And they should inherently, or be expected to, know about the toxicity of many online gaming environments?
From a mechanical perspective sure, but I'm sure than there would be children who don't have 'bad parents' who would fall victim to the largely toxic online environment that shooters promote. I do think that doing the utmost to shield children from that is a responsible choice.
I mean, it would seem pretty logical to me. Humans are assholes to each other whenever they have the option to talk to each other, in school, in work, in movies, in games. It would make sense that if you have a game where you can talk to other people, that the logical assumption to make as a parent would be that they could encounter bad shit in that environment.
But even if they didn't know that -inherently-, if you had a sticker on the cover that was specifically talking to the parents to beware about the voice chat option, it would immediately make me wonder why if I wasn't already there.
I just think we're getting to the point where we really just believe parents should have no responsibility toward their kids over even the simplest thing. And it's annoying because in this case, all the adult gamers who want Splatoon like myself now have to deal with a neutered multiplayer environment due to it.
Does the Wii U have any sort of system level "child" account or something like at?
I'm asking. If Nintendo wants to have additional safeguards for minors, there should be a way to flag who actually is a minor on the system. If it has this then it seems trivial to simply configure Splatoon so that adults can chat and kids cannot without parental permission.
I get what Amiro0x is saying about parenting, but I think there are multiple technical functions that could be employed to make things easier on parents (without absolving).
It will be interesting to see how prominent Skype/chat use on other devices will be with this game.
Well yes, I agree parental lock options and such should be available. I'm not arguing against that. It's good for companies to include those parental options, and it's good parenting to make use of them.
My issue is when a company decides not to have the option at all, because they can't even trust a parent to use the options they'd otherwise have to provide to keep it safe for kids.
Mr Fahrenheit said:
Well you see its a game intended for very young children, what you feel you deserve as an adult doesn't mean jack because the game isn't intended for you on any level.
Ridiculous. It's a game intended for everyone. Everyone on GAF is 13+, and there's a huge GAF thread of people enjoying it. Just because the game has colorful mascots does not mean it is inherently only for kids.