The Evolution of Video Game Affordances and Implications for Parental Mediation

Parental Mediation of Children’s Video Game Play

Borrowing heavily from research on parental mediation of children’s television viewing, literature on parental mediation of video games has broadly categorized parents’ intervention activities into restrictive mediation, active mediation, and co-playing (Nikken & Jansz, 2003, 2006; Shin & Huh, 2011). Restrictive mediation refers to the application of rules and regulations and the influence of video game purchase to manage the child’s video gaming usage. These rules include time of usage, duration of usage, and location of usage (Livingstone & Helsper, 2008). For example, a commonly imposed rule is limiting the child to playing video games only during school holidays and weekends. Parents have also been known to practice behavior contingency—allowing the child to play only after school-work or household chores are completed. Weekly or daily time quotas are also commonly imposed on children as a form of restrictive mediation. As such, active monitoring by parents is paramount in ensuring that these rules and regulations are adhered to (Nikken & Jansz, 2006). And having rules for children to play video games at home, and during which parents are present, contributes to the ease in monitoring.

Control of video game acquisition—purchasing over-the-counter or via downloading from the Internet—is also a form of parental restriction practiced by parents wanting to restrict the children’s access to unhealthy content (Oosting, IJsselsteijn, & de Kort, 2008). Typically, game classification guides and content descriptors aid parents in this selection and acquisition process (Entertainment Software Rating Board, 2011). Active mediation refers to an active effort on parents’ part to process, interpret, and translate video game content to their children (Nikken & Jansz, 2003, 2006). It is not confined to just providing factual information about the gaming content but also includes the imparting of parental values and judgment on the content in focus. Co-playing refers to playing video games with the child and is typically practiced when parents have favorable attitudes toward the game, or intend to monitor what the child is playing. The deployment of such mediation strategies suggests that parental concerns about video games center around various aspects: the nature of the content to which children are exposed (with exposure to sexual or violent content being a prime concern; Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007), the interaction opportunities which video games can facilitate (especially interactions with online strangers and sexual predators; Livingstone & Helsper, 2008), the impact that children’s excessive time commitment to games may have on their physical health, social development, and academic performance (Funk, 2009).

However, various challenges have been identified in effective parental mediation of children’s video game playing (Livingstone, 2007; Livingstone & Helsper, 2008; Nikken & Jansz, 2003, 2006). First, game devices are increasingly being located in children’s bedrooms, away from their parents’ visual radar. Second, co-using is problematic as gaming devices are designed for one person’s usage, with the screen size, mouse, and keyboard being too small for shared use. Third, opportunities for multitasking on game devices, and children’s superior technical expertise compared with their parents, affords avoidance of parental monitoring. Fourth, co-using may prove difficult for time-starved parents because it involves significant time investment to understand, learn, and play the game. Already, many parents acknowledge that they know little about video games (Oosting et al., 2008).

Thus far, we have provided a snapshot of the challenges facing parents of today, in their mediation of children’s video gaming. However, the next section will relate these challenges to the evolution of video games and our framework of key affordances.

Evolving Video Games and Affordances

The development of video games can be broadly divided into a few major eras: first-generation console (1972-1976), second-generation console (1976-1983), third- and fourth-generation consoles (1983-1995), and post-1995 (Malliet & Meyer, 2005; Prato et al., 2010). Each of these eras was marked by significant technological advancements in interface and graphic design that enabled enhancements in game design features and player activity. Beyond the game environment, the emergence of the Internet; and thereafter broadband and wireless Internet access, location-based technologies, and cloud computing; and the growing proliferation of portable telecommunication devices are key innovations which have heralded a slew of new possibilities for game design and game play options.

Among the many affordances of video games, we posit that the following affordances impinge most significantly on parents’ ability to exercise effective mediation of their children’s video game play: portability, accessibility, interactivity, identity multiplicity, sociability, and perpetuity. To this end, we explain in the following sections what each of these affordances encompasses, chart how they have evolved over time, and discuss how these changes have affected parents’ ability to restrict or actively mediate their children’s video game playing, or to even engage in parent-child co-playing.

