My STWOR Journey: Towards Darkness or Light?

I’ve a confession to make. I’m not really much of a gamer.

I played around a bit with Super Mario when I was a kid. In college, I dabbled in Warcraft only because my boyfriend loved it. But no, neither game left a lasting impression upon me. My husband played a bit of Starcraft when it first came out, but after we had kids, we had to deal with adulting and all it entailed.

So what to do when my tween asks permission to play Star Wars: The Old Republic on his computer?

Given all the blood and gore that appear in television, print, and social media, I was kind of wary. I wanted to make sure that the game was age-appropriate for him.

So I decided to do a bit of research.

What the website says

I know Star Wars. Or at least I thought I did. I watched all the three movies when they were first released. I watched them again when they were digitally enhanced. I loved Han Solo. So yeah, I thought I knew my stuff.

It turns out I don’t know as much as I thought I did.

Apparently, SWTOR Credits US is set in a fictional Star Wars universe more than 3,500 years before the setting of the original Star Wars films. The premise of the game is that the Sith Empire and the Republic had agreed upon a half-hearted peace treaty.

The game features eight different classes, each favoring a different style of gameplay. Like most games, each class has a storyline that continually develops as the players level up.

What I find interesting about it is that while players can choose to join either the Republic or the Sith, at any point in the game, their morality is judged along a light/dark spectrum. I like how this is relevant to the one of the key concepts of Star Wars---that people possess both light and darkness within them---and that you can always choose to do what is right.

I watched the short animated teaser of the game on the website, and I must say that video game graphics these days are truly on a different level. SWTOR Credits US features extensive options for customization, as well as fully voiced dialogues.

SWTOR Credits US is a multiplayer online role-playing game, which basically means that the game involves role-playing and that your kid gets to virtually play and interact with a huge number of players. The website also reveals that since SWTOR Credits US was released, it has became very popular, gaining players from all around the world.

The game is free to play, which makes my mommy heart (and pocket) happy.

What the pro gamers say

My online research showed that since its release, SWTOR Credits US had received numerous upgrades. I wanted to know what these developments meant, so I read several articles. Philip Kollar at polygon.com was one of those who praised the latest upgrade. He wrote that although SWTOR Credits US was already a solid game when it was launched, its multiple goals clashed with each other. It caused players to reach a plateau while gaming because neither aspect was fully satisfying. However, he notes that the best part of the most recent update is that it allows players to play solo from level 1-60.

As a mom, this was good news because I had been feeling a bit iffy about letting my kid play with people he didn't know. This development allowed him to play the game and progress by himself. Definitely win-win!

Some people may say that interacting with other people is the essence of MMOG and that I can’t screen all of his friends forever. So it’s good that the upgrade also allows the player to join MMOG once he caps off a certain level. And I’m hoping my tween will have the sense to be a bit more careful around strangers by then.

What other moms (or dads) say

I was very glad to learn that I’m not the only mom actively researching things that her kids get into. So I logged onto commonsensemedia.org to check the game out.

There is a lot of information online on how much violence, sex, and swearing was in the games. But as one reviewer pointed out, if you’ve let your kids watch the movies, you can let them play the game.

Huh. Made sense. I had let my sons watch the movies. They had seen Princess Leia in her gold bikini. They knew light sabers could kill.

One review stated that swear words seemed to be kept to a minimum and that the light / dark aspect of the game sometimes made kids rationalize choices. One parent even praised how the issue of consent was dealt with when one of the characters discovered his girlfriend at a bar. Forcing her to leave would earn him dark points, but letting her make her own choices, scored him light points.

Wow. Who knew we could get so philosophical about online video games?

This was cool.

Another point raised in some of the forums was the issue that the games weren’t really ‘free’ as I had initially thought. There were monthly subscriptions that allowed your kids to buy cool gear or firearms in order to advance in the game. One parent advised observing how your kids progressed before purchasing extras, and I agreed with her advice.

Another parent’s review addressed security settings. Aside from monitoring the privacy settings, he encouraged parents to play with their kids. This was not solely to supervise their actions, but to teach them how to be careful of the people they interact with on the Internet.

What other kids say

On the same website, I was able to check out what kids had to say and I was surprised by the depth of some of the reviews. There were the usual I’m-better-at-this-than-you statements trying to upstage each other, but what really got to me was how they interpreted the light / dark roles. Lots of kids marveled at how you could be Light-side Sith or a Dark-side Jedi.

It was also interesting how some kids rated the sexy scenes in the games as suggestive. Some even went as far as to suggest that the average age allowed to play the game be changed to 10. This reinforced my decision to ask my husband to supervise and play with our 12-year old.

What my husband says

So, I talked to my husband about it the verdict was: we can’t shield our kid forever. We can try and guide him as much as we can, but in the end, it’s always his choice (whether to succumb to the Dark Side). We decided that it was just a game and if our son wanted to try it out, we would restrict his daily computer time, but we would let him play.

It’s a go!

That decided; we both tried registering for an account online. It was surprisingly easy. After registration, we were allowed to download the game. My husband was kind of giddy because it was the first time he’d try out ‘a real game’ in a very long time. The download finished and we tried to install it.

Ooops. Unfortunately, in all my research, I’d failed to notice that Windows was a requirement and the game refused to install on our Mac.

As my son told me the next morning, “Big time fail, Mom.”