Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Managing Summer Holiday Video Games
1 Plays3 seconds ago
The school holidays take down every fence that term time builds around gaming, and the companies behind your child's favourite games plan for those six weeks the way supermarkets plan for Christmas.
This year that means a Fortnite battle pass that runs out on the 19th of August and a summer event in Grow a Garden, now the biggest game on Roblox, with a reward that asks for attendance six days in every seven.
In this episode I cover how to agree the shape of the summer in week one, and the console settings worth switching on before the first argument. There's a way of finishing sessions that doesn't end in a row, and a warning about the free Robux scams currently dressed up as official summer events.
And there's the good bit, the games worth playing together whilst you've got the time, because the industry has planned its summer around your children and it's worth planning yours around them.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:11
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening. Whenever you are, or welcome to the Dopamine Slot Machine, the podcast that discusses what you need to know about the video games your children are playing. How are they designed to get your kids hooked? How do they make money from your children? and What can you do to make sure that your childhood relationship with video games is a positive one? My name is Andrew, I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer.
Managing Video Games During Summer Breaks
00:00:30
Andrew Wilmot
Now, the schools have just broken up and I've started to see some questions in WhatsApp groups about how to handle video games over the summer. I say just broken up. my My daughter actually has a last day today. Son's got his last day tomorrow. But um also, if you've been in Scotland, summer's already started, right? So I'm um'm super late there. But...
00:00:50
Andrew Wilmot
I wanted to cover how to manage video games over the summer holidays. It's something that we've given a lot of thought to. It's something that I've been on the receiving end of as a child myself. And so first, just get out of the way, I'm not going to tell you to ban gaming for six weeks.
00:01:04
Andrew Wilmot
I myself am a lifelong gamer. I've got some quite fond childhood memories of spending the odd long summer day with a controller in hand with my mates. And if you've been listening for a while, you know that there are some genuinely lovely games that you can share with your kids.
Impact of Holidays on Gaming Habits
00:01:20
Andrew Wilmot
problem that a lot of parents have over the summer is all of the sort of scaffolding all the routine is taken away the holidays take down every fence that term time builds around gaming and increasingly the people who make games know about this and they're taking advantage of that so in term time right you've got that structure uh for free schools and clubs eat up most of the day at school Bedtime sort backstops the evening. Kids have to be up, which means they've got to go to bed.
00:01:54
Andrew Wilmot
Games, if your child is playing games, have to then fit into the gaps. Problem is the holidays then arrive and the whole day becomes one long gap. If you've not got anything planned or if you're working, it's really easy for your kid to end up spending double figures hours per day on a video game.
Engagement Strategies in Games
00:02:10
Andrew Wilmot
And the games industry plans for the school holidays the way supermarkets plan for Christmas. Modern live service games such as Fortnite, such as the games on Roblox, Marvel Rivals, etc, etc. They run on daily rhythms.
00:02:24
Andrew Wilmot
Daily quests that reset every 24 hours. Login rewards that build into streaks. Where missing a day means losing quite a lot. On a school day, that's a small ask. In the holidays, there's an invitation to build the whole day around the game.
00:02:38
Andrew Wilmot
And then there's summer events. So a lot of these big games have named summer events most years. Fortnite has won a named summer event since 2019's 14 Days of Summer. This year's one that's just finished was called Gone Wild, which was a fortnight in late June, where new collectible creatures called sprites were dropping every Thursday, with timed windows, mastery Mondays, et cetera, et cetera.
00:03:03
Andrew Wilmot
Mastery Mondays being when the rarer finds were more likely. This finished a couple of weeks ago, but there's another so ah the season that belongs to runners still keeps it with them going, and that battle pass runs out on the 19th of August, right in the middle of the holidays. Anything left unearned, by the way, if your child does have that battle pass, anything left unearned when the clock hits zero is gone.
00:03:27
Andrew Wilmot
The child who paid for that pass nags you into paying for it is going to be thinking about that countdown every day. It's urgent, right? It is a deadline in the way that we might experience through work. Roblox works differently, so the platform itself stays quiet over summer.
00:03:42
Andrew Wilmot
But the big experiences introduce these summer events. Grow Gardens launched its summer event in the first week of July and has added a new part every Saturday since.
