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Pop-Up Gaming Surgery with Drew Family

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We visited the Cribbs Causeway Bristol Game Store to talk to families and offer advice in our Pop-up Family Gaming Surgery. Here is the first of the episode from Bristol on Family Gamer TV -- catch the other videos here.

Today we talked to the Drew family who were in store looking for games for Christmas. The challenge they found was not finding games they liked but finding the ones which are suitable. For them this revolved around playground pressure to play older rated games.

Toby told us he liked playing SSX, Motorstorm, Sonic and Skylanders Giants. Some of these he plays on his own and some with his sister and dad, who talked about how difficult it can be distinguishing between which games are right for him. This is a particular issue for them when Toby has played games at friend's houses. In their home they only have games at home according to the PEGI age limits.

I suggested that if they are in doubt about a particular game a good thing to do it to play it together first. This ensures you share the experience and can discuss any difficult scenarios that crop up in the game.

The Drew family were keen on the idea of having a time limit for playing games. They started a two hour limit a day, but needed to police this to ensure the kids don't go over. I suggested that they may be interested in using a Family Timer on their games console which cuts the game off when the time runs out. This can be a nice way to manage how long a family uses a particular device. "That's a handy thing to know, isn't it? That will be the first thing we do when we get home."

We rounded off the conversation by talking about the other symbols on the back of the box that describe why a game has a certain rating. Mr Drew highlighted that even game reviews aren't always that informative and a system like this is really useful.

Many thanks to the staff of Game Cribbs Causeway who accommodated our FGTV filming session.

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Andrew Robertson
Andy Robertson is the editor of AskAboutGames and has written for national press and broadcast about video games and families for over 15 years. He has just published the Taming Gaming book with its Family Video Game Database.