Portability

Video games have become distinctly more portable over the years. During the first generation console era when video games first penetrated the domestic space in the early 1970s, games were played on electronic devices such as televisions or other video monitors. Although smaller than predecessors such as pinball and slot machines found at amusement parks (Prato et al., 2010), these home-based devices were by no means portable as they required power from electrical outlets, and consequently remained in fixed locations within the home. Slightly greater portability was introduced during the second generation console era when handheld gaming devices entered the market (Malliet & Meyer, 2005). However, these handhelds only had sufficient battery capacity for 15 minutes of video game playing at a time, severely limiting their portability (Malliet & Meyer, 2005). The situation would only change significantly during the era of third and fourth generation consoles when handheld game devices with smaller keys and screens such as the Nintendo Game Boy, Atari Lynx, and Sega Game Gear were introduced, and battery capacity had been considerably enhanced, ranging from 4 to 11 hours. Even so, these handhelds were fairly sizable and weighty, and carrying them around could be cumbersome. The post-1995 era then witnessed the dawn of mobile gaming, defined as games played on mobile devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, and personal data assistants (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, & Tosca, 2008). Small, light, and streamlined, these multipurpose mobile devices added a new dimension to device portability because one did not require a dedicated game machine for video games. Instead, the rising ubiquity of these personally owned mobile devices engendered an environment where almost everyone could play video games on the move if they so desired.

In addition to device portability, there is also the issue of game portability. Whereas first generation console games allowed one to play with a limited range of games that were preloaded onto the device, the second generation console era ushered in general-purpose processors in console devices that enabled users to play a larger assortment of different games stored on 8-inch interchangeable cartridges (Prato et al., 2010). Third and fourth generation consoles then offered more advanced game cartridge systems in addition to employing inexpensive and light compact discs to store the game information component, thus further enhancing game portability (Malliet & Meyer, 2005). With the advent of the Internet and the subsequent diffusion of wireless broadband connections, game devices have been largely relieved of data-processing burdens, thus facilitating the playing of more complex games on mobile devices (Prato et al., 2010). The recent emergence of cloud computing through wireless streaming has also created wider possibilities in accessing video games while on the move.

This growing portability has some distinct implications for parental mediation. Parental monitoring of video game playing within the home is considerably more difficult because the activity is no longer confined to a fixed location around which arrangements for adult supervision can be planned and executed fairly predictably. Instead, gaming devices are now located in children’s bedrooms more frequently than in the past, when game consoles tended to be placed in living rooms and other communal parts of the home (Oosting et al., 2008). Coupled with the rise of “bedroom culture” (Bovill & Livingstone, 2001, p. 179) and the trend toward personal rather than shared media devices, children’s bedrooms are now media-rich havens replete with a comprehensive array of media devices. Playing video games thus becomes yet another form of media consumption that children can engage in privately, away from parental supervision. Furthermore, the miniaturization of screen sizes and keyboards in the interest of device portability render co-playing and visual monitoring difficult (Livingstone & Helsper, 2008). Ironically, the miniaturization of video game devices was originally driven by the intention to keep children at home, playing console games, away from amusement parks where visual monitoring by parents was more challenging (Oosting et al., 2008). Instead, with miniaturization and portability, the ease with which children can play video games anytime and anywhere, away from home and their parents’ active visual monitoring, poses a challenge for restrictive and active mediation, while also minimizing opportunities for co-playing.

