Family Settings for offline games and entertainment
Xbox 360 offers you five ways to customize your offline gaming and entertainment environment:
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Game ratings: Xbox 360 reads from each game's disc what game rating the game has received. Select the games you prefer your child to play, from EC (Early Childhood) to M (Mature).
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DVD movie ratings: Xbox 360 recognizes the United States' Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings that are encoded in many DVDs (not all DVDs encode their rating, however, so in those cases the DVD will play by default). Depending upon the movie you've chosen, you can set Xbox 360 to play R, PG-13, PG, or G-rated films.
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Original Xbox games: Original Xbox games do not include the same kind of encoded data as Xbox 360 games, so Xbox 360 cannot determine the game ratings of original Xbox games. Therefore, you can either disallow all original Xbox games, or allow all of them.
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Set pass code: Log in with your Passport Network account to set a separate pass code that can help protect your Family Settings. Your Passport Network account helps ensure that you're the only one who can access or change Family Settings you've selected.
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Turn off Family Settings: No kids? No problem! You can turn off Family Settings any time you like.
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Family Settings for online games and interaction
Xbox Live expands the gaming experience to the Web. When you log onto Xbox Live with your Passport Network account, use Family Settings to create an online experience that is appropriate for your family. Use these features to help keep your kids' experience a positive one:
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Online gameplay: Before you can play multiplayer games online, you need an Xbox Live Gold Membership, which grants you access to the online Xbox experience, including instant messaging with other gamers, chats, tournaments, special online programming, and much more. Once you've signed up, this option allows you to decide if your child can play Xbox 360 games online as well as original Xbox Live-enabled games that are Xbox 360-compatible.
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Privacy and friends: This option allows you to approve your child's online friends. Let your child communicate with anybody, or only with their friends; decide who can see your child's personalized gamer profile; decide whose gamer profiles your child can see; and control who sees your child's online or offline status.
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Communications: Select "Everyone" to allow your child to communicate with anyone on Xbox Live, choose "Friends Only" to allow your child to communicate only with people on their friends list, or select "Blocked" to block everyone from communicating with your child. No matter what the setting, your child will still be able to receive new friend requests (but it remains up to you to approve or block them).
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Content: The Content controls help you set limits on the kind of downloadable items your kids can access. You can choose to allow your child to go to Xbox Live for downloadable game updates, demos, and other for-fee content, as well as whether your child can download member-created content from other Xbox Live users. Here Family Settings act as a filter for what kids can or can't download onto the Xbox 360 console.
