SINGAPORE – Video games offer a space for fun and creativity, but for some people, they can become a hotbed of bullying.
Roughly one in five gamers between 13 and 18 years old feels bullied in video games by other players, according to a landmark survey on online gaming here by the authorities announced on Feb 13.
Many parents are kept in the dark – nearly half of the youth who felt bullied in games did not tell their parents, the Ministry of Communications and Information found.
Online safety advocates urge parents to familiarise themselves with games popular among youth, as well as the safety features available to them.
If you are clueless about the world of online gaming, here are some games and apps that demonstrate the issues parents should note.
Discord
Although Discord is not a game, it is the communications platform of choice for most players to facilitate voice calls while gaming. Simply put, if your children play online games on a computer, they are probably on Discord.
The platform, which has at least 150 million users, allows players to conveniently hop between chatrooms to chat with players of different games, including often-anonymous strangers in public chatrooms.
The platform has also been notorious for failing to crack down on explicit content being circulated in its endless channels. Chief executive Jason Citron was among tech bosses hauled to the United States Congress on Feb 1 to account for the proliferation of child sexual abuse materials on their platforms.
Discord introduced parental controls in late 2023, allowing parents to see who their teens are talking to and details of the servers they have joined, without giving away information about what their children are saying. Parents will first need to ask their children for a QR code to connect their accounts for supervision.
Within the settings of Discord, users can also task the app to scan and delete direct messages that contain explicit content and restrict messages to members they know.
