Probably a good idea to keep up that "fighting is bad" thing- at least until he's old enough to know that *he* can't start a hockey fight on any children's hockey team he might be on.
Hockey and hockey fights are a complete mystery to me, but I imagine that fights during children's hockey games aren't as accepted as professional ones.
About the only game that I could say for sure that I wouldn't allow my child to play would be a GTA-style game. My husband enjoyed a few of those games for a while, but never when our daughter was in the room. I think there's a difference between a game with violence like a fps, and a game that glorifies violence, robbery, prostitution, etc.
Mind you, our daughter's also not welcome in the room when he's playing a fps game, either, but she does run the characters around levels he's designing. She likes the elevators.
A friend of mine had his son play Doom with him when he was younger, manning some of the keys for him. He mentioned that he had been raised in China, where very young children were raised on the violent kung fu tales of the local storyteller. Apparently even local moms had a fair share of kung fu novels. Yet, the people in his town were quite peaceful in real life, even though they enjoyed the violence in the stories.
He made the parallel between the violence in those stories and those in video games, and I can relate to that. I'm not ready to go down the "hey, little Gris, come play UT with me" route, but I can understand and appreciate that point of view better now.
My biggest problem? Our daugher is not interested in video games! With all the time that my husband and I spend playing, you'd think she'd play a lot, but she's really not interested. I think she's decided that video games are something boring that old people do. :unsure:
I like the fact that, at 7, she's not that attached to any type of screen. But, I'd also like to find a video game that she could enjoy (in moderation, of course). Her eye doctor even recommended it. :P I bought her a Spongebob XBox game for Christmas, but she won't play it. Luckily Mr. Gris likes it. She won't touch Tetris or Nitro Kart. She has a friend who enjoys Diablo (the original), but she won't even give it a try. She enjoys her "I Spy" game, but really never asks to play it. I wonder if there are games that aren't designed to be just educational but are still playable by fairly young children (someone who can read but isn't going to be able to catch huge amounts of text flying past quickly, and who isn't going to be performing any huge feats of manual dexterity any time soon).
We have an XBox and she has her own PC she can use (our old one, of course). Any suggestions? What games are your kids playing? Oh, I guess that all of the Barbie fashion design or shopping games would be off limits, probably for the same reason that GTA would be off limits in this house- that's not an aspect of society that we want to encourage.
Hockey and hockey fights are a complete mystery to me, but I imagine that fights during children's hockey games aren't as accepted as professional ones.
About the only game that I could say for sure that I wouldn't allow my child to play would be a GTA-style game. My husband enjoyed a few of those games for a while, but never when our daughter was in the room. I think there's a difference between a game with violence like a fps, and a game that glorifies violence, robbery, prostitution, etc.
Mind you, our daughter's also not welcome in the room when he's playing a fps game, either, but she does run the characters around levels he's designing. She likes the elevators.
A friend of mine had his son play Doom with him when he was younger, manning some of the keys for him. He mentioned that he had been raised in China, where very young children were raised on the violent kung fu tales of the local storyteller. Apparently even local moms had a fair share of kung fu novels. Yet, the people in his town were quite peaceful in real life, even though they enjoyed the violence in the stories.
He made the parallel between the violence in those stories and those in video games, and I can relate to that. I'm not ready to go down the "hey, little Gris, come play UT with me" route, but I can understand and appreciate that point of view better now.
My biggest problem? Our daugher is not interested in video games! With all the time that my husband and I spend playing, you'd think she'd play a lot, but she's really not interested. I think she's decided that video games are something boring that old people do. :unsure:
I like the fact that, at 7, she's not that attached to any type of screen. But, I'd also like to find a video game that she could enjoy (in moderation, of course). Her eye doctor even recommended it. :P I bought her a Spongebob XBox game for Christmas, but she won't play it. Luckily Mr. Gris likes it. She won't touch Tetris or Nitro Kart. She has a friend who enjoys Diablo (the original), but she won't even give it a try. She enjoys her "I Spy" game, but really never asks to play it. I wonder if there are games that aren't designed to be just educational but are still playable by fairly young children (someone who can read but isn't going to be able to catch huge amounts of text flying past quickly, and who isn't going to be performing any huge feats of manual dexterity any time soon).
We have an XBox and she has her own PC she can use (our old one, of course). Any suggestions? What games are your kids playing? Oh, I guess that all of the Barbie fashion design or shopping games would be off limits, probably for the same reason that GTA would be off limits in this house- that's not an aspect of society that we want to encourage.
Why can't we all just get along
--Pete
--Pete