A Pilgrim’s Digression

This is either a fascinating, or a disturbing article, depending on one’s point of view.  Survey: Nearly Every Kid a Video Gamer.

I can’t say I am surprised, though.  I’ve been playing video games since roughly 1980, and since I still play them as an adult, it was inevitable that my son would also start playing.  We bought a Wii for his birthday in April, ostensibly for him, but it has been only recently that he has really begun to enjoy playing.

Since my game is World of Warcraft, I don’t play the Wii much on my own, but my son and I play together.  This confirms something else mentioned in that survey: parents under 40 typically play video games with their kids.

That has to be an unambiguously good thing.  I have good memories of playing Atari with my Dad when I was a kid, so even that isn’t necessarily a recent trend.  However, I can see the counter-argument: kids should be outside, playing ball or exercising, or just running around the neighborhood with friends.  Video games are too sedentary.

My parents only let me play Atari and, later, Nintendo after dark or on rainy days.  They were constantly pushing me outside.  I’m not even sure my son thinks about playing outside.  Is that a fault of mine?   I don’t know.  The thing is, I don’t do sports.  I’m not the kind of dad who is going to throw a ball around with him, or kick a soccer ball.  He is enrolled in soccer, and he goes to soccer camp in the summer; he also takes swimming lessons pretty much all year long, since we have an enclosed pool in our community.

But do we take a ball outside on a whim and kick it around? No.  I guess that means he’s inheriting my own sedentary habits.

I remember the one time this summer when I encouraged him to come outside with me while I worked in the yard, within ten minutes he was complaining of the gnats and heat and went back in the house.

Honestly, that’s where I’d rather be, too.

So what kind of society are we creating with our video games?  Ironically, in terms of this discussion, I saw a kid about eight or nine years old taking a tour here at work just the other day…and he was literally walking around this beautiful building, not even listening to the docent.  Instead, he was playing his PSP.

That’s a bit much even for me.  If I were his parent, I’d tell him to put it away.

But in a way, how atypical is he?  I see people playing games on their portables while riding bus and metro.  The tendency is to see this as creating a society of weakling introverts, but I think as the article correctly points out, what is happening is that there is a new society forming online.  One has only to play an MMORPG like World of Warcraft to see that.  There are people I consider my friends who I have never met, and who I will probably never meet outside my video game.

People are playing together on their consoles as well, either online or face to face.  Gamers are not necessarily the lonely basement dwellers they are caricatured as being.  In fact, that caricature is used as an insult in the gaming world.  “You probably live in your mom’s basement,” someone will say to someone who offends them.

Still, there is a part of me that wonders if my son would be better off with a little more outdoor activity.  I grew up in West Virginia, and my Dad took me hunting and fishing from an early age.  He bought me my first gun, a .410 shotgun, when I was about seven or eight, my own son’s age.  I cannot imagine putting a loaded gun in my son’s hands!

We went camping on weekends, and when I say “camping” I mean really roughing it.  We didn’t pull our truck or camper into a park somewhere and build a fire in a fire pit.  We got in a boat on the Little Kanawha river and floated down it for miles, so deep into the hills there was no trace of human life.  We’d camp in a tent on a sandbar, or along the shore.  Somewhere down the river, Dad would have arranged for Grandpa or someone to meet us at a point where the road re-connected with the river, and we’d haul our boat and go home after a couple days of that kind of living.

I will never do that with my son.  I look back on hunting and camping nostalgically, but it’s not something I want to do now, as an adult.  Maybe I’ve grown plain lazy, I don’t know.  I just don’t think that it would be fun.

Certainly I don’t think hunting is fun.  In fact I never enjoyed it.  I hunted partly because my Dad forced me to go hunting, and partly because I wanted to please him.  My memories of deer hunting involve standing under a tree at 7 AM in freezing, snowy November weather, waiting for a deer to walk by so I could try to shoot it.  That is something I will never do again of my own free will.

Now, if there is a world apocalypse and I am forced to live off the land, perhaps my hunting skills will have to be honed for the sake of survival.  But until that day, I’ll always prefer my nice warm bed at 7 AM on a cold November morning.  If that makes me a video game playing wuss, then so be it.

I guess what bothers me is that my son won’t even have any outdoors skills to be honed.  My grandpa passed this tradition on to my Dad, and my Dad passed it on to me, but because I am “different” I will never pass it on to my son.  It’s funny how things work.  I hate hunting.  My son would probably hate hunting.  But hate it or love it, there is a part of me that feels like I need to teach him to handle a gun and kill animals, whether he likes it or not.