Protecting adults from children.

Recently our rather-mature group of World of Warcraft junkies found themselves in a dilemma. A ten-year-old wanted to raid with us, screechy voice on raid chat included. Was this okay? Where were his parents? Will we have to "clean up" our language? Or explain our innuendoes? What a mess. This article shows that we're not the only ones with the problem.

Lots of issues were raised, but the bottom line for me was that it made me feel uncomfortable, and I was against it. I didn't care what his parents were doing or even if they knew he was raiding at all. I don't care how somebody else raises their kids.

Anyway, he did end up raiding with us a few times, but made some titanically disastrous mistakes by not paying attention and wiping the raid (that means we all got killed, expensive in terms of time and game resources).

We ended up deciding that this particular guild, which had no recruiting standards at all (they took anybody, and their friends), was a bad fit for our alliance and asked them to leave. Some of the guys from that guild who were a good fit for us joined other member guilds.

It's a complicated issue, and it's interesting that some of the players who responded to the article said they'd pay extra to keep kids out of their online gaming.