Birthday Boy Blues
by keara22hi, HSM team writer
It’s the tragedy of Home: the latch-key kids who are given a PS3 as a birthday present (or a Christmas present, a graduation from elementary school present, etc.) by well-meaning but overworked parents. All too often, although the parents might be avid gamers themselves, it is highly likely they have never ventured into Home before gifting their child.
Though this is not supposed to happen, we can find children as young as eight in Home when school is out for a holiday – a school holiday – not a parent workday holiday. The child is at home alone with his precious PS3. He is tired of all his current games and he scrolls across to – Home! If this scenario does not sound familiar to you, try talking to hundreds of defaults in Home.
In addition to Home, he finds an Internet browser! And a chat room for everyone. If you think he goes running to his Mom to share this exciting piece of news, you must have some very unusual children. Birthday Boy has heard plenty of dire warnings about what lurks on the internet. But this is a PS3! It’s for KIDS! And it’s FUN! His parents have turned him loose with it and it’s time to explore.
My research started when I became curious about some of the behavior in Central Plaza. It struck me that, unlike adult troll behavior, some of the people getting into trouble were acting like bored children. After taking the time to talk to them, I found that yes, that is exactly what was happening. At home, alone, bored, and looking for something to do.
So. We all know children who are very well behaved and are amazingly mature in their Home activities. And we all know a lot – too much in some instances – about some really twisted adults in Home who are deliberately harassing people. But in this article, I am only talking about the pre-teens who are having trouble. And the people who search for them.
Almost none of these kids have keyboards when they arrive in Home. I talk to them extensively about the problem:
- Some of them cannot cover the cost of a keyboard with their allowance money from their parents;
- Many of them do not want their parents to know they have found a way to talk to adults socially;
- The parents refuse to give them a PSN card because they already gave them games to play and – enough is enough;
- Neither parent has time to take them to the mall to buy a keyboard;
- They do not have a credit card to use to buy one online and have it shipped to them;
These are the reasons most often given when I interview them about the lack of a keyboard.
The next big problem: some of them talk like young children. Bear in mind, most of the adults they meet in real life are either parents, teachers, or relatives. They have never conversed with an adult in real life on anything other than an adult/child level. They have had very little exposure to carrying on a conversation about anything other than school, friends, and parent problems.
1. They like to tell crude jokes involving body functions. Nobody loves a fart joke more than a ten year old male! And adults in the vicinity move away and ignore them.
2. They want to talk about games and tv shows that a lot of adults are not interested in.
3. Even those adults who have no malicious intent don’t want to talk to ‘jailbait’ for fear of being accused of trying to get close to a child.
4. On the other hand, there is the very real risk that some people will risk jail time if the child seems to be ‘approachable’ for a meeting away from their home.
If Birthday Boy is alone, upset, angry, or otherwise alienated from parents, friends, or school counselors, this is fertile ground for the very sympathetic and supportive “friend” who may not be a friend at all. Establishing a relationship is going to be a lot easier in a virtual reality where the avatar presented to the child can be radically different from reality. Show me a ten year old boy who wouldn’t be thrilled to have a cute fourteen year old girl eager to be his girlfriend.
That’s another reason why some of the preset default phrases bother me a lot: by Sony making them preset statements, you are telling Birthday Boy that he is expected to share personal information. Eavesdropping in Central Plaza, it sickened me when I saw, on my screen, “I’m Brian. I am eleven years old. I live in San Mateo.”
I don’t really need to discuss where this can lead. Virtual realities already have to fight the stigma of being conducive grounds for sexual predation, and by no means do I wish to suggest that this is the norm. However, we do ourselves and our children a disservice if we ignore this issue entirely. As a grandparent, watching a child growing up in a digital age, this is a subject of great concern for me. There’s no way in hell I’d let my grandchildren anywhere near Home. Not for many, many years to come.
Second Life, for the longest time, had two separate societies: one for legal adults, and one for underage teenagers. I would personally suggest that Home be age-restricted so that no one under the age of 18 is allowed to access it. Yes, this potentially removes a percentage of the user base, since many underage gamers use the PS3 for gaming and may stumble into Home, but I would counter that they do not constitute a major economic force in Home and thus would not be a great loss on Sony’s balance sheet. If anything, it may help protect Sony, from a PR standpoint, in the event of a high-profile incident involving a minor.
It is so easy to spot potential victims: some children in Home get bored and angry when everyone is ignoring them so they resort to ‘spamming’ preset phrases, ‘dancing’ in people’s faces, and running up and down aimlessly.
Some of this could be avoided: there is no tutorial teaching them how to function in Home. The brief overview that happens in the first few minutes in the Harbour Studio Apartment does not explain how to use the Navigator, how to locate the shops to buy clothing, where the games can be found, and what activities are in all those public spaces.
