I am on the exact same boat as you. 9yo daughter keeps asking to download a bunch of crap with in app purchases or ads. The problem is that there’s so much crap for mobile. I almost never play anything on my phone, but her at her age and the current times of short attention span being bored for longer than a second seems.like a taboo, she needs to have stuff on her phone, even though we have a Switch at home with loads of good quality games.
I agree there’s a lot of crap, and it takes some time and conversation. Lots of tips in this topic as well. Eg Play Pass looks pretty cool so far, and I’m going to look at F Droid and installing an emulator.
I’m also explaining to her why I reject some apps. She seems to understand it better and better.
I’m also going to look at using Tasker to set it to airplane mode on all apps except Play Store and Chrome.
Also I don't know anything about adblockers but I was lucky enough to have a device supported by www.divestos.org and I think the OS defaults to a DNS that ignores ads somehow. But I'm not sure! I just know I get WAY less spammy ads than friends do :P
One thing you might need to pay attention to is your daughter would want to play the same game as their friends do.
You may want to reject games base on your criteria, but if your daughter feels isolated because she can’t play with her friends, that could be a bigger problem.
I’m not too worried about that tbh. It’s the same thing that when she gets a mobile phone it will be very limited, only call, text and messaging. No social media until she’s 18. Thanks though for checking.
Good luck. We tried that rule too, it has led to so much stress and fighting. I’m certainly not suggesting to not try and hold the line. I’m just wishing you luck with it.
After watching The Social Dilemma and seeing that people who worked high up at eg Facebook also didn’t want their kids on there, I’m going to try to do the same.
That… seems a bit too extreme, I honestly don’t think you can achieve that… unless you get her a dumb phone and assuming she never gets her own by her own means.
Working with your kids to have a decent social media experience? That I can see!
Yes it may sound extreme but based on The Social Dilemma and presentations at our school from people who did a lot of research into this topic, I’m going to go with their recommendation to keep them off social media until 18. Probably won’t be easy indeed.
My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it’s riddled with ads.
Did you ever consider using this as opportunity to educate your daughter about ads in general, how some games try to push adds to get you to do something, and also how some games have game mechanics trying to push you to do specific things, and then just let her figure out if those games are worth playing, or not?
She’s definitely old enough - I had that discussion with my daughter when she was 5, we have an agreement that we limit the number of games installed on her phone - and the kind of shitty game you’re talking about typically gets uninstalled again pretty quickly.
In a few years she’ll be able to install stuff by herself - if you never explained to her what and why games/apps are doing she’ll not be ready to deal with that, and it’ll be out of your control.
My kid has this problem too. So many games interrupt him mid level to force ads, its ridiculous.
But we’ve found a few games that arent total popup nightmares (that he enjoys):
-Two Dots, a beautiful puzzle game, very kid friendly
-Bad Piggies - a spin off of angry birds, Physics based building/puzzle game, very cartoony and fun gameplay. My kid loves this game, probably his favourite (its older so the ads arent too obnoxious. You can pay to disable them, also)
-Stumble Guys - massive multiplayer platformer like fallguys, loves this one (there are ads but you can pay to disable for 4.99)
We have the ios equivalent to play pass and it helped a lot, too.
When my kid was younger he had a “garbage games on tablet” phase as well. As others have said, paid games are the way to go (Play Pass sounds cool). Looking for indie games for Android, or PC games ported to Android gives some good results. Stardew Valley’s an obvious one. I haven’t played Ordia, but it looks gorgeous.
What worked really well for us was to teach him about some dark patterns in simple terms and spot them with him in the freemiums he was playing. “Fear of Missing Out” events/notifications and “Progression Paywalls” are typical ones. It made him realize the game wasn’t built to give him a good time as much as to frustrate him into endlessly spending real money in exchange for some phony currency. In the end he was happy to switch to saner games. It’s a good opportunity to work on their critical judgment basically.
In a fit of nostalgia I bought Yugioh: Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution. I watched the original show as a kid and played the game at recess, but never went any further than that. The game was on sale for a couple bucks on steam.
I gotta say, this is a great amount of content for the price (again, I bought it for like 5 bucks). You can play through the show’s storyline (every season) with all of their dumb little decks, and after every duel, you unlock a “reverse duel” where you can do the same fight but from the antagonist’s perspective. If you complete all of the duels involving a particular character, you unlock their “challenge duel” where they use a themed meta deck with actual combos and interesting win conditions. Because this game has every season of the TV show, there’s at least a hundred different characters you can fight like this. Every time you win a duel you get some of your opponent’s cards and money to make your own custom deck. The online is dead though, which is fine, I’m just playing this to relive my childhood watching the show.
I’ve been kinda hooked, even though I haven’t been a Yugioh fan since 4th grade. I feel like a kid again. I just wish the Pokemon TCG or Magic: the Gathering had a modern game with a story mode like this.
Yeah was thinking about a switch, but I’m a bit reluctant due to high cost of games. They mainly use the tablet to game while traveling, at home they play with their toys or on the xbox.
bin.pol.social
Najstarsze