Crossplay Mailbag: "Is Nintendo's Awful Online Setup Actually Great For Kids?"

Nintendo's online services involve all sorts of hoops, but as one reader points out, maybe that's actually an advantage. Elsewhere, kids with murder rooms?

Editor's Note: As part of Crossplay’s launch, this edition of the mailbag is free. Reported pieces will always be made public, but more personal work, like this, will ask that you invest in the future of Crossplay. In the future, mailbags will be available exclusively to subscribers. 

Welcome to the Crossplay Mailbag!

Every Friday, we'll close out the week by answering questions from the Crossplay community, a grab bag of observations and worries about what it means to be a parent who plays video games and a parent with children who play video games. 

You can write in at mailbag@crossplay.news. I'll also be answering questions when I've got free time, aka the moments when my children are either asleep or on a device, alongside dropping into the Crossplay community on the subscriber Discord, and whenever I figure out how the “chat” and “notes” functions work here on Substack.

Please feel free to keep the discussion going in the comments section below! 

Anyway, onto the mailbag this week.

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"What kind of an effect do you think it might have that kids have such a huge variety of ways to access games these days? Do you think it's easier or more difficult for them to find games that they like? Are they less likely to stick with a game when they get frustrated and there's a bunch of other stuff they could be playing" — Anonymous

Patrick: The funnel in our household has been from YouTube. My oldest clicks around videos through YouTube Kids—we haven't yet graduated to proper YouTube yet, thankfully—and will often start asking me questions from there. That's how Super Mario 3D World became a thing, that's how Minecraft became a thing, and it's what has exaggerated interest in a lot of other games, like Roblox, because she sees a video, tries the game, then watches more videos. It's that cycle that's likely to push out of YouTube Kids and into YouTube itself, because recently she asked me how you subscribe to a channel, which is not something you can do on YouTube Kids.

YouTube Kids and Roblox have a very specific thing in common: a friendly interface. It is so incredibly easy to jump from video to video in YouTube Kids and game to game in Roblox—it's seamless. The two apps basically discourage investment in a specific experience, compared to staying within the app and feeding a shortened attention span. Minecraft and Mario Kart are the only games that have really "stuck" to my oldest, games she returns and puts valuable time into. We're starting to see this a bit with Mario Party, too, now that she has a real sense of 3D space. 

"My son is 3 years old and just starting to be interested in playing games. He loves watching Kirby and the Forgotten World and playing a little bit, and seemed interested in Tears of the Kingdom at first (obviously too complex for him but to watch or just run around). However, as soon as Link needs to hit that first Zonai construct with a stick, he didn't like it. He really hates violence like this, even pretend. I wonder what non-violent adventure games could be out there which still have fully-explorable 3D environments?" — Anonymous

Patrick: Interesting! I wonder how that will change when he's older? For example, my oldest had no fear when it came to media around that age. We'd watch Jurassic Park, Gremlins—it didn't matter. She was delighted every time. But as the years went on, and she developed into more and more of her own person, fear became a known quantity. Maybe that'll change with violence for your son? Regardless, I wonder if games like Animal Crossing or Minecraft might prove fun? In both cases, your son can help make suggestions on what needs to happen, and in both cases, neither require violence. (You can basically turn it off in Minecraft.) Donut County was also a big hit with my kid a little beyond the age described. We just skipped the story stuff. 

"I’ve been surprised how much I’ve appreciated Nintendo’s online ecosystem with a young kid. My son loves playing Mario Kart and Splatoon and I’ve had no worries about anything on voice chat or other messages coming through. For myself, I wish it was better but it certainly makes me feel better about letting him play online. I think my question would be for other ecosystems if there’s controls available to make it a similar experience?" — Anonymous

Patrick: You're not the first person to make this point. Because so many multiplayer games default in the direction of connecting players to one another via play and chat, then asking parents/players to ratchet back what they don't want, it's actually refreshing when the hurdles are in the other direction, and you need to jump through hoops in order to access any of that. In fact, this counter logic has taken me by surprise to the degree that I might need to write about it.

I have heard that if you're going to open the door to something like Roblox, doing so on the Xbox platform is actually great, because you get multiple layers of protection, due to the parental controls through the Xbox layer and the parental controls through the Roblox layer. 

"My son, when he was around age 5, was playing Minecraft, built a home and wanted to give my partner a tour of it. All was going well until he got to the "murder room" (his words) where in which he would lure villagers so that he could kill them for the items they carried. Has your child done something in game that made you step back and question the action morally, or whether or not you should be allowed to raise children at all?" — Anonymous

Patrick: That's so funny. Haven't had much evidence of that when it comes to the act of play, but it has manifested, over and over, in the kid-focused horror that's all over places like Roblox and TikTok. (My oldest does not have a TikTok account, but we'll scroll through videos on my phone before bed, which means my algorithm has basically become her account.) She giggles with delight at videos with grotesque monsters, all of the backroom stuff, and is positively obsessed with these compilation videos of kaiju-style creatures made with iffy animation. 

"What age do parents introduce games in to a child's life? My 4 month old is already distracted by phone or TV screens, do people play games in front of or with their kids at?" — Anonymous

Patrick: I'm no child psychologist, I'm just winging it. But my approach has been to reward curiosity. When my kid started asking questions about games, I would answer them. When they wanted to hold a controller, I would hand it over. There are going to be households where, perhaps because of personal values or attributes specific to their kids, stricter lines are drawn. I wouldn't blame anyone for saying they don't want their kids on YouTube or Roblox, even though I'm drawing those lines in my house. It's more or less impossible for me to not play games in front of my kids, so it's hardly surprising the questions started arriving sooner rather than later. 

Plus, and this is somewhat of a personal guiding principle, they're going to encounter it somewhere else, right? They're probably going to see or play a video game at a friend's house, where you don't know how the parents handle everything? Wouldn't you prefer to introduce it?

You can send questions for future Crossplay mailbags by writing to mailbag@crossplay.news.

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