This piece today at Wired raised a question that’s been at the back of my mind for a while: How much gaming does the kid get to see and when can he start playing on his own?
Gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who’ve blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we’re in a weird position: We’re the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids.
So it turns out that, whoops, now we’ve got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding? I started making calls to my gamer posse find out.
As you’d expect, I found that joystick-wielding parents are much better than Hillary Clinton at parsing the nuances in various types of combat games. Brian Crecente, the editor of game blog Kotaku, takes an approach that most gamer parents described to me: They treat games as they would movies. If they’re too adult in content for his 5-year-old son, he won’t let his child even watch them being played.
“Everybody knows, as an adult, that the world is not always a nice place,” Crecente told me. “But I don’t want him to know that yet. I want him to have a childhood.” So he disallows games with “realistic” combat, like World War II titles, or Resistance: Fall of Man, but permits highly cartoony shooting, like Starfox on the Nintendo DS — since he regards it as essentially as abstract as playing cops and robbers with your fingers as guns.
Chris Anderson, my uber-boss — the editor in chief of Wired magazine and lead editor on Geekdad — suggested a even more intriguing strategy: the “Lego Rule.”
The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. “You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns,” Anderson says. So his four children can play games like Halo, since it contains only futuristic, fantasy war, where you’re killing only green- or blue-blooded aliens. The same goes for Roman swordplay titles. “But it clearly walls off Grand Theft Auto.”
(I e-mailed Lego’s spokesman Michael McNally, and he confirmed the company’s Solomonic logic. Lego, he wrote, agrees that good-versus-evil combat “is at the root of children’s play scenarios, and we believe is an important part of a child’s exploration of the world.” But they don’t want it infecting the children’s perception of the real world around them, so the solution is to place it decisively in the realm of fantasy.)
Personally, I love that idea, and will probably try to remix it with Crecente’s guidelines. But the truth is that violence in games is, paradoxically, one of easier issues to deal with, because you actually can make distinctions from game to game. (And as scientific research is finding, games are unlikely to make your kid a killer; recent studies show that violent games only increase your kids’ aggression if they already have pre-existing behavioral problems.)
That seems like a pretty good guideline to me. I’m certainly not going to give up watching The Shield and the like, it just won’t be appropriate for the kid. (No, he’s not going to be called Skeletor, folks. He’s going to be named Arthas, sheesh.) At the same time, games like Vice City (if I ever actually finished it) would be off-limits for the kid.
But Jenn and I loved Spyro the Dragon on the PS1 — I even have a big signed poster of Spyro 3 I’ve gotta frame and hang up when we move into the new house — and it’s as kid-friendly as can be, as are many other platform games. If Arthas were old enough to play with the Wii, I’d pick one up for him and play Wii Sports and Zelda with him until we’d sent our Wiimotes crashing into all the TV screens we could afford.
The bigger question, of course, will be total daily “screen time,” the modern merger of TV time, videogame time and Internet time. Fortunately, that decision (and resulting fight) can wait a little while.
Today, I was declared asymptomatic for sarcoidosis. Which should be good news, but I think it just points to differing yardsticks used by medical practicioners and patients.
Yes, at its worst (well, nearly worst — the absolute worst is blindness), sarcoidosis targets lung capacity and function, and that’s horrible and I’m glad I no longer have the 30-minute coughing fits and the like that I had in 2005. We had an office manager with sarcoidosis who had greatly reduced lung function thanks to all the granuloma studding the inside of her lungs.
But just because I’m breathing fine doesn’t mean that I’m asymptomatic: I still have pain in my joints, especially my left side, especially my left wrist and hand and knee. When I get up after a long time sitting down, our current office manager, Sharon, can hear my knee snap, crackle and popping from across the room, particularly when I’ve been off my meds for a few days.
Anyway, my prescription has been renewed and some more drug company coupons for free months’ supplies have been tossed my way as well. I’m also due for a chest x-ray to see if the granuloma on my lymph node have disappeared. I’m also going to go in for a Pulminary Function Test on Thursday.
Still, by any standards, my quality of life is a lot higher than it was this time two years ago.
Jenn got this via e-mail, and a quick look at Google shows that it’s all over, so determining its origin would be difficult at this point.
1. The “Wall Street Journal” is read by the people who run the country.
2. The “Washington Post” is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The “New York Times” is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
4. “USA Today” is read by people who think they maybe ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. “The Los Angeles Times” is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country — if they could find the time — and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
6. The “Boston Globe” is read by people whose ancestors used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
7. The “New York Daily News” is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The “New York Post” is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The “Miami Herald” is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.
10. The “San Francisco Chronicle” is read by people who aren’t sure anyone runs the country, but if they find out who does, they oppose all them. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist, and also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.
11. The “National Enquirer” is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
12. Nothing is read by the guy who is running this country.
Having lived in Washington and having lived in Southern California, it would take a hell of a great incentive for me to ever move back there. (This is your cue, Washington Post.)
So, this year, I think I’m going to try and knock out a novella in a month as part of National Novel Writing Month. (The standard length really creates a novella, not a novel, but “National Novella Writing Month” wouldn’t put as many butts in the seats.) I don’t have any illusions that this will produce something publishers are going to be eager to snatch up, but I still would like to make this a good practice run for a “serious” novel attempt.
In that spirit, I’m going to do some advance planning for my piece, “The Unicorn Hunter,” periodically throughout the year. While I have the basic concept — the title almost tells it all — I’ll want a good outline ahead of time, an idea of who the characters are and some ideas of the setting.
Wendy Wheeler has a good basic outline on her site. I’ll rough something out over the next week and post it here.
So, it’s been about two years since I woke up one morning, when I woke up with what I thought was a foot spur, which then progressed into what doctors thought was rheumatoid arthritis and then diagnosed as lymphoma before finally identifying as sarcoidosis.
For maybe 18 months now, I’ve been taking a combo pack of 1000 milligrams of (generic) Aleve a day to lower the swelling in my joints and Prevacid to undo the damage that the Aleve was doing to my gut.
Yesterday, I was informed my monthly prescription couldn’t be refilled without another visit to the doctor, which is certainly overdue. Sarcoidosis is something that most people’s immune systems will eventually get over (it’s an auto-immune disorder where the body mistakenly discovers non-existent problems in the body and then overreacts to them), and I’ve tried to lower my Aleve intake a few times just to test over the past year or so.
Well, I’m still needing my drugs, it seems. My fever has come back — eyes, tongue and other bits are swollen and hot — and my left wrist, both hands and left knee are swollen, stiff and making as much noise as a large bowl of Rice Krispies.
The saga continues.
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