00:03:54
Andrew Wilmot
So many of these games will be on the hour, every hour that children have to log in and harvest rewards. For Grow Garden, one of the event seeds only unlocks if the harvest goal gets hit on six days out of seven.
00:04:08
Andrew Wilmot
So just to sit with that for a moment, an event running through the so school holidays has a prize that asks for attendance six days a week.
00:04:19
Andrew Wilmot
Adopt Me and Brookhaven are running week-long updates back to back through July. This is just pure attention design. It's doing exactly what it was built to do. And it is structuring itself around your child's school holidays.
00:04:32
Andrew Wilmot
Then there's the journeys and the spare time. so Holidays are when gaming quite frequently migrates onto phones and tablets rather than you know a PlayStation in the living room or a family desktop.
00:04:45
Andrew Wilmot
Long car journeys, a week cut to the grandparents with the consoles left at home. well I've spoken before about why phones and tablets are just the worst form factor for children's gaming.
00:04:56
Andrew Wilmot
From the push notifications to the fact that the device follows them to bed, to the bathroom and everything. And then you combine that with the way that games companies push these events during the summer makes this a really quite um a difficult time to manage.
Setting Gaming Rules with Kids
00:05:11
Andrew Wilmot
So with that context all set, knowing that the structure is gone during the summer, knowing that games companies are going to be trying to take advantage of your children during this time, and knowing that the shift towards mobile devices can actually make established routines quite hard to keep, what can you do?
00:05:32
Andrew Wilmot
So the most useful thing is really the most boring. Agree about what someone's going to look like in the first few days together before the arguments start. So rules will be different for every family. You could say that, you know, no gaming until you've had breakfast, brushed your teeth, your pyjamas on, regardless of what you're doing in the day. So even if you've got nothing planned that day, saying the games consoles don't turn on until after a set time.
00:06:00
Andrew Wilmot
In the past, we've said that you are absolutely not gaming until you've brushed teeth, you've got your clothes on, you've had breakfast, and it's gone midday. So there is at least a window where they've got to occupy themselves without a console.
00:06:17
Andrew Wilmot
Trying to set those rules, by the way, mid-match in the evening with the controller in hand, that's that's hostage negotiation. That is the worst possible time. If if you are like jumping in being like, right, you've been on this console for eight hours, you are quitting right now, and they're in the middle of a match, they're going to kick off. They're going to be quite angry with it It's confrontational rather than collaborative, and that is just not the tone to set with these sorts of things.
00:06:42
Andrew Wilmot
So have a conversation over breakfast in the first week. Get the kids involved. Get them on board with the the rules you're going to be stick sticking by. And I sort of hinted at this.
00:06:53
Andrew Wilmot
What you don't really want is a stopwatch. Here's your allotted time. once it's done, it's done. But instead, a set of anchors, right? time Predictable times a day when gaming happens and times when it doesn't.
00:07:05
Andrew Wilmot
So, as I mentioned, not before everybody's dressed and fed, but also potentially not everything anything in the hour before bedtime. Keep devices out of bedrooms, which if you've listened to a few of my episodes before, you'll know that's a hill that I will die on.
00:07:20
Andrew Wilmot
This is better than minute counting because it enforces itself. If you have a daily minutes allowance, then you've got to be the referee of every single session. And that... you know, six weeks, 42 days of sessions between the end of one term and the start of the next.
00:07:34
Andrew Wilmot
That's a lot of times you've been refereeing. That's putting the the onus on you. By instead doing a structural approach, then you don't need to get into the weeds of, oh, you know, I actually haven't had this amount of time because although I left the console on, I went and did x y z Now, all three console makers makers do give fairly decent tools to manage this, right? They can set limits as to how long you play, um with a choice between the console plot, you nagging them when time's up or actually suspending the game.
00:08:08
Andrew Wilmot
Family management on the PlayStation, for instance, can give a monthly spending cap as well. So if you do go down the sort of hours budget route, then there are some good tools to manage that.
Risks of In-Game Purchases and Scams
00:08:22
Andrew Wilmot
One thing I would also say is when it is coming to the end, instead of being like, all right, you can have five more minutes, let it be to the end of a milestone. If it's a round-based multiplayer game, then let them finish the round, and then that to be the hard stop.
