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Baguio City- When parents allow cyberspace to become nannies, questionable content is bound to find its way to children.
Abet Ongkingco, a college game development professor and a developer himself said, the deeper problem is the erosion of Filipino values of caring for children, making the children open for cyber abuse, which allows the abuse in the first place.
“We have made these gadgets our babysitters,” he said, creating a situation where many children are now unsupervised.
Ongkingco traces the peak of gaming in the Philippines during the Ragnarok Online craze in 90’s. The game was a multiplayer online role-playing game created by Gravity based on Ragnarok by Lee Myung-jin. It was released in South Korea on 31 August 2002 for Microsoft Windows.
Adding to the spectacle and ease of online gaming is the fact that it has no commercials and though it started to be played in internet cafes, the birth of social media in 2004 has likewise increased accessibility to online gaming, Ongkingco said.
A survey on children and gaming
In a school in the IIocos region north of the Philippines, 56 students in the 4th and 5th grades aged 10- 11, successfully opened email accounts and registered into online game applications despite being minors.
32 students, representing 57.1% of respondents affirmed they all have personal email accounts. Thirty (30) of these children dedicate 2- 4 hours a day for online gaming, with five (5) responding that they indulge in online games for five to six hours a day. Four (4) have attested they spend 7-8 hours for gaming while eight (8) said a mere 30 minutes is given to the online recreation.
Only five (5) children said they do not play online games.
Majority of players confirmed to engage withy Roblox (62.5%), followed by Call of Duty (10.7%), Minecraft (7.1%), Mobile Legends (7.1%), Volarant (3.6%) and puzzle games (3.6%).
While Robolox is said to be a safer platform for children, adult content can still find its way to child-users and can also become a Pandoras box for cyber bullying, scammers, hackers, and online predators.
Children usually sidestep authentication questions like age by simply clicking a box, saying they are over 13 years old, leaving children like those in the Ilocos region vulnerable to receiving notifications, advertisements and susceptible to in-game chats or microtransactions.
To Be Continued
*** This story was produced under the #WebSafeandWise Media Fellowship by Probe Media Foundation Inc. (PMFI) and ChildFund Philippines. The views and opinions expressed in this piece are not necessarily those of PMFI and ChildFund Philippines.