Accessibility

Closely linked to device and game portability is the affordance of accessibility—the ease with which one can be exposed to, come into contact with, and actually play video games. When computer game devices and personal computers required separate game components in the form of cartridges or compact discs for play, parents could exercise gatekeeping in the selection and purchase of games. Keeping pace with advancements in wireless Internet access and the growing adoption of portable media devices, video games have gone beyond dedicated game consoles or computers and are now embedded in social networking sites and Internet browsers (Klimmt, Schmid, & Orthmann, 2009), both of which are frequently used by children who use the Internet (Livingstone & Bovill, 2001).

Hence, even in households where parents refrain from purchasing game devices for their children as an exercise in restrictive mediation, children with Internet access via computers, tablets, and smartphones are able to access video games. Strategic alliances between video game developers and popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Google+ have created an online environment where social interaction with peers can expose children to and encourage them to play the free games that have been seamlessly incorporated into these sites. Similarly, many physical toys that children play with, for example, Lego and Barbie, now have companion virtual worlds on the Internet that offer free online video games (Lim & Clark, 2010). With this online “convergence of play spaces and playthings” (Lim & Clark, 2010, p. 9), children may be more drawn to these freely accessible video games and parents may also find it harder to restrict them given that these online games seem to extend and support offline play. With a growing plethora of video games being easily accessible across multiple platforms, and often available for play at no charge, parents’ ability to impose restrictive mediation via the selection and purchase of video games has also been severely undermined.

Interactivity

The interactivity of video games, broadly defined as the magnitude of control afforded to the player in his or her interaction with the game (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006; Klimmt, Hartmann, & Frey, 2007; Severin & James W. Tankard, 2010; Walkerdine, 2007), has also been greatly enhanced over the years. Salen and Zimmerman (2005) identify interactive engagements with video games in four dimensions: cognitive, explicit, functional, and beyond-the-object.

Cognitive interactivity is defined as “the psychological, emotional, and intellectual participation between a person and a system” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2005, p. 70). With game devices possessing higher processing power and screen resolution, thereby offering players a game environment that has more realistic graphics, sound, and in-game movements of player’s characters or object, the immersiveness of games has been intensified. While a more immersive game experience is not problematic in and of itself, it may exert a greater pull on the player, with consequences for greater time commitment to the game (Yee, 2006). Accompanying the heightened realism of games is greater complexity, with some video game genres evolving to become more difficult to learn and play, with role-playing games in particular having very complex rules for players to build up their own characters (Malliet & Meyer, 2005). Such games give players a purpose and mission in a storyline, thereby promoting a sense of achievement (Yee, 2006). However, the time-consuming and involving nature of such protracted gameplay limits the extent to which parents, who typically have time constraints, can exercise active mediation and co-playing because they will find it harder to comprehend how the games function (Nikken & Jansz, 2006).

Video games also have evolved in their level of explicit interactivity, defined as “participation with designed choices and procedures [with] choices, random events, dynamic simulations, and other procedures programmed into the interactive experience” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2005, p. 70). It is in the levels of explicit interactivity that the evolution of video games has seen marked changes. While explicit interactivity is not inherently problematic, there has been a discernible increase in the incorporation of violent and sexually explicit scenarios into gameplay, thereby demanding that players simulate sexual and violent acts as they interact with the game. Violence in video games has been a growing concern since the introduction of Death Race during the first generation console era. It was the first game to award players bonus points for decimating “living” creatures, thus alarming parents and policy makers through its explicit depiction of violence and igniting concerns about the morality of games and their players (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008; Malliet & Meyer, 2005). Anxieties were further heightened by the Columbine shooting of 1999, where two teenagers went on a shooting rampage using weapons similar to those in their frequently played game, Doom, with questions arising about the effects of violent video games (Funk, 2005; Herman, Horwitz, Kent, & Miller, 2002). Similarly, the inclusion of sexual simulations in games has also raised the alarm about media effects, a notable example being Grand Theft Auto, which had sexual simulations surreptitiously embedded in the game (Glater, 2008). Along with other content issues such as simulations of profanities, drug, or tobacco consumption (Entertainment Software Rating Board, 2011), these explicit simulations place a considerable burden on parental mediation, particularly given the hidden nature of some of these simulations such as in Grand Theft Auto. With the growing encroachment of mature violent and sexual content into games, parents need to exercise even greater vigilance in understanding the content and nature of games before they can decide how to calibrate their mediation efforts. This involves a more assiduous use of game ratings and conducting independent research on the scenarios that their children may encounter in gameplay. Only with such information can parents decide whether restrictive mediation, active mediation, or co-playing is the most effective strategy for supervising their children.

