Video Games

The Unschooling Voices for March has two choices of the designated options from which to pick, the first is to do something creative with the letters U-N-S-C-H-O-O-L, you know like Underwater Naturalists Scurry for Caves However Often Orcas Lurk, which probably isn't true. There probably aren't a lot of caves to scurry for where orcas lurk. Or something else maybe Underwater Naturalists Scan Clamshells when Hunting Ocellated Octopuses Lying in. And while I can come up with two marine based examples, I am completely stuck trying to come up with one that actually applies to unschooling. I got one: Unschooling: Not Schooling Can Help Overcome Obstacles to Learning. But, really, I'm going to go for the second question: A topic that comes up on the unschooling e-mail groups a lot is TV/computer/video games and how hard it is for parents to let go of control in those areas.

I've addressed tv/computer/video games a lot on the lists that I'm on. It is such an intense worry that these things rot children's brains, that they are all evil, well, except for eye-hand coordination, but presumably people who chop wood have a need for eye-hand coordination as well, so maybe just get a wood burning fire and some axes instead of the whole game system route. But, I haven't really talked about my route through video games.

When I was a kid my dad brought home the game system Pong. I'm pretty sure it wasn't actually the Pong system, it was some later derivative that included not only pong, but also breakout. I can remember sitting in the t.v. room, this lovely, bright room with windows on three sides, on the floor in front of our huge television (the screen wasn't that big, but the box was so large) that at some point had the metal wear out on the channel changer so to change channels you had to use a pair of red handled needle-nosed pliers, playing pong and breakout against Sam who was so much better than me that I'm sure I probably cried at least once or twice. I don't know what happened to that system, I don't know how long it sat on the top of the television with maybe a plastic dust cover over it, maybe not. But it was my first experience of the world of video games.

I think my next brush with video games was playing a text-based role playing game at Camp Unistar where they had a game similar to, or maybe it was, Zork. I didn't play it much, swimming and canoeing and playing ping pong were far more appealling. But it was fun when I did sit down and play it. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I found every once in a while and cheated at, holding on to the page where I made a fateful choice so that I could come back to it if I changed my mind or died. It held at least two of the kids who were attending the camp rapt, they had so much fun in this imaginary world with twists and turns of someone else's devising.

The next major video game moment for me was at an arcade at Skateland in Omaha. You'd roll in to the arcade on your skates and play some game for a quarter. I sucked at almost all of them. I would die almost immediately when playing Asteroids and Galaxians and Space Invaders, but I remember getting a high score on Tempest (you may have to register to play the one at atari, there is a similar version here) that doesn't require registration) the first time I played it. I don't think I ever did so well again, but that didn't keep me from trying. And then came Pacman. I really didn't and don't have any aptitude for Pacman. But my friend Deb was amazing. We would go to Little King'sin Kearney, Nebraska and she would make her quarter work for her on the tabletop version of Pacman or the arcade version of Ms. Pacman. I could watch her play for ages with our giant sized, refillable, cups of pop to keep us going. And that was it for me for video games except for having The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text based game in High School to use on my dad's computer for which the Nebraska Legislature paid to let him have modem access to what I have no idea. I couldn't ever figure out how to get the babel fish into Arthur Dent's ear, which was about 10 minutes into the game, the bar was set too high for me. I played it on-line 3 years ago, and I had to use a cheat guide and follow it word for word, which got boring, so I managed to get as far as ejection into outer space from the Vogon ship and picked up by the Heart of Gold. Oh, and I spent some huge amount of my very small amount of money on the game Neuromancer based on recommendations by my friend Bill Carmichael, and I could never, ever get it to work on dad's computer.

There were brief interludes with video games. One of my roommates at college had a Nintendo with Super Mario Brothers 2. And when I lived in Puyallup, Washington and worked at Kaybee Toys I bought a Nintendo and got Fester's Quest and a few other games that I can't remember as well. I do remember getting Nintendo thumb and buying a controller with a rapid fire setting which alleviated the problem nicely.

