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Left 4 Dead. At what age can your children play it?


donssword

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Okay, so I'm in the Steam Family Sharing Beta. I really look forward to Family Sharing saving me some money because I got 3 Steam users in my house--me and my two teens. We have mostly Macs, and 1 Windows laptop. I'm drooling over the prospect of the upcoming Steam Machine (Steam Box for you oldseters).

 

I buy all the Humble Bundle deals, and lots of Steam sale games, which has included a few Mature titles like Left 4 Dead, Telltales' The Walking Dead, Alan Wake, and Dead Space.

 

I'm fine with my kids playing most FPS titles--we play Nexuiz, Xonotic, TimeSplitters 2 & 3, Goldeneye 007 Wii, Conduit 2 (the Wii is as modern as I have gotten). They have on occasion, though rarely, watched me play CoD Modern Warfare Reflex Ed on the Wii (a highly underated game, IMHO), as I usually do not play games in front of my kids, waiting until after bedtime. I would not allow them to play a Silent Hill game at this time, though I would consider the request from my soon to be 16 y.o. I also would avoid letting them play Dead Space, but I would allow the 16 y.o. to play Dead Space Extraction co-op (overall presentation, story, content detail). I would not allow them to play or watch House of the Dead Overkill (though I played a lot of it myself).

 

Getting to my real question:

My 13 y.o. is a heavy gamer. Lots of Minecraft, WoW, Planetside, TF2. He watches all the gamer videos, Pew Dee Pie (sp?), Yogscast, etc. A lot of those YouTube gamers cover Mature titles, incl games like GTA V (which I am not too happy about). In digging thru my Steam Library, my 13 y.o. saw Left 4 Dead, and has asked to play it. I spent some time playing it myself and found it fairly tame--just an FPS with bots running at you. The overall "hideousness" of it seemed sort of tame--rather the game relies more on inducing panic by throwing hoards of unpredictable enemies at you. At what age would you allow you own kids to play Left 4 Dead?

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I let my kid watch me play Ninja Gaiden (Black) around 8 and I waited for scary\gory games like Resident Evil (5) until she was about 10.

 

She's 11 now and plays Black Ops II and I wouldnt have a problem with her playing Left4Dead. I think around 6th grade is OK but that's just me.

 

All kids are different but mine can handle most of anything right now.

 

Steam family is going to rock. She still prefers Minecraft and her iPad though.

Edited by cimerians
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I would have to say it depends on the maturity of your child, not necessarily age. My daughter has been a fan of Zombies for years. We started out playing RE and have played many other zombie games with adult content when she was 12. One if which was left 4 dead. She is going to be 16 soon and she still plays zombie games with her dad.

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Good answers. I'm leaning towards "yes" at this point.

 

While my kids are not fans of TV or film horror, they are very game savvy. We homeschool, for no particular reason--not for religious reasons, mostly because we live in the city and my kids are dyslexic. He plays D&D (Basic Fantasy RPG, which is an OSR-like based on the D20 SRD). They have seen all the Matrix films recently, minus the sex scene, I "may" show them the orig version of Blade Runner (less boobs, and less head crushing) this weekend as we recently read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep."

 

We tend to monitor a lot of the content they are around, and we don't allow them to go see R-rated or horror films (excluding the recent viewing of the Matrix films).

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. He plays D&D (Basic Fantasy RPG, which is an OSR-like based on the D20 SRD).

 

My daughter loves D&D and we played a bit last year. A mix of the old Basic set with some D20 type stuff thrown in. Currently we are looking at other basic set games and its nice to see many of them now out there.

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Don't forget, if the zombies are too gruesome for your taste, there are mods in the Steam Workshop where you can change the common infected to the martians from Mars Attacks, Xenomorphs models from AvP2, and even the warrior bugs from Starship Troopers. There's even a mod to change the blood color to match the Xenomorphs.

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This is a tough question to answer, mainly because you seem to be somewhat strict. (Not saying this is bad or good) The whole homeschool thing in general sort of suggests that you could care less about how others do their parenting, which makes it puzzling why you'd ask others.

 

At 15/16, yes, I'd let my daughter play Left 4 Dead.

 

"Different strokes", however. My sister allowed my nephew to start watching Walking Dead at like 13, which is pretty much live action L4D. I personally can't wait for my daughter, who is 3, to start being able to pay attention to programming that is not animated, and is longer than 20 minutes long. When that time comes, theres going to be a blowout of Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, and, yeah even Blade Runner coming her way. I figure she'll be 6 when that happens. When she can understand "Don't tell your mom" I'll be showing her Aliens.

 

My folks gave up on sheltering me from this stuff early, to the point where today I'm surprised it happened. My dad took me to see Sudden Impact and The Terminator in the theatres. I was 10. I saw Alien, Jaws, and Blade Runner when I was about 7.

 

So yeah, while I say it's all good, I'll also say take all this advice from us with a grain of salt, and do what you ultimately feel is right. We don't know you or your child.

