Of course there are excellent and informative television programmes, great films on DVD and brilliant computer games like the Civilisation series or Age of Empires which are not just absorbing and creative but educational, imaginative and thought-provoking as well.
And we all need a dose of junk TV from time to time - not least children who have just walked in from a ten-hour school day.
Recently, however, my son’s best friend lent him a Gamecube installed with the most mindless games whose sole purpose is to run around empty warehouses or bits of no man’s land blasting opponents to a bloody pulp using an arsenal ranging from snipers to bazookas and hand grenades.
“I too had become
a zombie,
jabbing
incessantly at buttons”
Then the friend fell ill and couldn’t come round any more. But we still had the Game cube. My son tried to interest his sister in playing but she said she “couldn’t see the point” of a game that consisted only of shooting people without any strategies or creative content. (Boy, was I proud of her!).
He approached his father, who tried to interest him in a bike ride or some target practice with his new bow and arrow instead.
Adolescents spend an increasing amount of time in the virtual world and thus, inevitably, significantly less time in the real world while we parents try to explain that “taking a break from the TV” does not mean switching to the computer, it means throwing a ball for the dogs or baking a cake or having a face to face conversation with a live human being.
In desperation he turned to me and I took pity on him: the cube was only on loan for a few more days and his horrible parents wouldn’t buy him one of his own. I offered to be taught and to play with him.
I am not a techno-Luddite but nevertheless I was useless. With a set of buttons in each hand controlling different movements it was a bit like an IT version of the old trick where you have to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time.
My choice of weapons was pathetic. Generally I opted for the bazookas and machine guns to give me the best chance of hitting something when, my son pointed out, a revolver or shotgun would have been more appropriate (how is it boys know these things?). Every time I threw a hand grenade I forgot to run away but just stood and watched, thus blowing myself up rather than my opponent (who had run away).
My son was patient. He invested time in “training” me (to turn me into me a more interesting opponent, I suppose). He encouraged me, commenting periodically on my improvement and he congratulated me on a good shot.
It was fun spending time with him doing something he wanted to do and I was impressed with the range of skills and co-ordination he had mastered to be able to play so well as well as by his ability to instruct me.
And there was a moving moment when he said proudly that he didn’t think “any of the other boys in my class have a mother who plays Medal of Honour with them”.
Gradually I got better. Not just that, I got hooked. Absolutely bowled over addicted. My daughter might ask for help with her homework, my husband try to establish if the animals had been fed and I didn’t hear a word. This is such a fast moving game you don’t have time to break concentration for a second to answer irrelevant domestic queries. I too had become a zombie, jabbing incessantly at buttons. Worse still, when I wasn’t playing, my fingers were itching to play.
It was a secret vice I shared with my son. I would be busy proofing pages of the Rendezvous and he would sidle into the room and suggest a quick game.
“Only twenty minutes - max”. He nodded. Two hours later we were still playing.
If you are tearing your hair out watching your kids fritter away their lives playing mindless electronic games, believe me, they can’t help it. It’s frightening.
Eventually, the friend reclaimed his Cube and of course I was as disappointed as my son.
“Now you know what fun it is I don’t suppose you’d think of buying one for us?” he asked hopefully. But he knew the answer already.
Absolutely no way.
Posts
