If you are someone that has a child, you will be more than aware of how much time children like to spend online gaming. Gaming is not something that only children are addicted to, as many adults are also fond of kicking back and taking some time to play their favorite game.
Gaming in general is something that has taken the world by storm. In the past, gaming was something that was exclusive to ‘nerdy’ people due to a societal stigma that surrounded it. However, this is no longer the case and it is rare that you will come across someone that doesn’t enjoy gaming from time to time.
The increased popularity has been excellent. Gaming has taught our children life skills, allowed them to socialize and even enhance their intelligence. But with all the good that has come with gaming, there has been bad which left us all asking, should there be age limitations on online gaming?
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Why Do People Want Age Limitations
Before we can really get into whether or not age restrictions should be implemented for online gaming, we should first look into why people believe there should be age restrictions, to begin with.
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Explicit content
One of the main reasons why people believe that there should be age restrictions online is due to the explicit content. Many games have an 18 rating when it comes to purchasing, which means that children can not buy them from a store, which guarantees some form of protection from explicit content and crude imagery.
However, there are now many ways in which children can get around these age restrictions, which means that putting restrictions on the games isn’t enough. If a child owns a console, they can download it straight to their device from the online store, which means that they won’t receive an ID and they can easily download the game without the parents even knowing what they play.
You can put restrictions on the console, but if it is a shared device among the family, then it wouldn’t be very fair on the other members to do so.
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Children’s Content Isn’t Safe
Even when you manage to avoid your children being able to buy games with explicit content, that does not mean that they are safe from exposure. If you are a parent, then you are likely aware of recent reports concerning children’s games such as Fortnite. Though parents thought that Roblox was a safe game for their children to play, it was found that many children were in fact talking to adults with poor intentions, that were sharing explicit content and even making explicit game modes that children were encouraged to play.
This shows that even if your child is playing a game that seems to be perfectly innocent if they are online they can easily fall victim to someone with poor intentions. Unfortunately, there are many people out there that would like to take advantage of the online space and there is no way of games and websites being able to vet these people, which means that your child is at risk.
Many people believe this is a good reason why there should be age restrictions put on online games, as you cannot stop adults preying on children, but you can remove your child from a place where they may be preyed upon.
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Private Details
Another reason that a lot of people believe that there should be age restrictions on online gaming is due to the many instances where children have unfortunately shared their details online. This could be anything from their address to their parent’s bank details. Even if you believe that you have taught your children to be careful with their details, children can often be very trusting and naive, which means that they may accidentally slip up and give away their details.
Much like what was mentioned above, there are a lot of bad people online that are looking to pry on the trusting nature of children. These people have had a lot of time to practice ways to get the details of children, so they know exactly how to work the system. Many pretend to be friends with your child, only to use this friendship to gain information from them.
Even if your child is well equipped to deal with online scammers, every day there are new ways that people are now stealing information from people, so your child may be caught off guard.
Though it is possible for adults to be scammed, there is no denying that it is more likely that children will be scammed and many people simply do not want to risk it.
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Some Online Games Aren’t On Private Servers
As well as video games, there has been an increased popularity in children playing browser games. There is a trend right now of people playing indie games in an attempt to find the next best game. One of the big issues with this is that a lot of these browser games are actually being run on a shared server. This means that the game owners that have published the game on the website are not the only people that have access to the data that is input into the site.
This means that if your child has made any online purchases using your card, then other people on the server may have access to this, which could put you at risk. Before you allow your child to play a browser game, you should first check that it is on a private server that can guarantee your safety. A lot of indie browser games use PrivateInternetAccess as a VPN, so I would look for sites using this VPN or similar VPNs. You may wonder, is privateinternetaccess a good vpn? Well, customers of the company have only experienced secure uses and other online views praise the companies.
Though we don’t believe that adding age restrictions to games is going to happen any time soon, we can see many reasons why age restrictions should be put in place.
