Indoctrinating The Young As Gamers

Gamers with Jobs has an interesting look at what it's like to indoctrinate the next generation of gamer. From the article: "Now, as I stumble through my fourth decade on this spinning marble in space, it is my great privilege to pass this obsession on to my own son. It is something of a shock to me that my years of gaming can be measured reasonably in terms of percentage of a century. I shudder to think how many productive hours and how much money I have sacrificed to my passion. Instead of dwelling on that point, I pretend that the question doesn't even exist, in much the same way that I occasionally like to pretend the mortgage doesn't exist when a desired game finds its way onto store shelves. And now, already, my own son has begun his own epic sacrifice to the pastime, so that someday he too can struggle in the decision between food and maintaining his subscription to World of Warcraft."

Comments

Hmmmm

[Lord_Dweomer]

You know, I was thinking about this the other day and realized that I don't think of this as wasting my time and money (well...especially since I haven't paid for any media of any sort since Napster was born). Gaming and media in general has become such an integral part of society that I consider it to be an essential part of my everyday life. Communication is becoming more and more vital to us, as is entertainment. Now yes, you have your old forms of entertainment....but these are just new forms. And if people don't consider old forms of entertainment to be wastes, I don't know why they would consider these new ones to be.

Besides, its snowing like crazy now, its 20 degrees outside, what the hell else am I going to do?

My Son and Games

[under_score]

We're homeschooling. Educational games play a part of that. We have games from the "Reader Rabbit" series as well as a few other one-offs such as "Physicus" which is a cool physics simulator/tutorial/game and "Rosetta Stone" for Arabic and Chinese. However, much as he doesn't mind these, they are not what gets him really interested. He's been a Civ player for over a year... and he's only seven and a half. Right now he loves CivIV. He is starting to learn the difference between strategy and tactics, learning about planning, and of course, learning some things about history from the game itself. However, we have found that we need to put tight limits on his time playing. Currently, he plays CivIV only on weekends, and only in the time he has available when we're not doing other things (visiting, groceries, etc.). We have had some struggles with obsessive game-playing and we are trying to moderate that, but given that I myself go through periods of intense game playing (and so does my wife), we have to balance that with our own example. When we first got CivIV, we didn't do much else except eat for about three days... I truly hope that this is not a problem. I haven't seen anything conclusive about this and we do have a balance with visiting, regular academic work, and my son is an avid reader as well. I'm not worried, but like with television or other forms of entertainment, I don't think that children are able to set their own boundaries very well. It's important as parents to do that both verbally and by example. For those interested, my wife keeps an extensive web site about homeschooling and some other things.