The challenge of the gamer dad
This piece today at Wired raised a question that’s been at the back of my mind for a while: How much gaming does the kid get to see and when can he start playing on his own?
Gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who’ve blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we’re in a weird position: We’re the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids.
So it turns out that, whoops, now we’ve got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding? I started making calls to my gamer posse find out.
As you’d expect, I found that joystick-wielding parents are much better than Hillary Clinton at parsing the nuances in various types of combat games. Brian Crecente, the editor of game blog Kotaku, takes an approach that most gamer parents described to me: They treat games as they would movies. If they’re too adult in content for his 5-year-old son, he won’t let his child even watch them being played.
“Everybody knows, as an adult, that the world is not always a nice place,” Crecente told me. “But I don’t want him to know that yet. I want him to have a childhood.” So he disallows games with “realistic” combat, like World War II titles, or Resistance: Fall of Man, but permits highly cartoony shooting, like Starfox on the Nintendo DS — since he regards it as essentially as abstract as playing cops and robbers with your fingers as guns.
Chris Anderson, my uber-boss — the editor in chief of Wired magazine and lead editor on Geekdad — suggested a even more intriguing strategy: the “Lego Rule.”
The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. “You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns,” Anderson says. So his four children can play games like Halo, since it contains only futuristic, fantasy war, where you’re killing only green- or blue-blooded aliens. The same goes for Roman swordplay titles. “But it clearly walls off Grand Theft Auto.”
(I e-mailed Lego’s spokesman Michael McNally, and he confirmed the company’s Solomonic logic. Lego, he wrote, agrees that good-versus-evil combat “is at the root of children’s play scenarios, and we believe is an important part of a child’s exploration of the world.” But they don’t want it infecting the children’s perception of the real world around them, so the solution is to place it decisively in the realm of fantasy.)
Personally, I love that idea, and will probably try to remix it with Crecente’s guidelines. But the truth is that violence in games is, paradoxically, one of easier issues to deal with, because you actually can make distinctions from game to game. (And as scientific research is finding, games are unlikely to make your kid a killer; recent studies show that violent games only increase your kids’ aggression if they already have pre-existing behavioral problems.)
That seems like a pretty good guideline to me. I’m certainly not going to give up watching The Shield and the like, it just won’t be appropriate for the kid. (No, he’s not going to be called Skeletor, folks. He’s going to be named Arthas, sheesh.) At the same time, games like Vice City (if I ever actually finished it) would be off-limits for the kid.
But Jenn and I loved Spyro the Dragon on the PS1 — I even have a big signed poster of Spyro 3 I’ve gotta frame and hang up when we move into the new house — and it’s as kid-friendly as can be, as are many other platform games. If Arthas were old enough to play with the Wii, I’d pick one up for him and play Wii Sports and Zelda with him until we’d sent our Wiimotes crashing into all the TV screens we could afford.
The bigger question, of course, will be total daily “screen time,” the modern merger of TV time, videogame time and Internet time. Fortunately, that decision (and resulting fight) can wait a little while.
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I’m still going to show him how to play Duke Nukem in god-mode.
Comment by Jenn — April 10, 2007 @ 10:42
That has strippers in it. That’s wholesome and I strongly approve.
Comment by Beau — April 10, 2007 @ 11:01