So for me video games were a part of the backdrop of my life. They didn't define anything, really, I wasn't an avid fan, but I enjoyed them. But something happened when I had Simon, something that said to me that videogames beget violence and stupidity and sloth. So when my brother gave us a Sega Dreamcast with a Sega Bass Fishing and special fishing rod controller in a sweet gesture to help us practice our fishing before coming to his new property near Ainsworth, Nebraska, I was livid. Simon was only almost 3, and it seemed so wrong to have this little boy sluiced down this path to mindless brutality. The funny thing is that Simon and I played computer games together all the time. We played Blues Clues and Barnyard Rhythm & Moos and Tonka Construction which had an attachment tool kit that you strapped on to the keyboard and hammered and sawed and drilled as required during the gameplay. I didn't see those games as the gateway drug to real life violence that I saw in console games. They were educational, and it was fun to sit with Simon on my lap and play these games and chat and press the keyboard together. It was a family moment.

But we played the fishing game and it was fun and we got Pen Pen TriIcelon, which Simon can still remember, and David got Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 which both he and I played nightly, and we got a Sonic game, Sonic Adventure. The Sonic game was Simon's first true love in a video game. And he was pretty good at it. And he was good at asking for help when he needed it.

When we went to Japan we put the Sega into storage and something happened when we were away. Something that made those games, that system, not an evil. Maybe it was the 6 months before we left of playing with the Sega that laid the groundwork. Maybe it was watching Simon play superhero games where he rescued animals in need and knowing, totally knowing, that he was a gentle person who would take more than a video game to corrupt.

There have been moments when I stopped believing. Television was always something that I felt had addictive properties. My brother wrote a column when he was in high school and was the editor on the school paper about how our home survived having no television for a bit. He put me in the corner, in a daze, saying "The plane, the plane." And it seemed an accurate caricature of my relationship with television. So when Simon hit Linnaea for turning off the television I turned off his television for a week. I remember talking to two women at a local grocery store during that week. Two women who home/unschooled their daughter and as we stood near the refrigerated section we talked about the television problem, and they said they didn't use television in that way, but, because it is so hard to criticize a stranger's parenting, they did say that they could understand why I had done it. They didn't say but he was probably intensely enjoying the show when she turned it off, they didn't say do you have pre-existing issues with television? they didn't say could you have stepped in and helped Linnaea to find something else to do other than playing with the television? Which is among the things I might say if someone came to unschoolingDiscussion in a similar situation. And are certainly some of the things that now play a part of my responses to such conflict, if and when it ocurs, which is rarely.

We now are a 4 system house. We have 3 PCs, a gamecube, a Wii, and this week we got a PS2 with We Love Katamari and Kingdom Hearts 2. Simon is really enjoying Kingdom Hearts 2 and is planning on getting the first one so he can get all of the story references. Linnaea loves Katamari, although she will rush through what the King says, which are some of my favorite bits. I've started my own file so that I can hear his fabulous, fatuous self. She also loves World of Warcraft, most evenings she plays while talking to her friend Jess on the phone, and Sims 2, which I think has helped to spawn an interest in the Barbies she collected a few years ago. It really is a giant, virtual game of Barbies. Simon is more of a console player. The Wii isn't as appealling for him as are the gamecube and the PS2, maybe because the only RPG we have for the Wii is Zelda Twilight Princess. But I really enjoy the movement of the Wii.

I was talking to my dad on the phone a few days ago and he asked what I was reading. I told him I was reading Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good for You (which always gets me singing Everything right is wrong again, just like in the long, long trailer), which a friend lent me, but that it was preaching to the choir a bit. And he said "you like video games?" and I said "Yeah, they're fantastic. Don't you remember playing Mario Dancemat with Linnaea and how much fun it was?" He said "She was amazing, and I was bumbling". And so she was. But she remembers that her Grandpa danced Mario with her. And that is a really cool thing.