A Conversation With Sony About Crafting PlayStation's Parental Controls
Catherine Jensen, with the company for more than a decade, explains Sony's approach to guiding parents through today's complicated gaming landscape.
Did you know the PlayStation 2 had parental controls? But they were limited to managing access to DVDs, and a quick Google search mostly brings up lots of people buying used PlayStation 2s with a parental control pin they’re having trouble resetting.
The world is a lot different now. Parental controls are everywhere. A big reason I started Crossplay was to help guide people through the confusing nature of parental controls, because how you’ve set them up on one device isn’t the same as another.
Just recently, we kicked off an ambitious new project at Crossplay where I’ll be producing written and video guides to parental controls. First up, PlayStation 5.
Sony has their own guides, too.
As part of researching Sony’s approach, the company offered me a chance to chat with a few figures at the company to better understand how they approach the problem.
One of those conversations was with Catherine Jensen, who joined the company as VP of customer experience a little more than a year before the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 4 might not feel like that long ago, but the PlayStation 4 launched in 2013!
Jensen is currently global VP of consumer experience and creative services at Sony Interactive Entertainment, a long way of saying she helps shape the way you and your children interact with a PlayStation, from parental controls to customer support.
“A lot of the things that I use when we're setting a strategy is about our PlayStation brand and what we want to bring to our community that's a safe and positive place to play,” said Jensen, whose own children are in their 20s and thus slightly beyond the scope of parental controls, in a recent interview. “That doesn't mean that it's one thing for one family or one thing for one player. It's about that diversity of our community and making sure that we've got controls and policies that reflect that.”
On a PlayStation 2, you were setting a PIN code to limit DVD usage. You can, in fact, still set DVD usage on a PlayStation 5, but it’s possible to get far more granular, including setting time limits, purchasing limits, content restrictions, and more.
“With over 100 million active players, we have a lot of data, and that data can tell us where players are looking for more control on their experience,” said Jensen. “That's where it starts: let the players set the functionality and the parameters that are right for them. Everybody may have different choices. Not everyone wants one single setting or three settings—high, medium and low. That's not enough.”
Choice comes with its own downsides, though.
The choice facing my parents was wondering if a game was too violent, or if the reason I was tired in the morning was because I’d snuck in playing at night. (I did.) Now, on a PlayStation 5, you can make all sorts of choices about, for example, your child’s experiences online. It’s easy to look at all the “choices” and get intimidated, which, in my own experience covering this topic, can lead people to choose nothing.
One of Sony’s solutions for that is having a good mobile app with all these choices built in. It’s a good app, and lets you manage and change anything about your kid’s experience on a PlayStation. I highly recommend you download it on your phone.
You can download the app on Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store.
“Video gaming is supposed to be fun, and you can have connections and shared experiences while you're setting up the controls,” said Jensen. “So don't just pass over the console and the controller to your kid. Sit side by side and talk about the choices as you're setting up the account and what those mean.”
This underscores a core mantra of Crossplay: experience what your children are experiencing. It is fair and normal to be weirded out by Roblox, or even decide Roblox isn’t right for your children and that becomes a game that you say “no” to, but it’s always better to play it yourself and come to that conclusion while experiencing it.
That said, the point of parental controls is handing trust to another party.
When asked about features parents tend to overlook, Jensen pointed at spending.
“I have a lot of parents who didn't realize that their kids were spending so much money online,” she said.
My children are too young to have a spending budget on PlayStation (or anywhere else), but if your children are, maybe it’s better to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Jensen pointed to the “Ask to Buy” feature, where the child initiatives a purchase that has to be approved. That might make more sense than abstractly allowing them $30.
Also, if you don’t want to do specific time limits, PlayStation also has “Ask to Play.”
Similar features are available on most other platforms, too.
These basic levels of parental controls are now present on basically every device you buy these days, even if you have to jump through the hoops of setting them up all over again. And though Sony is often considered in competition with companies like Nintendo and Microsoft, Jensen pointed to the “Shared Commitment to Safer Gaming” initiative, where the companies work in collaboration with one another to make these features a priority.
“We look at our online safety as a commitment, not a competition,” said Jensen. “We share technology as well as best practices on how we can keep large global communities safe online.”
“That's where it starts: let the players set the functionality and the parameters that are right for them. Everybody may have different choices. Not everyone wants one single setting or three settings—high, medium and low. That's not enough.”
This also extends to Sony’s work within the Entertainment Software Association, the parent company of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, aka the video game ratings agency whose recommendations are on most video games. Within there, Sony is one of several companies who are part of smaller, more focused groups researching topics like screen time and developing best practices with academics and other folks.
All of this was understandably accelerated during the early parts of COVID-19, where time spent on devices, including video game consoles, reached all-time highs.
Whenever the PlayStation 6 arrives, it will also have parental controls, because games are now mainstream in a way that no longer makes them special. It’s just part of life.
“We want to make sure that not only our players, but parents of players, have the ability to customize their experiences online,” said Jensen. “We invest a lot of time and flexibility.”
Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.
Also:
What do you wish was different about parental controls on a PlayStation 5? I haven’t spent enough time with Sony’s approach to understand the friction points.
Microsoft has already offered me someone to speak with, so I anticipate Xbox’s parental controls will be the next one that we’re taking at look at next month.
I’d love to talk with Nintendo, but who knows? But the moment I have a sense of what Nintendo is doing with the next Switch, we’ll break that down for you. (Yes, we’ll still be producing a parental controls guide for the original Switch.)