Culture Clash

(March 2005)

OK to Play

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak with a concerned mother about the impact of video games on the lives of her children. While she didn't see significant harm in allowing the kids limited access to games, her husband was dead-set against any gaming at all. Phrases like “melt their brains” were bandied about. This mother sought input from adult friends that played games, and they in turn referred her to me.

What struck me most about our conversation were the views of her husband – that video games are a worthless squandering of time, lighting up no more than three or four synapses at once and almost certainly more addictive than crack. He also took issue with what he perceived to be ubiquitous and cavalier violence in every game ever made. Her husband wasn't just concerned that the kids were playing too much, he was aggressively against their doing so at all. At the same time, however, she indicated that he had no problem when the kids watched football – American football is apparently not violent – on television for hours at a time.

And this, my friends, paints a bright red target on anti-gaming sentiment: it is here that our most concerted attack must fall.

Television, movies, even reading are passive entertainments. You can learn from them, to be sure; you can even discover impactful emotional experiences. But at the end of the day you're sitting, inert, while something is told to you. Passive entertainments have their place, but to imply that they are more beneficial than an engagingly interactive medium is laughable. Even the most simplistic games – even Pong – require players to make decisions and deal with the consequences of their actions. Any child psychiatrist would doubtless agree that learning to make choices and managing results are an important part of growing up.

Could kids learn the same from a football game? Probably; if a play results in broken limbs they'd recognize that it's the wrong play to run under those circumstances. You could teach the same thing with naught but chalk and a blackboard. But seeing the result of a choice is a lot different than experiencing it. This is the critical difference that makes games unique. They are the first, and currently the only, interactive medium. Every other consumptive medium is passive in nature, which makes games inherently superior as transmitters of experiential concepts.

So I told Concerned Mother all these things, then I dropped the real bombshell. If Husband has a problem with the gaming, rather than vilifying from afar, perhaps he could consider playing them with his kids now and then. This would realize the dual purpose of demonstrating that games are a heck of a lot more mentally engaging than television and give him a chance to spend additional time with his family.

Personal aside: one of my earliest memories is that of playing Mystery House with my brother and father on our Apple II+. I was four or five at the time. This ancient, vector-graphicked, text-parsered adventure game was, at its core, a story about seven extremely brutal murders. Your job is to find some hidden jewels, then identify and bump off the killer before you become a victim. So Mystery House was violent and it was a video game: the two things Husband apparently detests the most. But my memories of the game aren't of the violence, they're that I played it with my Dad. It had the added benefit of teaching me to read more effectively than hours of seeing Spot run.

Husband, and many like him, perceive video games as dangerous because they know nothing about them. They make no effort to educate themselves, preferring to assume that their children are frittering away important TV-watching time. And their reactions when it's suggested that they sit down next to the kid and say “what are we playing?” are rather shocking. It would seem that the concept of parents educating themselves on their offspring's interests is simply too much to bear. Thus parents are increasingly abdicating that responsibility and letting the law raise their kids.

The truth is that games are extremely valuable when played responsibly. Play in general is important for young things throughout the animal kingdom. We've long since moved beyond the desperation-tinged inanity of the industry's early attempts to defend the medium (“games are important because they improve reflexes!”). Games are important because they teach players to assess data logically, interpret facts objectively, analyze problems rapidly, make decisions confidently, and deal with the results appropriately.

Time spent playing games should be limited; great learning tools or not, they are so much fun that they can overwhelm other important growth activities. No gaming until your homework is done, and then no more than two or three hours a day at most seems fair to me. Concerned Mother had limited her kids' playing time – to a rather draconian level in my opinion, which she didn't ask for but which I gave her anyway – but still she and Husband worried. This brings us full circle to the issue of parents not just needing to educate themselves on what their kids are doing, but needing to take an occasional direct interest in it.

Parents who find the time to involve themselves in their children's activities are going to wind up with better children than those who don't. Moreover, something as simple as playing the occasional game with your kids – not to be confused with watching disapprovingly while looking for something to criticize – can be an important communication channel. It's as basic and as beneficial as reading to kids. Moms and Dads who wonder why their young are so in love with games might do well to actually find out for themselves.