mjs0
The 4th X
Greg,
Welcome aboard...I do have one (slightly esoteric) question i would love to have answered.
I have two pre-teen children (9 and 10) who love to play Civilization multiplayer on our home LAN (they started with Civ4 vanilla). They are home-schooled and Civilization was a huge contributor to their desire to read (we stopped reading popups for them!) and has sparked a love of history and imaginative play in both of them. Now we have 4 copies of Civ4 complete we quite often sit down as a family and play with 4 of us in a coop multiplayer LAN game (sad I know...but we are a very nerdy family) Needless to say the kids were VERY excited to hear about Civ5, which brings me to my question.
Whilst I understand the reasoning behind the integration of Steam's online features into Civ5 I am concerned about exposing the children to the online world. I know there is a reason why online interactions are not evaluated for ESRB ratings and am concerned our family game time not be ruined by interruptions from the less savory aspects of the online Steam experience. Although in general I find the ESRB ratings on games like Civ4 unhelpful (e.g. I find some T-rated games are fine for our kids, but some E-rated games perpetuate stereotypes that are not fine) we do regulate the kids access to the internet using parental control software and are keen to maintain that for a few more years.
Given this background information so you know where I am coming from, I have two questions...
Good Luck!
Welcome aboard...I do have one (slightly esoteric) question i would love to have answered.
I have two pre-teen children (9 and 10) who love to play Civilization multiplayer on our home LAN (they started with Civ4 vanilla). They are home-schooled and Civilization was a huge contributor to their desire to read (we stopped reading popups for them!) and has sparked a love of history and imaginative play in both of them. Now we have 4 copies of Civ4 complete we quite often sit down as a family and play with 4 of us in a coop multiplayer LAN game (sad I know...but we are a very nerdy family) Needless to say the kids were VERY excited to hear about Civ5, which brings me to my question.
Whilst I understand the reasoning behind the integration of Steam's online features into Civ5 I am concerned about exposing the children to the online world. I know there is a reason why online interactions are not evaluated for ESRB ratings and am concerned our family game time not be ruined by interruptions from the less savory aspects of the online Steam experience. Although in general I find the ESRB ratings on games like Civ4 unhelpful (e.g. I find some T-rated games are fine for our kids, but some E-rated games perpetuate stereotypes that are not fine) we do regulate the kids access to the internet using parental control software and are keen to maintain that for a few more years.
Given this background information so you know where I am coming from, I have two questions...
- Will it still be possible to play LAN multiplayer Civ5 without exposing the kids to the non-kid friendly aspects of the Steam environment? I have googled extensively but have been unable to find any information about parental controls on Steam. So I am asking (although not hopeful) if there will be some non-Steam but LAN based multi-player left in Civ5.
- Will the kids ability to run Civ5 be impacted by parental controls on their computers? I have Steam on my gaming machine (because of a gift with purchase on a graphics card) but not on my wife's or kids computers. Again, I googled extensively, and attempted to get information from Steam directly with no luck, but other than a few anecdotal stories of inability to play games could not find anything definitive.
Good Luck!