If he’s just playing single player, this won’t stop anything. It’s trivial to find cracks or patches that allow play without the CD. I think taking the CD will prevent online play, but I’m not sure…
ETA: There’s also really not much you can do, software-wise, that will hold up without some amount of supervision. You can’t keep the computer secure and locked down if he has physical access. And, at least at first, he’ll direct all of the time and cleverness he’s currently using for gaming on how to get around your restrictions. I know I did when I was in his place many years ago…
You are not going to be able to cripple the computer enough to stop something as low system requirements as Diablo.
It sounds like your main problem is online play, right? Others will have to back me up on this, but wouldn’t restricting access to battle.net work? I believe the modern version requires all data to run through that server, rather than connecting the players directly like it used to.
If so, you ought to be able to block port 1119 and/or the IP address of battle.net (12.129.242.40) in the firewall.* Heck, if you’ve got the administrator accounts locked down, you could probably add that IP to the hosts file.
*Most routers I’ve seen now have built-in firewalls. I don’t know about cable modems, but most DSL modems are now also routers.
ETA: You can definitely get around any CD requirements. (Yes, and even get online.) I don’t think I’ve ever let a game require me to insert the CD. It defeats the purpose of having a hard drive.
That’s what the WOW solution was. Setting the parent controls for battle.net. Maybe it’s only possible for the WOW accounts, but I think there is a good possibility it’s any game played on battle.net
How much access do you have to the computer? I’m thinking
Install Windows Steady State http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx and have him save his documents to a flash drive. This will cause him to have to reinstall all software that you don’t have installed and if you edit the hosts file to redirect the site you log in for diablo at to 127.0.0.1 he won’t be able to get one.
The battle.net account that’s linked to his WoW account is the one you want, but you’ll have to get the username and password from him. Of course, he can always change the email account associated with it.
If he has an authenticator attached to his WoW account, you can always take that. That keeps him out of everything unless he has it.
/edit: Everything meaning both his WoW and battle.net accounts, so he can’t change anything in account management (ie. parental controls) without it.
This. It appears he runs circles around his mother and he scams cash from sister. So your “fight” isn’t with him as much as it’s with his enablers. Plus he sounds bright enough to try almost anything to keep playing on the computer.
The computer is only a symptom. Unless his mother (and sister) stop the enabling, it appears your uphill battle is steeper than you realize.
The fact is that if he’s smart enough, there’s not much you can do to limit his play (while continuing to allow him use of a PC with a 'net connection) that he can’t get around. I say this as someone who has formerly had major MMO addiction issues.
You really have to look at the root of the problem. Game addiction is real and not particularly easy to overcome.
You’re S.O.L. with his mother unwilling to help. He’ll find work arounds to anything you do to his hardware, and if you delete his account or characters he’ll just go to a gaming cafe and play there. All deleted characters/disabled accounts can be restored by the WoW staff upon request.
Depending on what kind of guild he’s in, they MIGHT be sympathetic to your cause, and they might hate your guts for invading their realm. Deleting characters/accounts might be devestating enough to warrant some introspection, or might just galvanized his resolve, or provide another challenge.
Gaming addiction is a funny thing. Beyond treating his body poorly, and ignoring school, there are worse addictions. It’s a lifestyle you work yourself into, though by no means am I saying this isn’t destructive or a serious issue, perhaps you’ll find more success in trying to focus his energy in a creative way with gaming.
Heh. I don’t know about “addiction” - but I played a lot of computer games in high school, to the extent that it wrecked my grades pretty thoroughly. Failed senior physics, D in senior english, and so on. (Oddly enough, I played a lot of Diablo too. Is it wrong to be pleased that modern slackers are appreciating the classics?)
I know it stinks - but honestly, as the other posters have said, there’s not a lot to be done without at least Mom’s cooperation in controlling the PC - and even then, it’ll be tricky, unless you’re at least as computer-savvy as your kid. (When I was having problems, my parents tried taking the PC power cord. That worked for about a day - then I grabbed a power cord from the computer lab at my high school, and used that whenever my parents stepped out and took their cord with them.)
I’m skeptical about the “addiction” label that gets thrown around for this sort of thing - is your kid just bored? That was my problem - and for what it’s worth, it turned out all right. I ended up going to a no-name college - but I took classes I was very interested in, graduated summa cum laude, and went to a top-tier law school thereafter. I’m now a respectable government lawyer with a good chance at becoming a slightly less-respectable but much more fun nonprofit lawyer.
My point is: It’s important to try and get your kid to do his work. But if he really does screw up high school - and he will, if he’s determined - all is not lost.
Seriously consider the install Ubuntu (or some other flavor of Linux) suggested by Palooka. It will be perfectly adequate for him to do his school work on; I doubt any school work would be complex enough to run into any compatibility issues with OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office file formats, and Firefox on Linux is pretty much the same as Firefox on Windows. And just set up his user account as unable to install programs, so he can’t try and get Diablo running with WINE.
The latest patch for Diablo II allows you to play without the CD.
If you were running Windows 7, you can actually specifically lock certain programs for certain users…
Your best bet is the network level intervention, if you can find a way to make it stick. Editing the hosts file, blocking firewall ports - but it has to be done in a way he can’t just undo it.
Install a Norton product and turn the setting all the way up so that the computer just drags all the time. Happened to me inadvertantly.
Not a great solution but it sort of helped me and my son when he was overdoing the WoW in college. First you need to know the username/password on the account. We shared the account for a while so that was easy for me. With that in hand you can at least monitor how much time he is on and, if memory serves, he will be disconnnected if (when) you log in. Maybe his mom would be interested in some statistics about how many DAYS total playing time he has.
The word “addiction” is perfectly apt for someone who spends huge amounts of time every day playing computer games. I say that as an addict who has played computer games for close to 30 years. WoW is the crack cocaine of games.
Here’s the problem with all of the solutions everyone has mentioned so far: given enough time and cleverness, the kid will be able to get around anything.
Try to throttle his connection via the router? That can probably be circumvented in all sorts of ways, but ultimately if he’s in the room with the hardware and nobody is supervising, he can just hit the “reset to factory defaults button”.
Try to install ubuntu? He’ll just install windows along side it, either in a new partition, or if he’s really desperate on a second hard drive he scrounges from somewhere else. He can even hide that hard drive when you’re around. Same goes for just about anything you do to control or lock down the operating system.
My parents, many years ago, tried to place a BIOS password, so my computer wouldn’t boot up without them entering a password. Well, that can be reset as well – all I needed to do was open the computer up and take out the battery (or use the reset jumper, I forget which) to change the BIOS back to default settings. He can always do something like that, unless you padlock the computer shut (and lock away all the tools, and hope he doesn’t spend his newly freed up time learning to lockpick…)
If he’s as stubborn as I was, he won’t give up when you put a little obstacle in front of him. Basically this escalation will only be a temporary deterrence to him, and then you’ll have to resort to something more severe. Any technical solution will be useless without cooperation and supervision from his mother.
But he may be amenable to reason. I was, to an extent. In my case, I was usually bored with a class – either didn’t care about the topic, or I thought I knew it well enough that homework wasn’t teaching me anything and was therefore a waste of time.
Take care, though, to backup your kid’s homework first.