Internet Bard

My husband Chris and I are both video gamers.  We have been since we were hanging out in my family room at the age of fifteen, interspersing makeout sessions with long periods of playing Super Mario Brothers together. (He refused to play Contra with me because I kept accidentally killing him in co-op mode.  I suck at first person shooters.)

Our kids are also video gamers, particularly Junior Cheeseburger, who is twelve.

We just picked up Assassin’s Creed II this last week.  We had it on reserve, because the first one was really awesome.  While the first one was rated M, it was mostly for violence.  There was some strong language sprinkled in it, but mostly towards the end.

Let’s just say that Assassin’s Creed II has fully earned it’s M rating, on pretty much any count that a parent could care about.  As Chris put it on Facebook:

“There’s some Bow Chicka Wow Wow and a lot of f-bombs in the first half hour of gameplay…”

I probably don’t need to tell you, given that the name of the game is “assassin’s creed,” that there’s also a lot of killing people in it.  I’ll go ahead and say that right now anyway: you kill a lot of people.  But in the words of Arnold Schwartzenegger in True Lies, “they were all bad.”

I’m the official “gamer mom” in my circle of friends.  I get a lot of questions from my mom friends who aren’t gamers, because they recognize that a Mature or Teen rating is fairly meaningless when it comes to deciding whether or not they’ll let their kids play a video game.

Did the game get that rating because it’s a first-person shooter and you’re spattering purple alien blood throughout it, or am I going to walk in and find Junior watching soft-core cut scenes? (Thank you, Mass Effect.)

Inquiring moms want to know, but they often don’t have the personal interest in video games or the 40+ hours of free time to devote to playthrough to find out for themselves.

So that’s what’s prompted this post. As a blogger, I find tend to be fairly good at three different kinds of posts:

• funny riffs on life and pop culture
• introspective psychological/spiritual essays
• extremely practical informative posts

I’ve been kind of light on the last category lately, partly because I’ve been manic-depressively bouncing between hilarity and introspection in real life.  But also, partly because I’ve had a hard time finding “helpful/informative” topics to write about that haven’t been covered to death.

So I will probably start posting some reviews of video games for my online mom friends who don’t want to save the galaxy to figure out whether or not their kid should play the game at the top of his or her Christmas list.

Any interest? Drop a comment.

P.S.  Just found a Ning network full of other Gamer Moms.  I’m joining it.  If you found this post via a search for “gamer mom” you might be interested, too.

“Ms Pacman” img courtesy miz_ginevra on flickr

assassins creed 2, gamer mom, parenting, video games