Need the low down on Garry's mod

[Blackferne]

Zoe saw someone online playing garry's mod. I know very little about it. what is it, kid friendly? things to worry about etc.

Thanks!

[Jimer Lins]

Garry's Mod is a sandbox mod of the Source engine. It has an interface similar to Half-Life, but with a slightly different set of tools and weapons (with a number still the same). The idea of Garry's Mod is to either build contraptions by using the physgun to do things like glue stuff together or create welds or flexible connections (think rubberbands), so you can make things like catapults or weird rolling things or even something that tries to walk.

Or you can spawn models from various Source games like Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 and pose these models using in-game tools. Or pretty much anything else you can think of that involves the Source engine and physics system.

Since it's a sandbox, whether it's appropriate for a kid kind of depends on the specific sandbox. I would say that if you wanted to get a copy, Zoe might enjoy playing around with it solo, but by no means should be allowed to play multiplayer unsupervised (like with most Source games, the multiplayer community is a complete sewer).

An alternative: Source Filmmaker, which is free and lets you make videos. It's what Valve uses to make their ingame movies and a lot of people are using it for cool animations.