Monday, December 10, 2012

A creative solution to a "Sticky" Mario problem

My son recently earned the chance to get the video game Super Mario Sticker Star. He was delighted to get it, as he hasn't had any new games for a while. There was only one problem ...

The boy recently lost the privilege to watch YouTube videos unsupervised because he would not self-regulate his viewing habits. There are many fan-made videos that use language that we'd prefer for him not to hear regularly; his filter isn't as fine-tuned as his sister's, so we didn't want this language influencing his speech habits. There are also some crude and rude visual humour that we'd like him to avoid as well. The initial arrangement was that he was to switch to a different video if he heard or saw any objectionable content, but he has been skipping that step, so he was limited to watching videos on YouTube only when supervised by a parent. This put a serious crimp in his viewing time.

He became stuck on a certain part of his new game, Super Mario Sticker Star, but he was prohibited from searching for videos alone. He could ask us to watch alongside him, but neither Mom nor Dad like spending hours watching YouTube.

He came up with a pretty respectable solution to his dilemma: he'd watch the game walk-throughs with the sound off. Since it's just a game-walk-through, all the visuals come from the video game and not from the video producers, so there was no mature content for us to worry about. Not bad, eh?

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