Then, not only eliminating those personal information questions from the presets, but also giving a strong warning about not trusting anyone in Home with any of your personal information. This needs to be impressed on every Birthday Boy (or girl) who enters Home for the first time. And parents should be alerted when unpacking that PS3 for the first time. Just a large flyer saying, “Here’s how to set the parental controls for this PS3 when installing it for the first time,” followed by instructions on how to do it.
I have two grandchildren, ages four and eight. The eight year old is online, with his mother at his elbow at all times. And the usage is restricted to educational content websites. To take a cavalier attitude such as, “parental controls? They will hear far worse at school!” is just too dangerous in today’s world.
I am not tasking Sony with the responsibility of raising a child. That isn’t their job. I am, however, suggesting that Home really isn’t an environment in which children should be running around. Sure, there are plenty of idiotic adults in Home; age is no indication of maturity or decency. However, I can find no justifiable reason why a minor should be allowed in Home.
Yes, the PS3 is an incredible gift for Birthday Boy. But let’s try to keep him safe.
October 9th, 2011 by keara22hi | 19 comments
Keara is also known in Home as DarthGranny. She is a wicked little old lady with a wild sense of humor.
Absolutely fantastic article, and i’m sure there are many other people that have expressed similar concerns. I do think we should have something similar to second life in that there should be a Home for teens, but even in myself suggesting this, how easy is it to spot an adult o a minor on home? and to update you as a SecondLife user, our community was shocked and dismayed to learn that ‘Second life ‘Teens’ grid is no longer running, so this causes all kinds of problems in terms of management and sexual predator concerns, and most second life users, statistically speaking are parents themselves. But what has happened recently is that SL has now been put into 3 categories of age group (PG, Mature and ‘Adult’) the Adult area is completely locked off and you need to be age verified to view content. This can be your passport number along with a scanned picture of yourself. Again, to a smart kid this isn’t nothing, he can simply raid his dad’s bedroom drawer. (An issue has been raised by Second Life Talkshow Host ‘Paisley Beebe’ to Sex Club owner ‘Stephanie SteamWeaver’ on ‘Tonight with Paisley Beebe’.) On the user etiquette of Home, why not set up a ‘How to’ video that can be shown during the loading screen of Home that can benefit everyone on Home?
Again, this is an issue that needs to be raised and addressed, and my only question is, why wasn’t this issue raised sooner?
I see your point of view and I myself have “adopted” a 10 year old as my little brother on Home to try and keep him safe, but I have to say that I would hate to be separated into an area with only teenagers. Teen age boys are yucky and they can’t talk sensibly. Also, I don’t see how adults would be kept out of this area and wouldn’t it give a true predator a “feasting ground” of sorts? I don’t have a solution to these issues, but I’ve thought about them a lot. It always seems to come back to the parents doing their job. If they’re too busy for kids, they shouldn’t have them.
I have spoken myself about these concerns in my previous article. “How Young Is Too Young For Home?”.
I too have met kids from all over the world in Home who are much too young to be in here. It is a real concern for me, but kassadee brings up a valid point in that though we might be able to segregate kids into a different environment by asking proof of age, what is to stop a predator from pretending to be younger and diving into what they would consider a wonderland of opportunity.
The only way this could be avoided is to have to show proof of age for everyone on every account, young and old. And I believe that 16 and older would be a better cut off point for the segregation. Most 16 year old kids have enough savvy to be able to take care of themselves.
The suggestion you made about putting a flyer in each PS3 box warning parents about internet accessibility and telling them about parental controls is a good one and would help a bit I think.
I agree with what you say about not being a parent if you don’t have the time kassadee, but it is too late for that, and the problem does need to be addressed.
I heard a great suggestion about age verification awhile back. How about Sony makes special PSN cards that don’t cost anything and put them into the stores you normally buy them from. These would have codes needed to access the two different areas of Home, PG and Mature, but you would have to have proof of age to get them at the store, just like buying alcohol. This might help to curb some of the issues we are looking at here, and in this way if a parent wants to allow their kids access they themselves would have to get the card for them, raising awareness of the situation in the process. Just a thought.
Oh and I meant to say great article Granny!
The article was good.. BUT.. you showed only one side of the story. You forgot to mention how this effects the regular ppl on there. I get bothered,stalked,harrassed,insulted and what not by those kinda ppl . They think they’re anonymous behind their screen and can do anything they want. Why are there not moderators? Reporting won’t do the job as I experienced so far. Why is there not a system that when x number of ppl report a person for stalking that at least removes that person from the scene?
Why are there no guards that at least are availabe in the main public places like mall, plaza etc? Why is there no age check? Why can ppl change their gender?
My suggestions :
1. Moderators
2. the game should initially cost 20 $ and 80 % of all the noobs would not even enter . only people who are really interested would join.
