 - to decide the COPA case, Ashcroft v. ACLU, Wired added.

    COPA was passed by Congress in 1998, then challenged by the ACLU and a group of online publishers and blocked by a federal appeals court a few months later. Here's Newsbytes.com's story on this.

  2. Global child-porn crackdown

    Child-porn-trading suspects in 19 countries were the target of raids this week involving law-enforcement agencies on four continents, the BBC reports. For 10 months, Britain's National Crime Squad had been monitoring "regular users of more than 30 Internet newsgroups specializing in sexually explicit images of children" and had discovered 60,000 fresh images being downloaded and traded by these users. The BBC said that "the 19 countries where warrants were executed on Wednesday were: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK and the United States." Here's Reuters's report on "Operation Landmark" (via Wired News).

  3. Less TV

    Television is definitely losing ground in the lives of the Internet generation, according to a recent study cited by the Washington Post. Net users watch 4.5 hours a week less TV than non-Net users do, says UCLA Internet Report 2001, a survey largely funded by the National Science Foundation. The study showed that "the Internet increasingly is a source of information and a point of social contact, especially for teenagers looking for anonymous friendship," the Post reports. Though the study couldn't cite a direct relationship between hours spent online vs. in front of TV, it cited a "strong correlation." Other interesting findings included:

    • Teens: 33.7% of 16-to-18-year-olds polled said they find if easier to meet people online than in the flesh, and 55% said they do not tell their parents about everything they do online.
    • Parents: 37.2% of parents polled said they denied their children access to the Net, up from 30.6% last year, and limiting TV as punishment declined, with 47.5% of parents using it this year, down from 48.7% last year.
    • In general: The average Net user spends 9.8 hours online a week, up from 9.4 hours last year. As for Net access, more than 72% of Americans now have access, up from 67% last year. Among those without access, 44.4% expect to get online in the next year.

    Reuters (via Wired News) focused on a different part of the study, reporting that "teenage girls are more likely to maintain multiple online personas than other groups." The numbers weren't huge, though: Reuters reported that "nearly 4% of girls aged 16 to 18, and more women in all age categories except for the 36 to 45 range, said they use multiple online screen names, each with its own personality."

  4. Danish kids on chat

    A Danish online-safety-education Web site recently polled its visitors to "measure the chat-experiences of children under 18." It got 2,753 answers in the first two weeks, indicating that more than 50% of the visitors have had "unpleasant experiences" in online chat, with the following other findings:

    • 26% have had sex comments.
    • 23% have had sex offers.
    • 5% have had unpleasant experiences when meeting with a person from the chat.
    • 46% have not had unpleasant experiences.

    Sikkerchat.dk is part of Denmark's first awareness campaign for safer chat, which also includes brochures to all Danish schoolchildren 10-17, posters, and advertising. It's all a project of Save the Children Denmark and the Danish Crime Prevention Council. Our thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for passing this information along.

  5. 'Christmas music'

    Two milestone developments in Net-based music are happening right now, but they may as well be "happening on different planets," as CNET put it. One is the new generation of MP3 players led by Apple's red-hot iPod. The other is the new subscription music services, such as Pressplay (with music from Sony, Universal, and EMI), rolling out on MSN and Yahoo, and MusicNet (Warner, BMG, and EMI) on AOL, RealNetworks.com, and eventually Napster. The reason why all this is on different planets is that the iPod, et al, won't be able to play music files on the subscription services! And that begs the question of whether those services will ever really take off. It's all about the ongoing battle over copyright protection (the CNET piece provides a helpful overview of the conflict's history). Here's Reuters (via SiliconValley.com) on the debut of the record labels' subscriptions services.

  6. Teen code writer manages Linux development

    An 18-year-old will take over the management of Linux's 2.4 kernal, VNUnet reports - quite an accomplishment for a teenager. Linux is the open-source server software with which more and more software companies - lately including IBM - are building their products. The "open source" part is quite fascinating. Linux's first "chunk" of code, or "kernal," was written by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, who made it "public" on the Internet for code writers everywhere to improve and build on. Linux is still, and may always be, in development under this public, open-source (many programmers say superior) method. Linus announced this week that the 18-year-old programmer we mentioned - Marcelo Tosatti, an open-source developer in Brazil - will be taking over management of the server's "stable" 2.4 kernal, while Linus will move on to the next version, 2.5.

  7. Anti-war activism on the Net

    Increasingly, Web sites - not storefronts - are the "mobilization headquarters" of political action, according to the New York Times. This is certainly true for protesters against US bombing in Afghanistan. "With opinion polls showing overwhelming support for President Bush," the Times reports, "war protesters are relying heavily on the Internet to weave their fragmented constituents into a movement." The Internet can be a very effective headquarters because, on it, messages can be disseminated farther and faster than ever before. The Times cites the example of David H. Pickering, 22, of Brooklyn, N.Y., who started an online peace petition that was presented to Prime Minister Tony Blair by members of Parliament last month with 500,000 signatures from around the world.

  8. Teen helps catch teens

    Sometimes it takes a teenager to catch a teenager, according to the Detroit Free Press. A high school student works as an unpaid intern for the Michigan Internet Crimes Task Force. He modified a software program so he could monitor the trading of underage sexual material in nine online chatrooms. The monitoring of that activity for about a month "led to the shutdown of one of the largest child-pornography Internet operations in the state," the Free Press reported, adding that the operation's suspected ringleader, a 16-year-old, was expected to be charged this week with distribution and possession of child porn. Police confiscated more than 40,000 child-porn pictures from the suspect's house.

  9. Another kids' site 'hijacked'

    It happened again - the domain name registration of a kid-safe site lapsed and a porn publisher took it over, or "hijacked" the URL. In the latest example, a site for teens called "100 Percent Girls," about fashion and other light topics, was reregistered by a Turkey-based porn operator, according to Newsbytes.com. This past Sunday AOL removed a link to it from the Kids Only area. Our thanks to BNA Internet Law News for pointing this out.

  10. English no longer No. 1

    The third-annual "State of the Internet Report" has found that native English-speakers are no longer the Internet's dominant demographic group, reports Newsbytes.com. That's "thanks to a surge of more than 100 million new Internet users in 2001," the report, by the US Internet Council and International Technology & Trade Associates Inc., found. The new users, mainly in the South Pacific region, helped shrink the number of native English speakers online to roughly 45% of the Web's estimated total of 500 million users.

  11. No new Net taxes (again)

    For the record (because this was a Thanksgiving week story), US consumers won't have to pay new taxes on online purchases for a couple more years. According to Newsbytes.com, the US Senate approved a two-year extension of the moratorium on new Internet-specific taxes and rejected an amendment that could have led to the state taxation of sales over the Internet. Newsbytes reports that the language of the legislation was taken directly from an extension passed by the House of Representatives, ensuring the ongoing moratorium. The Newsbytes article has all the background.

* * * *

Share with a Friend!! If you find the newsletter useful, won't you tell your friends and colleagues? We would much appreciate your referral. To subscribe, they can just send an email to subscribe@netfamilynews.org - no need to type anything in the Subject field or the body of the message.

We are always happy to hear from potential sponsors and distribution partners as well. If you'd like to make a tax-deductible contribution or become a sponsor, please email us or send a check payable to:

Net Family News, Inc.
P.O. Box 1283
Madison, CT 06443

That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News


HOME | newsletter | subscribe | links | supporters | about | feedback


Copyright 2001 Net Family News, Inc. | Our Privacy Policy