Over time, video games have also begun to offer richer functional interactivity: “functional, structural interactions with the material components of the system” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2005, p. 70). Notably, technological advances in screen resolution have resulted in better quality pictures that enable the development of more realistic visual perspectives for video game players (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008). This has been accompanied by the introduction of fake guns, motion control sensors, earphones, and virtual helmets, which make the gameplay experience more realistic and highly immersive (Cummings, 2007; Skalski, Tamborini, Shelton, Buncher, & Lindmark, 2011). While an immersive gameplay experience can be highly rewarding and gratifying for the individual player, it makes parental mediation more challenging on a practical level. When children play video games using devices such as virtual helmets and earphones, parents are impeded in their ability to see and hear what the players are experiencing, thus, constraining their ability to monitor and supervise gameplay.

Beyond-the-object interactivity adds yet another dimension to parental mediation of video game playing. Referring to interactions beyond the immediate gaming experience (Salen & Zimmerman, 2005), such interactivity among video game players takes place within video gaming clans, communities, and websites that center on specific games or game genres. Online communities of this nature are especially prevalent for role-playing games where players go online to exchange tips, share gaming strategies, and even transact in game-related “commodities” and paraphernalia. Indeed, there have been several instances of young people who, under pressure to excel in a game, have fallen into debt by spending exorbitant sums purchasing in-game “weapons” without their parents’ knowledge or approval (Lehdonvirta, Wilska, & Johnson, 2009; Tassi, 2012). Interacting in this extended milieu fuels the achievement factor in players, involves and encourages greater time and financial investment, and further inculcates a personal attachment to the game, contributing possibly to game addiction (Yee, 2002, 2006). In which case, additional pressure is exerted on parents to mediate not only in-game but also beyond-game activity.

Identity Multiplicity

Intertwined with the affordance of interactivity is that of identity multiplicity. Unlike simpler and more straightforward games from the first generation console era, today’s games offer increasingly rich, multilayered environments, as exemplified by massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), which enable players to assume and maintain multiple identities. For children and adolescents still in their formative stages of life, identity exploration and experimentation can be a rewarding exercise which helps them to define a sense of self (Meyers, Fisher, & Marcoux, 2009), particularly online where social pressures are diminished. Yet these virtual environments are not divorced from the players’ offline lives because online actions are shaped by and in turn shape individuals’ behavioral assumptions and attitudes (Castronova, 2005). The mutual influence between an individual’s online and offline experiences are what complicate parental mediation of children’s video game playing. Identity formation and assertion online and offline, while interconnected, involve different verbal, visual, and social cues and parents need to guide children on which cues are appropriate in which contexts, and explain how their online experiences relate to their overall development as an individual.

Sociability

Whereas the unidimensional games of the first and second generation console eras may have involved some measure of socialization centered on playing games together in a shared physical setting, games today offer social interaction of an unprecedented nature. Shortly after the world welcomed its first video game, Pong in 1972, two-player formats for play were offered (Herman et al., 2002). Second generation console games introduced multiplayer formats of play, but still kept gamers interacting within the immediate vicinity of the device. In the post-1995 era, the arrival of the Internet facilitated multiplayer formats of play with real people around the world and across different time zones (Prato et al., 2010). But such requirements of sociability raise the possibility of children interacting with strangers online, with one study finding that 33% of game players participate in online games with strangers (Mitra, 2010). At the same time, location-based technologies are being increasingly incorporated into the mobile gaming experience (Hall, 2005). With the growing incorporation of location-aware technologies into game design, players’ ability to physically track and locate other players introduces greater risk to children’s interactions with strangers online. And yet, as player-to-player interactions during video gaming is not a primary but peripheral activity, they are difficult to anticipate and monitor because of the serendipitous way in which such interactions may occur. In such circumstances, parents have to strategically allow their children to enjoy the benefits of in-game sociability, while apprising their children of the attendant risks and perhaps installing safety features to minimize these risks.

