Most parents have a pretty good sense of whether a game is appropriate before their kid starts playing it. What’s harder to evaluate is what happens once they’re actually in there, because the social environment of a live online game with real-time chat and other players from anywhere in the world is a fundamentally different thing from a game you can assess by watching a trailer, and most platforms don’t make it easy to know what you’re actually agreeing to. These five questions will.
1. Does it use live moderation?
This is the most important one. Live moderation means real human moderators reviewing flagged content, not just an automated filter, and the difference matters because filters don’t understand context and can be worked around, and a human moderator is a lot harder to fool. The answer is almost always on the platform’s safety page if you take two minutes to look, and platforms that invest in this are telling you something real about what they actually care about.
2. Is there private messaging?
A game with private messaging between players has built an unmonitored channel into the experience by design, and for kids under 13 that matters more than it might sound. The research on how inappropriate contact happens online consistently points to private messaging as the pathway, not public chat where behavior is visible and moderation can actually function, and a game that eliminates it entirely has closed that pathway in a way that “friends only” messaging never quite does.
3. Is it COPPA compliant?
COPPA is a US federal law governing how platforms handle data from children under 13, and a compliant platform has made legal commitments about what it collects and how parents can access or delete it. It doesn’t guarantee a perfect experience but it means someone held them to a legal standard designed specifically for younger kids, and if you can’t find any mention of it on a platform aimed at kids that’s worth paying attention to.
4. Does it have an ESRB rating?
An E for Everyone rating means an independent body reviewed the content and determined it’s appropriate for a general audience, which is different from the company describing its own game as safe. Imagine Island is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB.
5. What is the game actually asking your child to do?
This one doesn’t have a checklist answer but it might be the most useful question of all. Some games are built around endless competition and individual performance metrics, others are built around creativity and collaboration and exploration, and knowing which one you’re handing your child is worth five minutes before you say yes. A game that passes all four safety questions AND gives kids something genuinely worth doing is rarer than it should be. When you find one, that’s the answer you were looking for.
