My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it’s riddled with ads.
The Play Store has a section for kids, which seems to have better quality apps and games. Also thinking to subscribe to Play Pass so she can try out paid games.
Any other tips? Especially how to find good free / paid games. I don’t mind paying for good games.
Also I’m aware I can block ads using eg Pi Hole (already doing that) or sometimes putting it on airplane mode, but that’s not my point. I want to find and support quality games.
Install an emulator for her alongside with some roms. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the only option we have nowadays.
Lemuroid is a great open source emulator. Vimm’s Lair is a great place to find games/ROMs. It’s difficult to play games though that require the bumper buttons on a touch screen. Maybe consider getting her a retro gaming handheld device. They can either run based on Linux, so an emulator, or Android which can operate like normal and then you can select an emulator to play. ETA Prime has lots of reviews of these devices.
When my kid was younger he had a “garbage games on tablet” phase as well. As others have said, paid games are the way to go (Play Pass sounds cool). Looking for indie games for Android, or PC games ported to Android gives some good results. Stardew Valley’s an obvious one. I haven’t played Ordia, but it looks gorgeous.
What worked really well for us was to teach him about some dark patterns in simple terms and spot them with him in the freemiums he was playing. “Fear of Missing Out” events/notifications and “Progression Paywalls” are typical ones. It made him realize the game wasn’t built to give him a good time as much as to frustrate him into endlessly spending real money in exchange for some phony currency. In the end he was happy to switch to saner games. It’s a good opportunity to work on their critical judgment basically.
https://www.darkpattern.games/
I have not extensively used this site but it seems to have some good pointers
So maybe check with them there first, then install
get them an offline console
Yeah, perhaps a better idea. Will do that once the tablet reaches end of life.
