Good for you for engaging with your son and taking the time to talk with him about these things.
I guess the thing I’d be most concerned about with an online game is more the interactions with other players than the violence aspect itself. Hell I get raged at from time to time in World of Tanks and I find it pretty unpleasant as an adult. I’m pretty sure it’d be too much for a ten year old.
See how it goes on your trial run I guess.
Sounds like a good kid 
Thank you and yes this internet thingy is very difficult as a parent because as we all know what a mental sewer it is, and yet there it is, on the phone and the computer and the console… Somewhere one can only hope that the character of the child is – well this sounds corny perhaps, but that that you as a parent do what you can do to allow the child to develop enough character and integrity to let the bad things pass as nonsense and stick with the good things. – But as you say, we’ll see how the trial run and where it leaves us.
It’s not thanks to me, but thanks for the remark nonetheless. He *is *a bright kid, much smarter than I was at his age, probably in all respects.
sounds like a good kid AND a good parent!
This internet thingy is difficult for me as a stepparent because, like, my stepdaughter is only just reaching the age I was when I got online for the first time, and [del]I had to walk uphill in the snow both ways[/del] I didn’t have Facebook and smartphones and the ability to e-mail photos easily and all the rest of it. So I am relying on inferences about what her experience is like, extrapolating from having been her age without the internet and using the internet at my age, and that only goes so far
You don’t get yelled as much in PS2 because there’s no limit to the team size. As long as you aren’t killing your own guys you are contributing instead of blocking somebody better from being there like in so many other online FPS games. Enemies can’t tell you anything, of course. I played ~200 hours and you can count the times somebody raged at me with the fingers of one hand.
I think you’re doing a great job engaging with your kid and being thoughtful about these decisions. Ours is still floating around in my uterus, so we’ve been talking a lot about how we’ll handle this sort of thing when it comes up.
However, with regard to ratings, I do absolutely feel that they’re a guideline and most useful when you take them as such (as in, "somebody felt this was okay 16+, which means I should take a look at it’. Not "you can’t play this until you’re 16 because that’s what it says on the box.) I feel age ranges that are actually in the rules, like Facebook, are a different matter.
Like some others, I played a lot of shooters a la Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem when I was in the single digit ages. I have yet to be arrested for spree killings, or even punching grandmas in the face.
Generally, once the kid is in middle school, I would advocate letting them play most FPS games - they’re old enough to know it’s not real and you shouldn’t do that in real life. I might hold back, say, Postal 2 until high school, but CoD? meh, they see worse at the theater.
I will say that, growing up, my parents were divorced, and mom didn’t like me playing those games but dad was fine with it. I remember that as a kid, I mentally categorized mom as “clueless if she thinks I’ll be a murderer for playing Doom”, and dad as “At least he treats me at my maturity level instead of outsourcing that to a ratings board”. Sure, there’s some self-interest there, but unless you think your kid is never going to a friend’s house, he’s going to play those games. Better to have him play them at your place.
And the ratings boards are notoriously negative nancies. I would put as much stock in them as the magic eight-ball.
yellowjacketcoder, parent of one with another on the way
Without getting into “whether this was the right decision for you to make as a parent” matter, I should mention computer gaming is a fairly fast-paced industry so saying “wait two years” is the same as saying “No”, because two years from now (probably two or three months from now), there will be a totally different game which is the thing everyone is playing.
For what it’s worth, I doubt your son will resent you in 2016 because back in 2014 you didn’t let him play a computer game that hardly anyone else is playing anymore.
Excellent. You’ve taught him that the best way to make a decision is to become informed about it. I’d also suggest showing him some of the rating boards and reading the reviews together.
I’d also suggest that if you do allow him to play, you NOT allow headphones, so that you can monitor the other players’ talk. And go into it with the agreement that if you don’t like what you’re hearing, the game is turned off immediately, no arguments.
I prohibited FPS until my son was about 12, at which point he said to me, “Mom, it just doesn’t make sense to me that you’re okay with Harry Potter, where I push the button that waves a wand and “kills” someone, but you’re not okay with a game where I push the button that shoots a gun and “kills” someone. Neither one is really killing anyone. I don’t get the difference. Can you explain it?” And…I couldn’t. The kid was right. It was arbitrary and about my discomfort with gun violence in video games, not about the actual impact on him. That was the point that I began to allow FPS. I felt that if he had the maturity to make an argument like that, then that itself was indication that he had the maturity to handle these games. (But this was before multi player open server games, so the behavior of the other players wasn’t an issue.)
I agree with folks who say you’ve handled it quite well so far.
When I was his age, the equivalent was Dungeons and Dragons, which my parents, having encountered some mid-eighties hysteria about Satanism and also blaming my poor school performance on the game, banned me from playing.
I learned two things from the experience:
My big worry about online gaming is other people. I’ve mostly done voice chat via Team Fortress 2, and eventually quit playing because of the astonishingly ugly stuff I encountered there.
