Making a Game marked as run in Parental Controls

For a game to show up in Parental Controls as being run a few things need to happen.  First the game must have a GDF file so it will be properly registered with the Game Explorer.  Once the game is correctly registered with the Game Explorer it will show up in the Games folder under the Vista start menu.  If a game is not recognised by Game Explorer it will not show up there.

Once the game is correctly registered, sometime during startup the VerifyAccess function must be called on the IGameExplorer Com object.  This function will return a TRUE or FALSE value in the *pfHasAccess boolean passed into the function.  The game must use this boolean to determine if the game can startup or not.  The game will get automatically locked down using ACLs once it is blocked.  The VerifyAccess call is also where the event is logged into the parental controls log system to say the game was started and run.  When the activity viewer shows the information it co-ordinates the information out of the application run log with the game event so the VerifyAccess function must be called in the executable that is actually the main game, not the bootstrap executable.

I previously covered some information about GDF files in this blog.