.png)
Best of LifehackerWhether we’ve made a complicated recipe absurdly simple, illustrated how to survive a natural disaster, or explained a political crisis in terms even your great-grandma would understand, these are some of our favorite stories from the past year.There is a lot to talk about when it comes to kids and gaming. We want to encourage their love of gaming because we love gaming, too. But we don’t want to introduce them to something before they’re ready, we want to capitalize on the bonding experience gaming can provide—and we want to remember that not all gaming has to be electronic.
Here are our favorite posts from the year to help you cultivate your gaming relationship with your child.
Navigating age-appropriateness
This year, we sought to help you determine whether certain video games were appropriate for your child’s age—or find ways to make them appropriate by playing them in “Dad Mode.”
Somewhat selfishly, because my 9-year-old is forever asking me whether he can play Fortnite, I asked writer Stephen Johnson to please answer that question for me—or at least guide me in making the decision myself. Which he so kindly and thoroughly did:
Other players are really the worst part of Fortnite, especially when it comes to kids and safety. Any game that attracts so many people also attracts bottom-feeders who prey on those people—from pedophiles to scam artists to legions of garden-variety assholes. While the likelihood of meeting child molesters or con artists during a game is small (hysterical media coverage notwithstanding), if you don’t turn off chat, your child will talk to countless trolls, griefers, losers, people who play loud music into their mic, YouTube celebrities, and other lowlifes eager to teach them exciting new curse words, sexual positions, and racial slurs. Luckily, if you turn off voice chat, there’s not much online miscreants can do to bother your kid.
Around Halloween, we hand-picked the best scary-but-not-too-scary video games for your kids (the scare factor made it feel timely around Halloween, but the advice is evergreen).
Also—perhaps most importantly—we helped you figure out which video games allow you to pet the dogs. Because this is good and wholesome information to have.
Playing video games WITH your kid
Gaming can be a great way to keep our kids occupied and out of our hair. Alternatively, gaming with our kids can be a nice bonding experience. This year, we made it a point to suggest (insist) that you jump in and play games with your kid.
If you love to game but hate to play against people who suck at games (like, for example, little kids), we’ve got a solution for you. This age-by-age guide is full of multiplayer games that are both fun and competitive when playing against even the youngest of gamers.
Another good one to play with your kids? Is Minecraft, according to writer Stephen Johnson who had an epic summer bonding experience with his son over the game:
When my son was seven, he and I had played Minecraft together for about a year, and we decided to take on the game’s ultimate challenge: Defeating the Enderdragon. The process of researching the beast’s weaknesses online, exploring and exploiting the Minecraft world for the gear we’d need, and creating and executing a plan for his downfall took an entire summer of after-dinner game-playing. It was fun for both of us, and I tried (very gently) to apply lessons from the game to life. I don’t know if it worked, but it sure didn’t hurt, and we had a ton of fun.
Now that you’ve played their games with them, it’s time to introduce them to your games. These are the retro video games that should be on your list to play with your kid.
Playing non-video games
Kids (and adults) love video games, but gaming shouldn’t always be electronic.
With a little creativity (and some bubble wrap), we taught you how to create an indoor hopscotch game for your kids and their friends this year.
Next, we curated a list of what we call the best “pencil-and-paper” games to play with your kids. They’re games that require only—you guessed it—a piece of paper and a pencil. Or the back of a paper menu and a crayon. You get the idea. These are perfect games to bust out when you’re waiting to board a plane or for your food to arrive in a restaurant.
We also helped you (and, by extension, your kids) create your very first Dungeons and Dragons character:
Starting out can feel intimidating, with all of the game’s books and charts and maps. Even if you’ve found a dungeon master and fellow players, now you have to create a character. You might be tempted to get really weird with it—I was. But if you plan to stick with this character for a while, you don’t want to saddle yourself with someone that you eventually hate to play. Here’s how to make a D&D hero that will best introduce you to the game.
And finally, we would have been remiss if we didn’t remind you that hand-clapping games never go out of style.
Meet the smartest parents on Earth! Join our parenting Facebook group.
from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/37njm9w
0 comments:
Post a Comment