lonait> To be honest, I have no clear idea, I was an asshole before I started playing vidya games (I was a bit of a spoiled brat), and it took me a lot of time to become someone better.
But from what I know, to have healthy gaming habits, you shouldn't let him use the games as friends of a nanny and encourage him to go play tabletop games (monopoly or whatever, cards, I don't know) with friends, go play outside, and also teach him that no, he won't have all systems AND on top a souped up PC, and that he'll have to take small jobs and learn to save money, or trade wiht his pals, and that used games are good too. No small savings, never.
Otherwise, I remember my mum threw a hissy fit and screamed through the house when she heard I was playing Doom and said "All right ! I got the chainsaw !" I was 12 and she got so angry I though she was going to slap me until my head fell... She got my dad to bring the game back to the shop and he came back with Jazz Jackrabbit... Well it was less fun (a bit lacking on the precision department), but not that bad, yet I remember I was mad at my mum. Yet she played video games before I was born, she owned a Game & Watch (Fire Attack), and two other electronic games (a traffic-crossing frogger clone and a monster house platform thingy), and she would spend endless hours challenging herself at Scrabble when I found a shareware Scrabble clone on a magazine's CD in 1996... She wouldn't stop playing it 7 years later... She also completed all Freecell puzzles and was a crosswords junkie...
She didn't get that mad when I got Duke Nukem 3D the same year, mainly out of boredom I guess...
I was not regulated much, even though my mum was very regarding about my age and the movies and games I wanted to play, so I was very careful treading along the lines (or playing the demos in magazines' CDs), but today I know there are games I'd never let my kids play (pray the Lawd I'll never have any, though, just as a safety measure). Some of my friends thrived on survival horror games, other on JRPG (I suppose they needed their daily fix of angst and androgynes), I was a FPS junkie, yet in the end I didn't shoot anybody.
All in all, I still think it is because my parents raised me mostly responsibly, teaching me what consequence means, that you have to carry on what you have started, and that games are not real, it's just pretending. I loved Postal 2 because I could be the worst asshole ever (it only needed a voice system to spew racial epithets on top of the game racist settings), all from a cathartic point of view, but I would never have gone outside insulting random people before tazing them and beating them with a shovel.
The key lies here : be here, raise your kids (just like in D'Mite's "Read a Book" -check it on YouTube), don't let screens raise them for you.
Make her read books, let her play with you, find games you can play together (co-op sports games are good for practicing mental coordination), have outside activities and don't fall into monomania, let her play Zelda or Dragon Quest, keep her away from Manhunt until she's old enough to watch horror movies, and it should be fine, as long as you remind her the real world is right here in front of her, beyond the screen she's sitting in front of.
My two cents...
PROTIP : If you let your kid play with your consoles, use an older console, easy to mod, and let them play with backup games or games on the hard drive (for example, some modders explained they modded an XBox and put games in the hard drive and launch them through a custom dashboard also because it was safer than letting their children handle the discs -basically they made a console for their kids, with no risk of damaging the games). I'm not defending piracy, just saying backups are useful also for this, and kids sometimes need a big bunch of years before learning to be careful with fragile stuff -some will never learn...
But from what I know, to have healthy gaming habits, you shouldn't let him use the games as friends of a nanny and encourage him to go play tabletop games (monopoly or whatever, cards, I don't know) with friends, go play outside, and also teach him that no, he won't have all systems AND on top a souped up PC, and that he'll have to take small jobs and learn to save money, or trade wiht his pals, and that used games are good too. No small savings, never.
Otherwise, I remember my mum threw a hissy fit and screamed through the house when she heard I was playing Doom and said "All right ! I got the chainsaw !" I was 12 and she got so angry I though she was going to slap me until my head fell... She got my dad to bring the game back to the shop and he came back with Jazz Jackrabbit... Well it was less fun (a bit lacking on the precision department), but not that bad, yet I remember I was mad at my mum. Yet she played video games before I was born, she owned a Game & Watch (Fire Attack), and two other electronic games (a traffic-crossing frogger clone and a monster house platform thingy), and she would spend endless hours challenging herself at Scrabble when I found a shareware Scrabble clone on a magazine's CD in 1996... She wouldn't stop playing it 7 years later... She also completed all Freecell puzzles and was a crosswords junkie...
She didn't get that mad when I got Duke Nukem 3D the same year, mainly out of boredom I guess...
I was not regulated much, even though my mum was very regarding about my age and the movies and games I wanted to play, so I was very careful treading along the lines (or playing the demos in magazines' CDs), but today I know there are games I'd never let my kids play (pray the Lawd I'll never have any, though, just as a safety measure). Some of my friends thrived on survival horror games, other on JRPG (I suppose they needed their daily fix of angst and androgynes), I was a FPS junkie, yet in the end I didn't shoot anybody.
All in all, I still think it is because my parents raised me mostly responsibly, teaching me what consequence means, that you have to carry on what you have started, and that games are not real, it's just pretending. I loved Postal 2 because I could be the worst asshole ever (it only needed a voice system to spew racial epithets on top of the game racist settings), all from a cathartic point of view, but I would never have gone outside insulting random people before tazing them and beating them with a shovel.
The key lies here : be here, raise your kids (just like in D'Mite's "Read a Book" -check it on YouTube), don't let screens raise them for you.
Make her read books, let her play with you, find games you can play together (co-op sports games are good for practicing mental coordination), have outside activities and don't fall into monomania, let her play Zelda or Dragon Quest, keep her away from Manhunt until she's old enough to watch horror movies, and it should be fine, as long as you remind her the real world is right here in front of her, beyond the screen she's sitting in front of.
My two cents...
PROTIP : If you let your kid play with your consoles, use an older console, easy to mod, and let them play with backup games or games on the hard drive (for example, some modders explained they modded an XBox and put games in the hard drive and launch them through a custom dashboard also because it was safer than letting their children handle the discs -basically they made a console for their kids, with no risk of damaging the games). I'm not defending piracy, just saying backups are useful also for this, and kids sometimes need a big bunch of years before learning to be careful with fragile stuff -some will never learn...
