Xbox 360 Parental Controls

The xbox 360 has been confirmed to have parental controls for it's games. Parents will be able to enter the age of their child(s) and the xbox will read the ESRB rating on the game to determine whether the kid can play the game or not. This is a good step to help parents keep games like GTA out of the hands of their children.

Now doesn't get me wrong, this is a great idea to me and I hope enough parents do at least enough research into the $300 or $400 console their child wants to know it HAS parental controls so they can enable them. There are two things that I don't feel are good about this. The first centers around the internet and the fact that everything gets cracked. The parental controls probably won't change this. Someone will find a way around them and it will be all over the internet. Which ties into the second reason this is bad. Parents will be able to enable parental controls and just forget about it. Meaning that if I thought parents were lazy about what their kids are doing now, it will only get worse in the future. When parents their TV's and their video games deciding what their kids can watch or play for them. It's one less reason for them to get involved. Plus, naive parents will have no problems thinking that parental controls are enabled on their kids xbox when they probably already figured out how to get around it. So I give this a C+ for effort. I don't see it doing much good, but at least it's there.