Tread Heavily

It is a sad fact, but not everyone enjoys video games. In my neighborhood alone 3 out of 4 adult males are in fact non-gamers. On the other hand, 9 out of 10 of their children play video games and think their Dads are n00bs. Don’t know what I am talking about? Maybe you should.

Many of the guys my age in our neighborhood don’t play video games. I don’t know if it was because they grew up in third world countries where they had to fight over our cast off GameBoys, or that their parents forced them to play outside all the time. Whatever the reason, they just don’t relate to me, people like me, or their own kids who happen to love playing games.

As suburban fathers often do, I was standing at the end of the driveway, watching my sons and daughter play with the gang of neighborhood kids who congregate in our cul-de-sac. Since we are fairly new to the subdivision, and since they are good neighbors, two of the other dads came over and started talking to me. We exchanged your normal questions and answers: What do you do? Where are you from? What kind of hobbies do you have? When I told them that my only real hobbies were writing and playing video games, you’d have thought I said, ‘I enjoy scrapbooking and tea-parties.’

‘Oh,’ they said, ‘I don’t really know much about that…’ Sure their kids played, but they themselves were shamefully uninitiated into the world of FPS, MMORPGs, or RTS. Like many men do, they began to back away, unsure how to now communicate with this ‘Nerd Next Door.’ What I couldn’t help thinking was, if they don’t know how to react to me, how do they react to their kids when they are playing games? Do they completely ignore them, or do they yell at them for wasting their time?

I’ll call one of the guys Pete. Pete has a son who loves playing with my oldest boy. One day, after a marathon session of Star Wars Legos, Pete came over to fetch his boy and see what they were up to. Since I wasn’t home yet, my wife relayed the story to me after it was over: “Pete came in and saw the boys playing the game. He just stood there for a couple of minutes watching them play and all he could say was ‘Wow.’ I told him he could play if he wanted to, so he went and sat down beside the kids, looked at the TV with the apprehension and excitement someone would show when approaching a tamed lion. He sat there and played for nearly a half and hour, and didn’t leave until his wife came over to get them both. For that short amout of time, he had some insight into something his boy really liked and was able to connect.”

I tried mentioning this to Pete and even invited him over to play some other games, but he is now in denial about enjoying it. Apparently, his wife told him to grow up and that it just wasn’t right for him to be playing games. He had other things more important to do.

Man, I’m glad I’m not married to her.

Ok, so much of this story is a fabrication…or rather an amalgamation of things I have experienced over the last few years. My point to all of this is, if we don’t know what our kids are playing, chances are that they’ll pick up something we don’t approve of and that might end up contradicting key values that we’re trying to teach them. If you get involved with their gaming (and I know that eventually, most kids will play video games) you can not only keep an eye on them, but you might learn something about them that you wouldn’t normally know.

For me, I learned that my son has the uncanny ability to crash into everything he sees on Project Gotham Racing. He’s going to be 18 before he gets his license.

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Filed under: Being a Geezer, Games and Gamers, The Monkeys