New Family Timer Places Time Limits on the XBox 360

A new feature on the X Box 360 called a "Family Timer" may help parents limit the time their children spend playing their favorite video games.

If you have a teenager like mine, he or she is always wanting to be on their X Box 360 playing Halo 3. Any waking minute he has my son gets on and consumes himself in an online reality world. Because he keeps good grades in school, I typically don't give him a hard time about playing on the X Box 360.

Until recently he has been complaining about not wanting to get up in the morning to go to school, he said he was too tired. That's when I started to play much closer attention to him and how long he was on his X Box for. One morning I woke up very early, around 4 am.

To my surprise he was still up playing his video games and hadn't yet fallen asleep. I also noticed that when I would arrive home from work at 5:30PM, he would be asleep. So basically he was shifting his schedule around his gaming time. This was not permissible and I had to take the system away from him for a month. If I would have had the Family Timer this issue may never have happened.

Sometimes parents are clueless when it comes to how much time their children are really on their gaming systems. With the online craze of X Box live in the past few years, which allows X Box users to interact with other video game players via the Internet, this has also given children and teens more opportunity of devoting their spare time to social networking and social gaming through their X Box live accounts.

Set to Premier in December of 2007, "The Family Timer" is a feature that Microsoft is adding to the X Box 360 to control how much time one uses on the system. If you already own an X Box system then a simple download can be found on the X Box website via a broadband Internet connection.

Microsoft is hoping to attract more mainstream consumers and to make the system more adjustable and appealing to other groups, not just the video game obsessed community.