Steam for my kids question

[YoullNeverWalkAlone]

Curious to get some thoughts. My boys are 5 & 7 and love Legos, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the RIngs. When the LEgo games of those went on sale las week for $5 each I bought them. Question though. They are all PC games, and we only have Macs so I need to get a PC platform or learn how to Bootcamp my Mac.

As far as Steam goes though, should I set up a steam account for them that only has the games I ok for them to play (meaning that they couldnt share any games with me though or I would have to buy it twice I think) or should I just add them on my Steam (where we can't both be on at the same time and I would have to worry about them accessing games like tf2 and l4d2 which I don't want them around).

Any thoughts or ideas?

[Will T.]

You can sort your library into user-defined categories, which might be the simplest way to separate the games for your kids from your M-rated shooters. You can minimize/expand the categories to only show your kids' games, thus keeping your other games hidden from view so long as they don't go snooping.

[Zork Nemesis]

I'm pretty sure Steam's parental controls allow you to completely hide and disable access to games you don't want them to see. Through it you can also disable Steam Community features so they can't thumb through chat and screenshots; for example you probably don't want them to see my Loadout screenshots where my character isn't wearing any pants. It looks like you can set up the Family View to only show games you choose.

[Boss Llama]

Might be worth getting them their own accounts. The reasons I'd suggest that are because if they retain their accounts for as long as many of us have, they'll be taking them to highschool and beyond, and it probably would be easier to have them separate from the get-go rather than splitting off down the road when they've got save games and additional content and perhaps friends of their own on the list.

I haven't looked in to it too deeply, but I believe the new game sharing feature means that you could still share games from your account to them, or between their two accounts, if you choose. That might keep down costs of double copies and things like that.

[The Spanish Inquisition]

Kids are dumb when it comes to this kind of stuff because they have no strong grasp of money and what people will do for it. Letting your kids have their own account is fine but you control the steam guard email account so they can't get phished. Of course doing this means they can't log into any other website that uses steam login because it will trigger a steam guard email authentication most of the time. You also have to keep an eye on their games list because money is fluid now in steam with free games and the market place being able to generate your own store credit. Did one of their rich friends gift them a clockwork orangesque game? It will be worth letting them have their own accounts later when you eventually don't care what they are up to online as long as its not on the streets but for now you would have to watch their activity.

Also.....MAC GUY NEEDS A PC.

[c4ridw3n]

It's funny... I had 2 steam accounts- my original which had 8 years and then I created one to download the free Portal copy a few years back.
Of course, somehow, my little boy ended up with my 8 year account due to various reasons.

There is a family share/control option and you can name other people (up to 5?) who can have access to steam games from your account.
We have told him that he can't friend anyone and routinely check his friends list... He seems to navigate through steam pretty well.

I would suggest keeping the accounts separate from the beginning.

[metacide]

For myself I have the Parental Controls set up and use the built in features from Windows 7 to make sure she can only play the games/programs I approve. We've talked about it and once she's 13 we'll set her up with her own Steam account but until then we share mine, which works out fairly well since we only have the one computer.

In the end though, you need to find a solution that works for you.

[YoullNeverWalkAlone]

Very helpful ideas folks. I will play around with the family share idea and see how it works.

Who needs a PC, Spanish, when you can game on a Mac laptop with track pad?

[c4ridw3n]

mac has frequent crashes with steam.. from what I have seen. A source of much ire in this household.