3. No gender changin. chose one in the beginning and after that no more changing.
4. for 10 of the 20 $ ppl will get a voucher for a set of clothes and a private place so not everyone look like clones.
there is much more in my mind but these points i made above would already drastically change PS Home for the good.
Nice article Keara, and as you know we run into a lot of these latch key kids while we’re out doing our Meet and Greets.
One thing you didn’t touch on is the impact that having hundreds or thousands of these kids flooding Home at certain times has on everyone else. Many people I know find it unbearable to spend time in public spaces in Home because there are so many of them.
At present I think that Home’s moderation practices favor these pests and trolls above all other users. There is no program in place to welcome new people into Home and help them to socialize to the new environment.
The new help commands on the menu help, but there needs to be some kind of a tutorial created to help ease new users into Home.
The buying of a separate ‘Mature’ PSN Card would be a welcome idea for a locked off area on home to be bought over the Cigarette and alcohol counter of a store to which proof of age must be shown. A brief, animated tutorial could help new users booting up Home for the first time understand how to use it’s interface.
Keara, although I’m somewhat sympathetic to your point of view, and would support a 16 or over age requirement, I don’t see Sony eliminating everyone but legal adults from Home -- ever. Young children may not have credit cards, but their parents do. And even though those parents may not want to buy them PSN cards, they will buy them games – and selling games of course, is Sony’s #1 priority.
Several types of parental controls already exist on the PS3. The problem is that all too often the parents don’t know how to use them – but the children do. Sure, there are plenty of adults in Home who can work their way around a PC, but that doesn’t change the fact that for decades now children have tended to be the technology experts in most homes – which is why you often find children setting up PS3s instead of their parents.
Many of the problems you’ve raised will be addressed by the new HUB. Every press release about it has stated that it will make games more prominent and easier to find in Home. That should reduce the problem of latchkey kids who don’t have anything to do. And really, if these children are that young, are you really sure you want them to have keyboards? One could argue that not having keyboards insulates them from would-be predators.
However, my personal feeling is that PCs are still a much greater danger to children than PS3s. PCs are everywhere, along with social sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc. I’ve heard of one, maybe two cases, of sexual predators in Home actually meeting up with a child. That can’t even begin to be compared with the problems posed by social networks. Personally, I don’t think adults should have Facebook accounts, let alone children, but that’s a speech I’ll save for another time.
Yes, Aeternitas, I wrote this article back in August when the worst of the summer holidays were at a peak. Some things have definitely changed for the better: the new Help section in the Navigator, for example. And the descriptions of the new Hub indicate that this problem is being addressed.
What worries me the most is that children using a PS3 can also get into the internet as well as into Home. I did not know that until I was told that this magazine could be accessed through the PS3. Up to that point I had never realized that -- although I had owned a PS3 since the first week they were sold. I will wager most parents do not realize it -- and have set no parental controls on that PS3.
I was not suggesting an age requirement for use of a PS3. Only for entry into Home. Parents would still buy games for Birthday Boy so no break in the revenue stream.
As for the keyboards, when I went undercover as Birthday Boy, one of the first things that emboldened the predators who approached me was that I obviously was not using a keyboard. Those are pics of me in the article -- and the first time my “little boy” avatar was solicited was 18 minutes after I entered
CP for the first time in that avatar.
Unless I’m missing something, the primary purpose of Home is to sell games, and you want Sony to lock out a prime demographic that purchases games. I would definitely consider that a “break” in the revenue stream.
The web browser on the PS3 is pretty weak. And as I stated before, there already exist parental controls for it -- which parents don’t use. Further, the lack of a keyboard would make it difficult to use, the same as with the Home application. I still feel PCs are a much greater risk.
But if you’re saying that you found a child predator within 18 minutes of entering Home, well, first I hope you’ve reported all of these people, and second, it seems to me that you are very much suggesting that this is the norm.
Personally, instead of explaining how to identify vulnerable children, I would have focused on how to identify would be child predators. I also would have directed my remarks more at parents, explaining the need to communicate with and educate their children, rather than looking to Sony to solve this problem. It is after all a societal problem.
Although I can sympathize with someone who might wish to create a separate server for 13-16 year olds, or even 13-18 year olds, I see this creating new problems, including the inability of grandparents and parents to interact with their own family members while using Home.
I really wrestled with this one simply because I have some friends in Home who are under 18 and yet are amazingly mature for their age. I have no hesitation about whether they should be in Home. They should -- because they are knowledgeable enough to be able to have a good time in Home without being endangered. But (1) I am finding children as young as 8 in Home without supervision (2) Parents need to be warned to implement parental controls and (3) by the time a child predator does something that can be ‘reported’, the damage is done.