Perpetuity

Perpetuity, the ability to play a video game endlessly with no clear end in sight, was not a characteristic of first generation games that were designed to terminate after a fixed period of time or when the player had completed a discrete task. It was only during the era of the second generation console that the affordance of perpetuity was prominently introduced. Space Invaders was the first video game that had no resolute ending in that players could play interminably in pursuit of new challenges each time (Malliet & Meyer, 2005). Perpetuity significantly intensified when role-playing game genres were introduced, offering and demanding continuous play before players could see tangible results (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008).

A growing proportion of games, especially MMORPGs, are characterized by perpetuity (Yee, 2002). Even games that do come to a resounding end have sequels that game developers release in rapid succession to enable and encourage players to play interminably. With online game servers being on 24/7, players can also play online video games anywhere and anytime as long as they have wireless Internet access. Other game genres have also evolved to offer perpetuity as well. Casual games that are typically used as time-fillers between daily activities can now be suspended and returned to at any time, encouraging players to play incessantly (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008; Hjorth, 2011). In other words, even games that are not purposively designed to be played for long periods lend themselves well to prolonged play.

The main implication of the perpetuity of games for parental mediation lies in the time commitment that such gameplaying demands, raising then secondary issues of addiction (Mentzoni et al., 2011; Ng & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005). Indeed, in most MMORPGs, gameplay is “dominated by time-on-task” (Hall, 2005, p. 52), where the players who excel are the ones who dedicate the most time to developing strong in-game characters. Extant research has demonstrated the adverse impact of excessive gameplay on children’s academic performance via the time displacement effect (Hauge & Gentile, 2003). Beyond more extreme situations of excessive play and addiction, other concerns prevail about the perpetuity of games that require players to monitor the online game space throughout the day, engaging in multitasking to do so, for example, simultaneously doing homework and playing online games on the computer. There is as yet no broad agreement on the impact of multitasking, although some research suggests that online multitasking may negatively influence cognitive processing with adverse long-term effects (Kenyon, 2008). Along with the time commitment required, multitasking poses a challenge for children to accurately ascertain their own playing time. As such, restrictive mediation involving limits on gaming time will be very difficult to implement, and active mediation involving parent-child discussions on the child’s time use may not be very productive. Needless to say, a game managed through multitasking would also render parent-child co-playing impossible.

Implications for Parental Mediation

As discussed above, the evolution of video games and their enhanced affordances of portability, accessibility, interactivity, identity multiplicity, sociability, and perpetuity, have considerable implications for parental mediation of children’s video game playing, as summarized in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Summary of Implications for Parental Mediation