00:08:36
Andrew Wilmot
Because if you say, let's say you say, oh you can play for half an hour more, and they finish a game, and then get 15 minutes into the next one. Well, that's a bit like cutting off an episode mid-flow. Whereas if you had just said, when you finish this game, then that provides a much more natural end point.
00:08:56
Andrew Wilmot
Whilst you're in those menus, it's a really good opportunity to sort out any spending settings. So, some are on the board and you know they might have accumulated some spending money at this point.
00:09:09
Andrew Wilmot
then you might be starting to get some of that pressure to start spending on in-game items, to let them spend their money on this. Now, firstly, I would say don't. Just don't. Do not allow that. In fact, I go as far as to say that you should be actively avoiding games where it's even possible to do that. So sticking to premium games, paid offline experiences, just as a general rule. But for those of you who have given your child something like Fortnite or Roblox, then making sure devices are set up to disable purchases from the front, or if you are going to allow purchases, um set them with tight spending limits, is very much a must.
00:09:52
Andrew Wilmot
um One thing to warn about as well, summer is high season for the free Robux scams. There's one that I've seen doing the rounds right now that's dressed up as an official Roblox summer event. It asks for your child's username, fees through a funnel of app in installs and sign-ups, and that pays for people running it. There is no free Robux. There is never any free Robux.
00:10:11
Andrew Wilmot
Same with V-Bucks, et cetera, et cetera. And any site offering some is lying to your child. And so it's worth having that conversation as well. So the day-to-day.
00:10:24
Andrew Wilmot
Right, I've covered, you know, how to finish that time, saying the one more game. ah but And i just to dive into that a little bit more, five male minutes that means nothing inside the game, but something like two more races does.
00:10:36
Andrew Wilmot
In those sorts of match-based games, you can't pause Fortnite. And dragging a child out mid-match means making them abandon in their squad, which in their world is a genuinely rotten thing to do to people. So agreeing that last match before it starts in ways that they understand stops the switch off from being an ambush.
00:10:54
Andrew Wilmot
And secondly, let them be bored. Games console shouldn't be the go-to solution for boredom. Boredom's not an emergency. it isn't one It isn't something that needs resolving with the screen.
00:11:07
Andrew Wilmot
It's usually what happens just before kids start inventing something, inventing a way to entertain themselves. What we can fix, though, is the friction in the house. So, as mentioned before, console should sit in the front room, plugged in.
00:11:22
Andrew Wilmot
If the Lego lives in the loft and the bikes live behind the deck chairs in the shed, the console is going to win every time just because it's easy to get to. So setting up frictionless alternatives ah to to video gaming is an absolute must.
Bonding Through Gaming
00:11:37
Andrew Wilmot
Third, and this is a really good bit and your kids are going love this, play the video games with them. The holidays are the one stretch of the year when... Hopefully, and I appreciate it's tough for working working families, families where both parents are working, like ours, for what it's worth.
00:11:53
Andrew Wilmot
Holidays should be one stretch of time. When you are able to make the time, you can let them stay up a little bit later, where you've not having your whole life tick, tick, tick to the routine of homework, school runs, and the dinner, bath, bed rush.
00:12:11
Andrew Wilmot
You can sort of lay off the pedal a little bit. When friends come over, something like split-screen Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is amazing. I've got a whole ah episode just on that.
00:12:22
Andrew Wilmot
Cat Quest as well is still the best co-op starting point I know for younger kids. Or pick a summer project game, something slow and buildable. A Minecraft world with your child. Avoid the public servers. I have to say that every time I mention Minecraft, avoid the public servers. If you are going to be doing any sort of online play, make that be in a Minecraft-run server that you are in charge of.
00:12:44
Andrew Wilmot
But sit with them, learn their games, ask them to teach you and let them show off. Let them sort of have that role reversal where they are the person teaching you how to play those games. Unless you're already a gamer, in which case you probably have loads of games that you're keen to show them and already have a good sense of what ah what' sort of games you want to be playing over the summer.
00:13:06
Andrew Wilmot
And whilst you're sat there, you can have those conversations. You get to know about the way their games work, about are things to be concerned about.
