Get Game Smart

In a world, and time, where monitors are viewed as the hearths of many homes, Parents' Choice has long been concerned about how parents can balance the time their youngsters spend playing games on screen with playing games where screens are not required. For the past few years, Microsoft has been taking a look at how it's wildly popular Xbox business unit can be socially as well as fiscally responsible.

Microsoft invited Parents' Choice to join the conversation of how to best shape a public education effort designed to help families set and manage standards for safe, healthy, and balanced use of video games. The result?
Microsoft asked Parents' Choice, along with Best Buy and a dozen of the nation's most prominent children's media advocacy organizations, to collaborate on the launch of the Get Game Smart Campaign.  The Campaign takes a first-of-its-kind approach to helping parents and kids establish healthy habits for playing video games, watching TV and browsing the Web.

The Get Game Smart Campaign offers families simple steps to help ensure that kids are using media in ways that are safer, healthier and more balanced. The public service campaign Web site, GetGameSmart.com, brings the most current parental control tools, expert tips and resources together in an online one-stop-shop where parents and caregivers can find information they need to make educated decisions about balanced media use.

Childrens' Media News

A roundtable discussion at this event focused on what proposals, policies or practices are likely to emerge during the Obama Administration concerning children's media content and delivery. The forum was not a debate about what should happen, but rather a chance for all involved to discuss what they believe will happen: Which issues will rise to the top of the agenda, and which will fall by the wayside? Where will we see legislative or regulatory action, and where will industry focus its self-regulatory efforts? Will the Obama White House work directly to foster a dialogue on these issues, or will it leave those issues to Congress and the Federal Communications Commission? A podcast is also available. Just what makes a geek tick? How about more than 1.5 million colored Lego bricks, like full-time freelance artist Nathan Sawaya has in his New York studio? Neil Gaiman's children's novel becomes an animated stop-motion fantasy that's both creepy and seductively beautiful. Like most Hollywood kid flicks, the big-screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline boasts a big star (the voice of Dakota Fanning), an armada of digital tools, and millions of dollars in advanced animation. But that's not what makes this stop-motion, 3-D take on the dark novel so eye-popping (and possibly Oscar-worthy). Publishers, authors and even libraries are embracing video games to promote books to young readers. Video gaming is a fact of life for nearly every American teen. And a new study says it may actually be good for them. Do we know what our kids are doing online? New research from the Rochester Institute of Technology suggests that we don't — not really. Some experts are finding that kids aren't playing as much as they used to. TODAY's Meredith Vieira talks to marriage and family therapist Hal Runkel about the issue. Children lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.