For example, yes, it would have been good if I had ‘reported’ each one who approached my 13 year old male avatar, but the initial ‘trust building’ phase was always innocuous. It wasn’t until he would broach the idea of a private chat room that the warning bells would start ringing. And I don’t see anyway to report that kind of suspicious behavior at that point.
Send a message to MercuryValentine or HomeForumMods on the official forums.
It is worth noting that the article states, “Virtual realities already have to fight the stigma of being conducive grounds for sexual predation, and by no means do I wish to suggest that this is the norm.”
Also, the article’s penultimate paragraph seems to indicate that Keara is acknowledging that it’s not Sony’s responsibility to raise children. And that’s what makes this such a thorny issue: it’s a societal problem which does exist.
Now, that said, I completely agree that the PC is a much greater risk than the PS3. And I also agree that any such suspicious behavior should be reported. Of course, observing such behavior and *proving* the intent behind it can be difficult, which is why there may be some validity to the idea of age-restricting Home.
Of course, from a business standpoint, this produces a conundrum that’s already been pointed out: how much revenue does Sony stand to lose by age-restricting Home? That financial data is the missing piece, which we of course have no access to. I’ll bet Sony’s looked at it, though.
(This, by the way, is the same potential conflict of interest Sony may have with moderation in Home: Sony actually has a financial incentive to be lenient with troublemakers, as they cannot quantify how much revenue they might gain by kicking out a miscreant, but they can almost certainly measure how much a particular account has spent in Home, and extrapolate future losses based on blocking that account.)
There are no easy answers. But one of the things I love with HSM, because our primary focus is Home’s social issues, is that we ask *a lot* of questions — questions which I don’t necessarily see being asked elsewhere. And that’s why these sorts of discussions can be so valuable.
I think there should be premium public spaces example take silicon lounge put generic sodium music from hub and games in there and perhaps a few more music tracks, make it so you have to buy something say a teleport like the sodium two one and thats the only way to access there as per slap happys concept and theres a premium public space thats instantly harder for unwanteds to get in to, plus if the ps3 is set correct from the start there should be a master account for adult and sub account for child if the adult chooses to bypass this then thats they problem. great article as a user of second life imvu and home I can say that they all have bout the same level of protection for minors, if the minor wants to lie they can get round it, to go into adult world in second life is incredibly easy
This was a fantastic article Darth Granny! On a article I did last month called “what is real?” I was arguing that Home is evolving into a society. Unfortunately many of the problems society has comes with that evolution. I couldn’t agree more that under-age gamers should not be allowed on Home due to the lack of moderators.(on top of it being annoying for us old farts!)
Wow! I don’t think she said that! There’s nothing wrong with “underage” gamers on Home. There’s something wrong with the monsters who prey on underage kids.
I generally like to give ppl credit for having a brain in their heads so I believe the best course of action for this problem is providing accurate info. to parents and then let them do what parents should be doing:namely teaching their kids good moral lessons.The pitfalls of segregation have already been pointed out so I’ll address the idea of seperate cards.There are some aspects of this that clearly match under-age alcohol consumption so I’ll use that as a template.In my state alcohol can’t be sold to anyone under 21 yrs of age,however in the early days of this law there was little economic incentive by business’ to comply with it.2ndly there is a cottage industry of over 21 yr olds who quite willingly buy alcohol for minors,for a steep premium.Lastly I think many parents would buy the 18+(or w/e age) cards for their kids if the kids squawked loud enough.The truth is I seriously doubt there is any 100% fool-proof way to keep kids seperate from adults or predators from engaging kids but if the kids are informed of the dangers and given some general guidelines that would help them make informed decisions about how much info. to give out and to whom I think many problems could be avoided.I am kind of curious though as to why there isn’t a report option that specifically address’ child predation or it’s appearence.There are a # of reasons I could guess as to why but the actual reason would be rather telling about Sony’s view(s) on this topic.
I agree -- no policy, either from Sony or a government -- is going to perfectly protect children (or keep them from wanting to be a part of the “adult world”) 100% of the time. I may be a parent, but I’m also a realist, and I haven’t forgotten what it was like being a child/adolescent.
(As an aside, it does amuse me greatly to watch teens behave like rebels -- as if they’re the first ones ever to have thought of behaving in such a manner since the dawn of time.)
There’s only one sure way to help keep my child safe, and it starts with me and my choice to actively seek information and educate myself on ways of keeping him safe. Not all parents choose this, sadly, and all the regret in the world cannot change an unfortunate event.
As for the inquiry as to why there is no report option specifically geared towards child predation, my guess is that it’s because in their eyes, it falls under the umbrella term of sexual harassment. Although personally, I would totally advocate its addition to the report list, as it is a much more serious offence than the generic crotch sniffing.
Agreed, Terra.