The Wi-Fi or Ethernet adapter built into tablets, phones, gaming consoles, and laptops has a permanent MAC address, which tells your router which device is accessing your network and lets you shut off or pause that device’s internet access.
#NIGHT CALL VIDEO GAME PC#
Parental controls and the restrictions built into most routers and mesh-network systems may have been effective five to 10 years ago, but once an online game is installed on a device like a PC or a tablet, it connects directly to a multitude of servers, rendering website blocking ineffective.Ī router’s parental control tools also let you block or allow internet access to a specific device using what’s called a MAC (media access control) address. Just program your router’s controls to block a website like or ea.com and you’re done, right? Unfortunately, it’s not so simple.
Many popular Wi-Fi routers have built-in parental controls, which would seem like the easiest way to prevent a kid from gaming at all hours of the night.
#NIGHT CALL VIDEO GAME HOW TO#
How to use parental controls on your Wi-Fi router So I decided to make the devices a little unusable. I didn’t want to deploy the nuclear option-taking away his devices-because I want to believe there’s a better way to guide our children’s use of technology. As a tech expert with decades of experience both in corporate IT and network testing for media outlets (including this one), I was certain I could find a technical solution to prevent this kid from gaming. Soundproofing my son’s room was one option, but I really wanted to enforce his bedtime. Getting my teen to go to sleep seemed like an exercise in futility. And if your child doesn’t have access to a PC or game console, they can still play mobile versions of Fortnite, Apex, and soon Warzone and Valorant as well. But in addition to the siren call of TikTok, I’ve noticed the steady growth of large online games like Fortnite, EA’s Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Riot Games’s Valorant, each of which has hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Pediatricians agree that children and adolescents need a decent amount of sleep every night, preferably eight or more hours, to reduce the risk of health problems. Kids have been staying up late since what seems like the dawn of time, and devices are only making it easier. His grades qualified him for the high honor roll last year, he’s taking advanced courses, and he has a social life both online and off. Then he got a gaming PC, became a ranked Valorant player, and seemingly overnight my wife and I were regularly woken up by his yelling over FaceTime and Discord or his YouTube streams.Īt first we tried to limit his late-night gaming time to weekends, vacations, and holidays, in part because his schoolwork wasn’t being affected. My 13-year-old kid got a PlayStation 4 and started staying up late playing Fortnite online with friends. But I found a tech fix that at least slowed him down: A firewall. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: I can’t get my teenage son to stop playing Fortnite until the early morning.
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