On July 8, 2024 the United States celebrates National Video Game Day. To celebrate, FOSI asked its video game member companies about all things online safety and video games. Sarah Guerrero, Privacy Counsel for NetEase Games, had the following advice to share.
What is your #1 piece of online safety advice for parents of young gamers?
Play games with your kids! Not only do you get to spend quality time together – this also gives you a better understanding of what games they enjoy playing and how they play them.
As a video game company, how do you strive to prioritize online safety?
Keeping our players safe means understanding who our players are and how they play our games. We focus on providing content and features that are appropriate to the specific audience of each game and that foster positive community building, like establishing clear community standards, implementing reporting systems, and providing players with options to manage their privacy settings.
What advice do you have for wary parents whose kids would like to get into gaming?
There’s a wide variety of options for different games, genres, playstyles, devices, and content out there. The first step to ensuring a safe and positive gaming experience is to understand the specific games that a kid might be interested in playing. Game ratings like the ESRB or PEGI can help parents identify age-appropriate content for their child, and many game developers and publishers offer parental controls that help parents manage their kids’ gaming experience.
The future of tech looks a bit different than the world we are in now. As AI and genAI become more common in video games and elsewhere, how should parents and kids navigate these changes? Is there anything potentially unsafe they should look out for?
It’s important to help kids understand that AI and genAI technologies are just tools. They can be very useful, but they also have their limitations. And like any tool, they can be misused. Parents should be aware at a basic level of how the tools work and how they are used in games (such as generating content or creating NPCs). Because AI can be used to create misleading information that appears very realistic, teaching kids to critically evaluate online content and not to trust everything they see can go a long way to avoiding potential misinformation.
And finally, just for fun, what’s your favorite video game, and why?
Here at NetEase, we’ve been playing a lot of Eggy Party, where players must run, jump, dash, roll, and whack their way through a variety of colorful obstacle courses and arenas to prove they’re the top “eggy” in town.. It’s a family-friendly, light-hearted, and action-packed game that’s easy to pick up whether you’re a gaming veteran or brand new to video games.
Sarah is Privacy Counsel for NetEase Games, where she leads privacy and safety initiatives for global game studios. Previously, she was a regulatory and litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP and was the first product and privacy counsel at gaming startup Playco. Sarah holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Stanford University, as well as CIPP/E and CIPT certifications from the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Your information will be subject to a different privacy policy that we recommend you review. FOSI has no control over the content of an external site.
.svg)
