Kids And Their Video Games

Kotaku had an interesting article today about kids and video games, originating from an anti-gaming parent who argues:

Here's my question: When do kids ever think these days? When do they ever have brains free from electronics long enough to ponder the universe? To think of things that might someday lead them to a cure for cancer?

If Sir Isaac Newton had been playing a DS, I'm sure he never would have noticed the apple falling from the tree, so he never would have formulated the theory of gravity.

As someone who is becoming more and more distracted by shiny things, I can see where she’s coming from.  But I can’t agree with her.

While video games can be a tremendous distraction, the same could be said for other forms of media.  Before video games, TV rotted the brain.  And yes, I knew kids in elementary school who were frequently disciplined for reading.  Kids shouldn’t be playing video games non-stop because they shouldn’t be doing any one thing non-stop. 

But in the article, they also highlight a comment that jumps to the defense of kids and video games.  Another parent claims that video games have resulted in his son being more creative, teaching himself to use Photoshop to participate in a gaming community.  Growing up, I think my experience is closer to this.

Granted, when I was growing up, video games still weren’t an established part of modern culture.  The rapid evolution from Pong to Mario to 3D gaming must have been a pretty questionable thing for parents, but their effects were not purely negative.  I was kind of an antisocial kid anyway, but gaming was something I could do with other kids.  The first game I ever played (or remember playing) was a Pinball game for some Atari console.  The graphics were terrible, the controls were awful, and I was absolutely hypnotized.  I remember playing Mario on the NES with some other kids and learning about the magic of the Game Genie.  And then, Pokemon (yep, more Pokemon talk).

As you already know, I was hooked on that game.  But around the same time, I was also discovering the internet, and I was a member of several on-line Pokemon communities.  I had a Pokemon site that received fan art and fan fiction from others.  I had readers.  Personal websites would eventually evolve in to blogs, and at twelve, I was already becoming part of it.  This still weirds me out to think about now.

Then came the N64, and Star Fox 64.  It’s still one of my favorite games of all time.  I joined a forum called Outside the GreatFox, a Star Fox forum that amazingly is still active today.  I was an active member and a regular in the IRC chat, from which I logged over a thousand pages of chat.  I really discovered fanfiction, and started writing it.

So you see where I’m going with this.  I played video games, but I spent more time writing and developing a sense of community (if online) than I did actually playing the games.  What I learned setting up my own sites is still valuable today, even if all I ever learned was the most basic of HTML.  I understood, long before mainstream media caught on, that there was a web culture, although I didn’t realize the significance at the time.  And gaming even pushed me to explore my creativity—in fact, one of the ideas I came up with (back in eighth grade) is an idea I still hope to someday write, although it has since evolved quite a bit and is obviously no longer a Star Fox fanfic. 

So yes, games have the potential to become brain-draining obsessions, but they also can have unexpectedly benevolent effects.  Like anything, they are what we make them.