Portal 2 Co-op with kids

This weekend, I played the co-op mode of Portal 2 with out 8-year-old son, and had a blast. The co-op mode is structured in a way where you have to work together, so at the end of every level, both of us felt a sense of accomplishment.

The game has an interesting mechanism for helping communication. When solving a puzzle required him to place a portal in a particular location, I had the ability to mark the location where the portal was to be placed.  This made it very easy for him to place the portals.

In addition to the game being fun, we enjoyed solving the puzzles together.  I think that once we finish the co-op mode, we will be getting the announced DLC and play that together.

Toy Story 3 Video game

Our son likes to have time where he can play video games with just me.  It is one of the things that we do in our father-son time. A few weeks ago, I got the Toy Story 3 video game for our Xbox 360, and I was saving it for the next time that we played video games.

A few days ago, when my wife was putting the girls to sleep, I showed the game to our son and mentioned that we could play for an hour, if he wanted to. He was very excited, about playing the game.

We had a great time playing the game.  He spent a lot of time, mining for gold, while I off on other missions.  We only played an hour, but there are some things that stand out about the game.

1. The controls are easy enough for kids to not get frustrated with


2. When playing with two people, it is a split-screen game, so even though each person might be on different areas of the map, you both can make progress.  (This a problem in the lego video games, where if the players don't stick together, one can get stuck at the edge of the viewable area of the map.)

Get Game Smart

Microsoft, the Entertainment Software Association and others have partnered to create Get Game Smart. This website help education parents and children about the tools that are available to allow kids to be safe while playing video games.

I really like their focus on education about Parental Control settings, ESRB ratings, and finding family friendly games. In addition, this site has tips on how parents can talk to kids about cyber-bullying, and helping kids and parents creating balance with kids screen time.

I hope sites like this one will help prevent the FUD with video games, like stories like I mentioned before.

Kids and video games

This is a pretty bad story about how dangerous video game networks are for kids.  According to the story, video game networks are full of predators.

http://kdvr.vid.trb.com/player/PaperVideoTest.swf

All video game consoles have parental control systems that can protect kids.  For example, for the few times that our son plays on the Xbox, only people on his friends list can see if he is online and chat with him.  If anyone sends him a friends request, I have to approve it before it will be authorized.

Parents need to know about how to protect their kids when they go online.  Here are some helpful links for parental control on the various video game systems

Xbox

PS3

Wii