Kids shouldn't have access to online multiplayer gaming.

Disclaimer: I'm neither a parent nor a gamer, so I'm admittedly not speaking from a place of direct experience. I mainly decided to post this because of some gameplay clips I saw recently.

I should also preface this by saying that I'm not writing some puritanical screed about the specific contents of these video games or whether said contents are appropriate for kids; my point is that kids shouldn't be directly interacting with adult gamers. There's the obvious issue of online predators/pedophilia, but even short of that, it should be self-evident that it's a bad idea to have kids with underdeveloped emotional regulation competing against adults who are bound to be more experienced at the game, especially given how cutthroat and antagonistic online gaming culture can be. When you watch clips of grown men playing against audibly school-aged kids in games like CoD or Gorilla Tag, you can plainly hear how agitated the kids are getting, and it starts to dawn on you that this type of interaction probably isn't psychologically healthy for developing brains (to say little of how these emotional moments are being clipped and shared online so that they can be ridiculed by even more adults).

As I sort of alluded to in the first paragraph, the catalyst for this post was a clip I saw of a very young-sounding kid (possibly as young as a toddler) having their Roblox avatar transported to a fake Hell by an adult player. I don't even think this kid was old enough to fully differentiate between reality and the game, as evidenced by how audibly shaken they sounded when they were sent to "Hell," and all I could think was, "Why are the parents putting them in a position where adults can upset them like this?"