XBox 360 and XBox Live Parental Controls
I recently came across a post at Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog about students exchanging XBox Live gamer tags. Vicki was concerned about allowing students to do this based on safety issues. I posted a comment pointing out that both Microsoft provides a variety of ways to make gaming safe for children. Vicki expressed interest in learning more, and that turned into an email detailing how to enable parental controls. Vicki posted that email with my permission, and I'm cross posting a slightly modified version here as well.
There are two ways to configure your XBox 360's family controls. One has to do with offline play and one has to do with XBox Live (online play).
For off-line play, parents can change some settings such as what ESRB rated games or MPAA rated games can be played on the 360, and then they set a password.
Anyone trying to play a game or movie rated higher than the allowed rating must know the password to proceed. These settings protect your children from offline content on their 360 console. More information can be found at Microsoft's Console Family Settings page.
The second way parents can protect their children is by configuring their XBox Live settings. I did some testing of this on my own console.
When you create a new XBox Live account, you are asked for your date of birth. If you are younger than 18, you must have a parent or guardian complete your account creation. That person must enter their credit card information, and must create a Windows Live Account (formerly known as a Passport account). That account is then used to configure the parental controls for online play.
If you want to configure parental controls for XBox Live after creating an account, navigate to the System Blade of the 360 dashboard. You then choose XBox Live Controls. The 360 will check for any child accounts on the console (accounts where the date of birth makes the account owner younger than 18). If you have such an account, you can then configure the options for it. You need to know your Windows Live information to do this. The things you can configure include the following:
- whether or not your child can hear the voice of people not on their friends list
- whether or not a child can add friends to their list without their approval
- whether or not your child can view and share their own and other people's gamer profiles
Microsoft provides a lot of information about configuring Parental controls on their website at http://www.xbox.com. Using these controls can make gaming a safer experience for children.
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