New gig, new venue – I just started a monthly column at the excellent Unwinnable, and the subject is my kid, and the way he plays videogames. I’ve been thinking about doing a “gaming dad” column ever since my son and I played our first game together (it was Machinarium), and in my Edge Online column from a couple years back, I tackled a few examples of the jealousy, violence, and learning that we experienced together in front of the screen. With this new column, I want to gain insight into the mind of a small child. Other parents are the natural audience, but it will also be relatable to everyone – to all of us, young and old, who still have an intemperate seven-year-old inside of us.
Check it out! And let me know what you think. If I get too cute, feel free to slap me – but I don’t think it’ll be too sentimental; if anything, the first few are going to be pretty ugly. If you’ve ever played Invizimals, you’ll know why.
Excellent idea, looking forward to reading more!
That said, there’s one thing I had in mind for a long time, but never got around to collect enough “data” to write a proper piece about it – so I’d like to just ask it here, since I guess that you will have more experience in that field and can maybe answer it.
I’m not a father myself, but uncle to an 8-year-old boy. Whenever he comes around to visit my parents, they let him play with the action figures me and my brother used to play with back when we were kids: You know, Masters of The Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles etc.
When I sat down to play with him one day, I was in equal parts irritated and fascinated: Back in the day, I used the toys in a narrative way. Combat always was a factor (they don’t come with tons of weapons without a reason), but nevertheless, I had a tendency to come up with big, sometimes rather lengthy scenarios that were interspersed with fights – but the focus never was the battles themselves.
My nephew, though, had different ideas altogether: He lined up all the action figures in two neat rows and then pitched them one against another, in a big continuous series of fights, with the loser (that he decided upon after rules that I couldn’t really fathom) immediately being put out of existence, or at least out of the game. It was like… you know, Chess, or something.
Naturally, I was reminded of the old debate: I had to consider myself a narratologist and him a ludologist. And I tend to think that it’s not only down to different personality traits, either. I mean, we had the Masters, the Turtles, Dinoriders etc. They do have Pokemon, Ju-Gi-Oh, Bakugan and what have you. All those toys and IPs with their one vs. one-battles inside a rule-based system seem to mark an actual paradigm shift coming from the toy-industry itself… and I wonder how this is linked to the rise of video games, and how it might influence our kids.
My question thus was: Have you perhaps read something along those lines that is more insightful than my random observations? And have you observed similar things?
I really would like to hear your opinion… thanks in advance!
Yeah, my son has big “toy wars” as well. To me it looks like he’s spreading his toys around on the ground and just making them fight – but I think there’s a storyline going on in his head while he’s doing it, and he just doesn’t stop to explain it or to spell out the conversations. I remember doing what you did – telling long stories and building worlds out of my toys – but to anyone watching, it would probably have looked like I was just beating my action figures against each other. Because all of my worldbuilding really just led to a bunch of good guys beating up a bunch of bad guys.
That said, I’ve definitely noticed that game elements creep into his imagination-based play – and then, those elements become another part of their gameplay. He and the other kids on the playground will talk about “hit points” or what have you. But they’re not actually keeping track of a score: they might say “you lost 1000 hit points” not because they’re keeping score but because that just sounds like a lot of damage. So, they’re taking the outputs without the rules, basically, waving around pieces of this carefully-balanced game system and using them in a totally random way because of how they sound. (Sort of like politics!)
I think he’ll become a lot more organized when he finally takes all of the, say, Pokemon stats that he’s memorized (“did you know that foongus does 40 damage” or whatever) and really starts to line them up – to see that one is greater than another, to think about how one could use its abilities against another’s vulnerabilities, etc. Until then, it’s all just play.
The blog kids on video games is very interesting.This game willl helps to develop the gain in child’s mind through create one column.