My 12 year old son is a video game junkie. This I say without a smile or even a hint of one. There is nothing I like about the fact that he prefers to spend many hours a day on his PS3 rather than doing any other activity. It used to be that he would play FIFA soccer or NBA basketball, but lately its just one game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II - aka MW2. He plays this game with his friend down the block, his cousin in Queens, a friend in Florida, and his cousin's cousin in Austria - at the same time. The ridiculous result of this arrangement is that these boys would rather sit at the game console in their own homes than meet in person to play. Meeting in person has a major drawback - they are away from their own machines and profiles - i.e. they are away from their game 'identities': their K-D ratios, and their 'rank'.
If your K-D (kill to death) ratio sucks, you are labeled a 'Noob'(slang for the slang: newbie). That's such an undesirable state of affairs that if one of your friends is a really good player, you may consider giving him your password, so that he can play 'as you' and raise your rank or prestige. The other way this can go is - someone who knows your password and wants to ruin your rep can play 'as you' and destroy your rank.
Recently my son's account was hacked, basically hijacked. Someone signed in, changed the password and locked him out. Since he had shared his password with a couple of his friends, he had at least that many suspects. His level of distress was greater only when he learned that the 'OpTic Nation sniper clan' he'd been invited to was a fake (a whole other story). The process of smoking out the offender was unsettling for him to go through, and painful for me to observe.
It did turn out to be one of his friends, though not the one he suspected. The deed was done in retaliation for an imagined slight - but my son made light of the incident to keep the friendship. We reset all his passwords and I told him never to share them again, which translated to 'fight your own battles and don't trust anybody'. In the end it was this that he had the hardest time with.
It did turn out to be one of his friends, though not the one he suspected. The deed was done in retaliation for an imagined slight - but my son made light of the incident to keep the friendship. We reset all his passwords and I told him never to share them again, which translated to 'fight your own battles and don't trust anybody'. In the end it was this that he had the hardest time with.
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