Yeah Sartre obviously knew where MMO games would head. Hell is other People.
Still I imagine there will be an option to disable voice chat somewhere in the game.
So how did the hands on test go?
For most of these games, most people disable the built in chat and use a teamspeak/vent/mumble/steam/skype chat server to use exclusively with friends.
I think it’s a bit of an overreaction. Planetside 2 is about as realistic as Halo. I don’t think a game being a shooter makes it age inappropriate.
This. I’ve played Planetside 2 with and without my then 8/9-year old about a year ago. I’ve also played with some of regular gaming friends (though we typically stick to MMO’s). I don’t think its necessary to use any public chat (I never have). The battles are truly massive, so there isn’t much point to having your entire team of 60-100+ on public chat. Your kiddo’s friends can easily set up a private Vent server that they can only chat together with.
It’s a free download, so I endorse the “try and it and let’s see” method, there is nothing to lose.
tangent: what if the child now plays one of those free-to-play games with his friends and now pressures you to buy stuff for him to keep up with his friends? stuff like asking for in-game credits for his birthday gift in lieu of something more tangible?
Two hours a day is a lot, especially for weekdays, IMO.
Also, I wanted to keep my stepson away from M rated games until he was 15. It’s not illegal for kids under 15 to buy them in Australia, but the recommendation is that they don’t. I didn’t get my way on this.
I had a few reasons for this. First, as IvoryTower said, it would’ve given him something to look forward to when he turned 15.
Second, there are heaps of interesting, fun, excellent games rated E, G, and PG. He’s played very few of them. When I look at his game collection, they’re all M rated. He complains about the censorship. Apparently removing some of the gore from Left 4 Dead ruins it.
Third, it would have just been easier. Instead of every game being a case by case, “do you think this is OK?” and “dang man, can you at least turn off the swearing?”, it would’ve been a lot simpler just to stick to the guidelines.
Do I think he will turn out to be a mass murderer? No. But he would’ve witnessed a lot less idiotic violence and coarseness, probably would’ve gamed a bit less and read a bit more, and possibly would now have a wider range of taste.
So after reading all the posts I felt none of them really addressed the elephant in the room. To clear up the “rating system” which everyone is so concerned about, the ratings are created by the studios in collaboration with the “rating panel”, a game is more likely to garner favor from gamers if a game is rated older rather than for a younger audience. The LEGO games might be the best in the world but with a rating placed at juniors, no teenager and up is likely to touch them. It is a matter of scientific note that access to technology such as games can encourage children to achieve greater levels or literacy and social prowess. Gaming studios have begun to seriously address the need for less gore in their games for precisely the OP’s reason. Levels of maturity are higher now than they were 20 years ago, boys don’t play soldier in the alleys and parks anymore they have virtual avatars on fantasy planets, which in my opinion gives a greater detachment from death than pretending to be shot by a friend and falling to the ground. I agree that as a parent it is important to at least attempt to instill good values and courtesies into our children but we have to apply those rules to ourselves too. I play a number of these games types with my godsons, all of whom I pay for their xbox live accounts, we play as a group including other parents and their children; we concentrate on team skills, and play objective game types with specific time frames so everyone knows the on times and the off times.
The reality is that a child in western culture is still far more likely to be hurt or killed crossing the road than by any other means. I commend the OP for at least opening up this to debate. Is 10 years old too young to play this mmo fps? It really does depend on the maturity of the child. that’s the OP’s call. As a mature gamer I think your child is far more likely to be ostracized by his peers, than any online gamer. PlanetSide 2, as other team games, chat either voice or text is intrinsic to game play and collaboration, limiting this can do nothing but impede on the game, however there are a number of online solutions for voice communication that are safe and can be monitored by you as a parent such as skype, mumble, ventrilo or teamspeak. All these will allow the friends to game but their speech will be separate from the in-game voice. Voice in most game can be disabled or muted and if using console access to these can be controlled using a master account/parental control.
Finally I would encourage you to try the game and more specifically if you have a second computer, play the game with your son. It really is no more than playing soldier as we did as children, but without the sticks and dirty knees. Also some games are created to almost self ridicule the fps genre like “Serious Sam” which is hilarious, fantasy fps. PlanetSide 2 is not Call of Duty, neither is it a serious war simulator such as ArmA but it does try to be a fun, fast paced team objective game; not the only one but very good for free.
The issue isn’t really the game. My response would be “No.” You can give your reason. But pushback from sonny boy would be “Son, I said no. You don’t have to agree with my reasons, but you don’t get to debate them. If you aren’t mature enough to respect my answer, then perhaps you are not mature enough to handle the privilege of playing video games. We’ll just put the machine away for a while.”
You made a reasonable parental decision. You do not JADE (justify, argue, defend, explain) with a child. Let him make his case if you want, but when you make your decision, it is no longer open to debate.