Affordance	Previous	Present	Implication(s)
Portability	Game devices limited to fixed locations such as arcades or living rooms	Wide range of highly portable game devices including computer game devices, personal computers, laptops, and handheld game devices and growing ubiquity of mobile telecommunication products such as mobile phones and tablet computers	Ease of anytime-anywhere game playing makes it more difficult to monitor, plan, and execute parental mediation strategies
	Game components less portable, for example, 8-inch cartridges	Emergence of wireless Internet and cloud computing for access to game information and content
Accessibility	Games can only be accessed through particular channels (e.g., arcades, consoles) and typically involved payment or purchase	Video games readily accessible over multiple channels (television, computer, mobile phone, Internet, etc.)	Parents required to monitor and mediate access on multiple channels
		Growth in market of free games in social networking sites and other online platforms	Parents’ ability to exercise gatekeeping via purchase or payment limited to particular game platforms and genres
Interactivity	Games were fairly straightforward and with limited interactivity	Games are more interactive with richer and more dynamic environments—more complex and immersive, involving role-playing through realistic simulations (sometimes of a violent or sexual nature) and beyond-game interaction	Enhanced interactivity can make games more engaging, thereby requiring greater time commitment and possibly raising the risk of addiction
			Interactivity also makes games more complex, placing an added burden on parents who wish to understand the game so as to impose supervision and offer guidance
Identity multiplicity	Games fairly simple with limited opportunities for identity experimentation	Games offer rich, multilayered environments, for example, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), thus enabling players to assume and maintain multiple identities	Identity formation and assertion online and offline, while interconnected, involve different verbal, visual, and social cues and parents need to guide children on which cues are appropriate in which contexts
Sociability	Single-player formats	Multiplayer formats with sociability encouraged, facilitated, and/or required by the game	Parents need to provide guidance on the process, nature, and risks of in-game social interaction. But such socialization is serendipitous and context-specific and parents need to invest time and energy to understand the game
Perpetuity	Games with definite endings	Games with no endings or many sequels	Considerable time commitment and multitasking required of these games may raise risks of addiction and require more assiduous parental monitoring
	No multitasking afforded as gaming devices have single purpose	Games can be played on multipurpose devices, raising opportunities for multitasking	Parents’ and players’ efforts to track time usage may prove difficult, and render restrictive/active mediation ineffective

The heightened affordances of portability, perpetuity (multitasking), and pervasiveness of video games have placed a strain on parental monitoring efforts. In an always-on, always-available, play-anywhere era, it is practically impossible for parents to have an all-encompassing appreciation of their children’s video game play activities. Restrictive mediation tactics such as imposing video game usage rules are logistically more difficult to enforce, whereas active mediation and co-playing would require considerable parental investment of time and energy that today’s time-starved parents may be unable to afford. With video games being more accessible nowadays, parents are also hard put to exercise gatekeeping in the selection and purchase of video games, thereby undermining the efficacy of another restrictive mediation tactic.

The interactivity, sociability, and identity multiplicity of video games have also heightened parents’ concerns about unsavory content in video games, for example, violence, nudity, profanity, and so on; time displacement; contact with strangers; and identity effects on the players. Yet even as parents’ anxieties about video game content grow, their ability to act on these concerns is being significantly undermined due to the relentless evolution of these video game affordances, as our preceding discussion has shown. The growing variety of platforms and channels for player-player and player-game interaction, socialization, and identity assertion have imposed a greater burden on parents who seek to supervise and guide their game-playing children. With games being far more complex and dynamic today, parents have to constantly play catch-up with their children to engage them in active mediation or co-playing. Indeed it has been observed that co-playing can only be an effective mediation strategy when the current generation of game players becomes parents themselves because only they will have the requisite experience and insights into video games (Eastin, Greenberg, & Hofschire, 2006).

Conclusion

In conclusion, this study has reviewed the evolution of video games and proposed an analytical framework which identified the affordances of portability, accessibility, interactivity, identity multiplicity, sociability, and perpetuity, as posing growing challenges for parental mediation. To the best of our knowledge, although extant research has charted significant milestones in the development of video games (see, e.g., Malliet & Meyer, 2005), no prior attempt has been made to relate the evolution of these game affordances to potential repercussions for parental mediation. However, this list of affordances is by no means exhaustive and it is likely that parents can suggest even more affordances of video games that they perceive as a strain on their mediation efforts. To this end, using our proposed framework as a point of departure, we intend to address this limitation through fieldwork involving interviews and surveys of parents and children who play video games. This issue is assuming growing importance in this era when video games are increasingly popular among children and far more accessible because of the proliferation of mobile communication devices.