Slashdot Mirror
Your Mom And Gaming
Tomorrow is Mother's Day in the US, and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal rightly estimates that many gamers owe a lot to their mothers. Because they indulged what they likely initially saw as a strange choice of hobby, we have a thriving gaming industry to enjoy today. The Level Up site offers an interview with a woman on the Newsweek staff who learned to tolerate those 'console things', and another piece where N'Gai interviews his own mom about his games-related past. "N'Gai: Growing up, you allowed us kids to have a computer, but we weren't allowed to have a videogame machine. What was your thinking behind that? Yvonne Croal: Well, in my estimation at that time, videogames were just another silly game. We certainly didn't want you to be spending 24/7 playing these games that we considered not productive in any way." If you're still looking for a gift for your own mom, Pop Cap is giving away a free copy of Bejeweled to anyone that signs up for their newsletter. Worked on my mom. Happy Mother's Day.
After about 20 minutes of trying to teach my Mom to play Roger Clemen's MVP Baseball on my NES my brother and I gave up and she concluded that video games were annoying and unproductive, but ok. Thank God for that.
Haiku for you!
It's pretty sad that, like most American holidays, Mother's Day has been corrupted into a holiday that celebrates consumption and hollow platitudes rather than anything meaningful. One of the original premises of Mother's Day was a call to women worldwide to stand up against violence and war that had taken the lives of so many of their sons. It wasn't a tribute to mothers, but a rallying cry for mothers of the US to band together in a political cause to improve the world. The "mother" of Mother's Day became so disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday that she actively campaigned against it.
Maybe it's just me but I find the article to be little more than cock stroking among a peer group in effect.
"I said no to my kids playing games and now they're all well adjusted perfectly fine kids, this clearly shows that no games was what made my kids will adjusted" and then she says "It's a delight to see my kids sitting down and talking, the subject doesn't even matter". So if they all sat down and discussed Half life's plot is that some how being well adjusted and delightful, or is it suddenly evil as the topic is games?
Secondly, she points out how fantastic radio dramas are, yet the reasons she says they are good is the exact thing a good game of Nethack will give you. That little rat known as a Q is infact trying to rip your throat out, so maybe your character dodges, left, then right and finally thrusts his sword into the foul beast. Yet because the medium is different it is "clearly" some evil twisted non-imagination based thing.
Seems to me like this is just some mother going "oh my kids are great, I raised them so well!" when she has zero evidence of what happens if she had let them all watch porn all day and play games to their fill because there is only 1 chance to do it and you will never know the alternative's results.
I like muppets.