The Government of India has the right reasons to be concerned about game addiction in children, them being exposed to unmonitored in-game purchases, age-inappropriate content and online harassment.

Fortunately, the video games industry has already been forced to follow stringent child safety and online privacy protection via international regulations like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) governed by the USA’s Federal Trade Commission and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This has resulted in the creation of family-friendly and child-safe gaming spaces across the globe irrespective of the platform in which the video games are consumed.

Expended below is the outline on which these safeguards work,

In the game industry “Platform Holder” is a name given to an intermediary that owns and operates an ecosystem in which the video games are distributed, marketed, downloaded, played, reviewed or maybe refunded etc. As video games are accessed on the platform holder's hardware-software ecosystem, they have powerful enforcement capabilities.

• In mobile gaming, the platform holders are Play Store owned by Google (Android) and App Store owned by Apple (iOS).
• In console gaming, the platform holders are the PlayStation Store owned by Sony, the Microsoft Store for Xbox and the Nintendo eShop.
• In PC gaming, the platform holders are Steam owned by Valve Corporation, Epic Game Store owned by Epic Games, Microsoft Store etc.

Together these platform holders have created exhaustive parental control features and have made them available to parents and guardians via a family account setup on the devices along with a connected mobile app to prevent gaming addiction among children and limit their exposure to in-game purchases, inappropriate content and online harm [5] by following four measures,

Anti-Addiction Measures

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• Activity Reports - Automatically generates daily and weekly reports of time spent by children on games and sends them to the parent/guardian accounts (the family account owner)
• Screen Time - Helps parents/guardians in enforcing gameplay times by preparing scheduled timers for playing video games on a daily/weekly basis
• Pause - Helps parents/guardians in pausing scheduled timers and blocking access to video games temporarily.
• Screen Time Notification - Pop-ups to inform the children a couple of minutes before their scheduled timer expires or to generally inform gamers with a pop-up of how much time they have spent playing a game.

Unmonitored Game Purchase Measures

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• Purchase Permissions - Minors will not be able to purchase on their own without authorization from the family account owner via the two-factor passcode system.
• Child Account Balance - Children's accounts can be set up with prepaid wallets that can be credited with money from the family account owner and thus the parents/guardians can access and view their children’s account balance on demand.
• Spending Limits - Family account owners can set monthly limits to the maximum money that can be spent on video games by their children.
• Spend Reports - Spending history will be reported to the family account owner.

Age-Appropriate Content Restriction Measures

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Like movies and series, video games come with age-rating certificates as well, India follows global standards like PEGI [6] and IARC [7] guidelines for rating video games. Despite video games carrying clear certificates the awareness of such mechanisms is low among consumers and even regulators in India.

But due to the age ratings certificates on every video game, the following parental controls can be leveraged -

• Age Restriction Setup - Child accounts can be set up to allow only age-appropriate video games. Parents/guardians will be able to set up the age category for the child's account and the games that do not meet the age category will not load up.
• Browser Restriction Setup - Enables restricting access to unsuitable websites, search results and social media.

Online Anti-Harassment Measures

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Many popular multiplayer & social games can be played by children too as they do not have mature content that demands a higher age rating certificate. Still, a multiplayer environment poses a potential for privacy intrusions and exposure to online harassment, bullying and abuse as dozens of gamers are connected online while playing these games. Fortunately, the video game platforms come with the following safeguards to prevent this,

But due to the age ratings certificates on every video game, the following parental controls can be leveraged -

• Chat Filtering - Automatically detects profane language and hate speech and censors it in textual communications.
• Chat Settings - Textual, Voice and Video communications will be turned off by default with options to opt-in. Settings can be propped in a way to limit who can chat ranging from nobody to friends & teammates or everyone. Parents can also override and disable chat functionality or allow it on a case-by-case basis to protect their children from potential harm.
• Friends List Oversight - Family account owners can check the friend list of their children with options to remove friends or set up an “Ask a Parent” feature to authorise their kids on every friend request they send.
• Social Sharing Features - It is common for gamers to share screenshots and progress from the video games but there are options available to the family account owners to limit and restrict what their children can share online on a per-video game basis.
• User Reporting Features - Multiplayer and social games are built-in with easily accessible settings that can be instantly called up on-demand to block, mute or report other gamers even in the middle of an active game session or after the game session is over from the settings or user profile pages.
• Profile Privacy Features - The privacy level of the children’s gamer profile/bio can be adjusted and limited by the family account owners.

Based on the exhaustive ecosystem and platform-level interventions that are available, it is evident that there’s a concerted and standardized set of global frameworks that are actively in place to protect children from potential ill effects that the Government of India is concerned about. It should be noted that consumers directly deal with intermediaries/platform holders for interventions such as refunds, user reporting etc as they are the ones to resolve the consumer grievances in the interests of their ecosystem.

The awareness of such parental control measures and their usage is limited amongst parents in India and India, keeping this in mind we recommend the Government to synergize with platform holders to increase the awareness of Family Apps and parental control features amongst consumers