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While the game seems to have a very loud group of fans who enjoy it, I don't really think its worth playing at all. It's basically "on rails" and offers almost nothing in the way of exploration or discovery. Even the "teamwork" aspect of the game falls short for me as it just ends up being an exercise in trying to avoid shooting your friends in the back.

 

I say let your child play the game and she will be bored and never go back. You'll probably spend more time thinking about and preparing her for it than she will actually playing the game.

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My daughter loves D&D and we played a bit last year. A mix of the old Basic set with some D20 type stuff thrown in. Currently we are looking at other basic set games and its nice to see many of them now out there.

Totally check out Basic Fantasy. The rule book is available as a free PDF, and you can buy the paperback at Amazon (createspace which is Amazon) for a little over $4.00. Yes, I said $4.00.

 

Grab the PDF here:

http://www.basicfantasy.org/

 

... and then grab the paperback here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1482355124/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&tag=atariage&creativeASIN=1482355124&linkCode=as2

 

What makes Basic Fantasy great, is that it brings D&D B/X up to D20. What sold me was that my kids could play in the old school way, while playing D20, so they could transfer those play styles to other old school games, or to D20 derivatives like Pathfinder, and still feel comfortable.

 

At the BFRPG site, they have modules and rule addendums (new classes and races), and an active community.

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When they're old enough to play it without getting nightmares, they're old enough to play it.

 

Agreed. I think my concern as a parent would be access to sexual content rather than violence (my father let me rent M rated games from a very early age - however, I was not allowed to rent games with strong language or sexual content.) If your child is old enough to recognize the difference between fake and real violence I don't believe it would be a problem.

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Agreed. I think my concern as a parent would be access to sexual content rather than violence (my father let me rent M rated games from a very early age - however, I was not allowed to rent games with strong language or sexual content.) If your child is old enough to recognize the difference between fake and real violence I don't believe it would be a problem.

 

I've never understood the hangup on sexual content over violence. I suppose there could be some extra legal issues. I can kind of understand a hangup over violent content, but it's not really anything I've been 'big' on.

 

Full disclosure, however--I don't plan on having children, and have seen nothing in left 4 dead that's tempted me to play it. Left 4 dead appears to have a somewhat lighter violence common to video gaming, movies and tv. Nobody has sat down and attempted to make something that's uncomfortable to play in this case. No doubt they've already seen every 'horror' the game has to offer on youtube.

 

I will mention that at a fairly young age (11-12 or so) I played the game Dreamweb which had some very mature themes. It greatly changed the way I look at the world in what I'd consider a positive way. Certainly no regrets there, it's one of my stronger childhood memories.

Edited by Reaperman
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I've never understood the hangup on sexual content over violence.

Indeed. In a sane world violence would be considered much more harmful than sex. Because it is. Honestly, the sexual content you have to worry about isn't even graphic. e.g. I watched Twilight (Hey! it was the Rifftrax!), and the attitudes about relationships in those movies are really, really unhealthy, worse than a lot of pornography. I see the same sort of thing with violence. Watching a zombie's head explode doesn't really harm anyone. Watching the talking heads on Fox clamber for war as if it were some sort of sporting event, that will seriously damage people.

Edited by Hatta
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Depends on the kids, but personally, I'd hold off on scary and violent stuff as long as possible. I watched a lot of horror movies when I was a kid, and seeing Jaws too young STILL has a lingering effect on me (I'm 40 now). There's no rush - it's not like they're going to get any life lessons from these games, it's just entertainment, so why push it? You can't unsee things, so I'd err on the side of waiting if you have doubts.

 

My son is 4 so video games aren't even in the equation yet, but I'm going to keep Teen and Mature games away as long as possible. That said, your kids are you kids, so only you know where they're at developmentally.

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I've played Left 4 Dead and the box says 17+, it depends heavily of the environment. I think a mature 13-years old could play it under parent advice, while a easily scared/emotive teen should not play it.

 

Some days ago I went to a Blockbuster to buy some movies and three kids like 8-10 years old accompanied by their mom were checking also for movies, mom shout "who wants to see World War Z?", I saw the kids yelling "yes", the poor kids had pale and scared-like faces, I was almost going to shout "shame on you" to the mother. Very unfortunate, there are things that aren't for kids.

Edited by nanochess
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Well as a 16 year old Teen myself It all depends on if they are mature enough to play it and if they will simulate the acts in real life.If they know that it's just a game then you should have no problem letting them play it but if they get influenced and simulate what they hear or see in Video games/movies/music then you might want to wait a little longer because you don't want your kids to rob or kill someone and say he was a "zombie" now do ya?

Edited by xDragonWarrior
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He's in deep L4D2 now. So much so, that I migrated his Steam Family save to a copy of his own since its on sale for $4.99 right now, and everytime I wanted to get into Steam, he was already playing.

 

He hasn't started running around the neighborhood with weapons screaming about zombies (yet), so I think it all turned out okay ;-)

 

Thanks for the input/feedback everyone.

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