00:13:17
Andrew Wilmot
You do that consistently over the summer. One, you've got a great bonding activity. it shifts gaming from being this with displacement activity to fill the time to being a genuine positive experience between you and your kids.
00:13:30
Andrew Wilmot
And come September, you'll be making decisions about these games, whether that's about money or about time, that you are really informed by because you will have spent that time putting the hours with your child to be able to understand that.
00:13:45
Andrew Wilmot
So some much more practical advice now and some games that I would recommend to looking at that I really, really enjoy. And I'm actually going to recommend ones that aren't just co-op games. I have in the past really focused on games that you can sit and play with your kids because I think it's fantastic.
00:14:02
Andrew Wilmot
few I've mentioned already, Minecraft, Cat Quest, Tony Hawk's, Brill, Trine as well, the Trine series, absolutely worth looking into. But some single player games that are really positive. Zelda Breath of the Wild and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.
00:14:15
Andrew Wilmot
They're long games, yep. And so it can be quite easy to fall into a naturally long session, but these games are works of art. And they're long not because of any sort of addictive design or predatory mechanics.
00:14:26
Andrew Wilmot
They're long because they're full of quality content. You know, Oppenheimer, right? Oppenheimer is a hell of a long film. um But watching that for three hours is very different to watching TikToks for three hours, even if it's watching a video for the same length of time.
00:14:42
Andrew Wilmot
For older children, particularly if they like a challenge, something that can both absorb time but give them an obstacle to surmount, something like the Dark Souls series or Elden Ring is absolutely fantastic. Although, just to reiterate, those games are infamous for their difficulty. I happen to have some opinions on whether that difficulty is real or not, but might be a little bit too much for younger players. For older children who can handle...
00:15:12
Andrew Wilmot
more mature themes, and I am talking, you know, sex, etc. Baldur's Gate 3, Clare Obscure, Expedition 33 are both amazing single-player RPGs. Baldur's Gate 3, you can actually sort of play play with somebody so and have them drop in and out. So that might be actually be a good candidate for cooperative games and other cooperative games to consider playing with your child over the summer.
00:15:38
Andrew Wilmot
It Takes Two, kind of cartoony there, but it does deal with topics such as the you know divorce and parent splitting and the impact on a child. So again, keep in mind the maturity level of your child there. Split fiction, which is by the same developers of It Takes Two,
00:15:54
Andrew Wilmot
is Again, brilliant, does tackle some mature themes. And I don't want to go into those too much because it's bit of a spoiler for the story. But, you know, grief, death, et cetera, et cetera, how we process it.
00:16:06
Andrew Wilmot
But either of those games, if you've got got a kid that's sort of 12, 13, probably not much younger than that, to be honest, those games are are brilliant. And your kid will love playing those with you.
00:16:18
Andrew Wilmot
But finally, I'll leave you with a thought that's been rattling around my head as I've been putting this together.
Planning for Positive Gaming Experiences
00:16:23
Andrew Wilmot
The companies behind your child's favourite games have summer plans with names and deadlines.
00:16:29
Andrew Wilmot
But yours doesn't need anything so elaborate. A couple of anchors and a couple of games that you agree that you'll play together will do. The industry has planned it somewhere around your children. and But once you know about that, you can start to combat it.
00:16:46
Andrew Wilmot
Go into the summer with a plan, with boundaries, And, you know, it is fine to relax the term time boundaries a little bit and take advantage of the time.
00:16:58
Andrew Wilmot
Same way you might ah be watching more films together, that sort of thing. But let it be planned. Let it be proactive rather than reactive. Let gaming be an activity that your child gets to look forward to rather than a way to fill out all of the time.
Listener Engagement and Next Episode Invitation
00:17:17
Andrew Wilmot
But for now, don't forget that if you've got any questions for me or if you or your children have been impacted by any these issues, that you can get in touch with us on the website, the DopamineSlotMachine.co.uk. I'm, of course, in a number of smart-in-free childhood WhatsApp groups and love getting any questions. So feel free to reach out if you come across me. That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining. I'd love to have you here again in our next episode.
00:17:40
Andrew Wilmot
This has been the Dopamine Slot Machine. Thank you and see you soon.