It's impossible for me to keep my bad habit from my children. Like a parent who steps out onto the porch to have a smoke, I can't sneak to a remote corner of my house to play a video game for 5 minutes without at least my oldest child wondering what's going on. So, since second-hand video games don't affect breathing, I don't hide, occasionally frequently pulling out my iPhone when nobody expects too much of me so I can try to beat Labyrinth Zone Act 3 in Sonic the Hedgehog or "27" in Flappy Bird.
And at least one of my brood is leaning over my shoulder within 5 seconds to take it all in. In particular, my oldest, Ben, and I have bonded quite a bit over Sonic the Hedgehog lately. Sonic was my greatest pre-teen love. When I saw a demo unit Sega Genesis in Toys 'R Us in early 1992, my mind was blown. My Nintendo at home was primitive by comparison, and Super Mario World on my friend's SNES was much slower and a bit too cutesy compared to the quick and edgy Sonic. There was something else about it that others have noted- something about the intro screen, the music, the swooshing text, the dancing flowers, deep scrolling backdrops, big-eyed baddies that made it seem more alive. I want to say "arcade-y" but I found most arcade games a bit campy. It was better than an arcade game.
I walked away from the demo unit and home to Super Mario Bros. 3 (great game, don't get me wrong), dismissing my brief love affair with the blue hedgehog as a fleeting crush never to be fulfilled. Then later that year, my brother won a Sega Genesis in a raffle. WITH SONIC THE HEDGEHOG INSIDE.
I lived and breathed Sonic for the next five years. I collected all the Chaos Emeralds. I locked on Sonic and Knuckles with non-compatible cartridges to try the extra special stages. I almost beat Sonic Spinball. By some strange miracle, I vaguely remember getting the good ending on the nearly-impossible Sonic 2 for Game Gear (this highly-capable gamer feels like a completely different person to me now- I wonder sometimes if he was real).
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| Ben playing Angel Island Zone Act 1 in Sonic 3 and Knuckles from Steam. |
This, of course, wasn't Ben's first exposure to video games. He was banging on Scott Hanselman's Baby Smash from 6 months and gawking at my urban sprawl in Sim City 4 from age 2. He spied on me playing Final Fantasy VII a few times (he calls it "dad's fighting game") and we even briefly tried Super Mario Galaxy a few times. He actually found that latter a bit scary. He already can't stand any conflict whatsoever in movies and TV shows, and I wonder if the images of Mario getting squished and the baddies that followed you combined with the immersiveness of it all got to him. But he really got into Sonic. If I was playing, he wanted to watch. And after 5 minutes or less, he wanted to play.
I know a kid liking something isn't a great justification to letting the kid partake in that something, but hear me out. Maybe it's just me romanticizing my childhood, but I really do feel like video games had a positive impact on me growing up. I think they encouraged problem-solving skills. They encouraged creativity; I would play games and then fill notebooks with drawings of my own games that I hoped to invent. Simulations like Sim City and Civilization caused me to consider what it would really take to build cities and nations. Making history in Civilization made me interesting in studying history. The desire to make video games made me want to learn how. I programmed them on my graphing calculator in high school and then I went to school to learn how to program, and now I program things to make money (incidentally, I minored in History).
So, with my rose-colored glasses, I've drawn many reasons why it's OK for my son to watch and play Sonic the Hedgehog:
- It's totally G-rated. It's easily recognizable as fantasy. I know kids don't fully understand reality vs. fantasy at this age (Ben asks me when Sonic sleeps and where is his home), but this seems relatively low-risk for generating nightmares. That said, I'll keep him away from the giant buzz saws in Scrap Brain Zone for a while.
- It's simple. The controls are very responsive. It's good for motor skills and understanding cause-and-effect. Two directions to go, arrows move sonic. Any button makes him jump.
- Physics! Mario is good for this, too (though Sonic is better). When you run first, you jump further. Going downhill makes you go faster. What does a spring do?
- Little, in-the-moment challenges with a sense of accomplishment. How do you get up this hill? How do you get over the spikes? Oh, so I have to go left and then right here? When playing together, you can gradually up the ante. "Dad, you get him through the water this time" (but next time you gotta do it!).
- Can be consumed in bite-sized morsels. Early levels are 2-3 minutes. Ben has even finished a few himself by knowing enough to run right and jump sometimes. Modern remakes allow you to save, so you can play 10 minutes together and come back to the same place (not sure how I ever played without this).
Glasses off... what's bad about it so far?
Like his father, he shows some signs of getting a bit obsessed. When I play games, if I get to point A, I have a hard time putting it down without first getting to point B, then point C, and so forth. Playing Sonic on a touch screen felt like I had never played the game before at first. The feeling was so foreign. Just barely getting through the game felt like a huge accomplishment. By about that time, I got over the touch screen thing and muscle memory was coming back, and I wanted to achieve more. I wanted to rack up Game Center achievements, beat time trials, get additional characters, and find secret areas. It's fun to do something you couldn't do a few days ago, and it must be extra thrilling when you can do something your dad can do.
So we come back to the age-old maxim about moderation- easy enough to enforce upon a young child, a bit harder to regulate oneself.
The retro movement: catching our childhood in a bottle and giving it to our children
I just took you though a very specific example that might not be at all appealing to someone who can't stand fast blue hedgehogs or who has a child who is afraid of dancing flowers and cute bug-eyed animalbots. What's the point?
Video games have not just been moved mightily over the decades by the advance of technology, but by the changing conscience of the player, going from cute abstractions that entertained to gory abstractions that dulled our senses to lifelike simulations that have been blamed for school shootings to virtual social experiments that have sealed us in our parents' basements.
Somewhere in that latter rocky era, video games stopped being fun for a lot of folks. They were too complex, too real, too long. Like all good backlashes, the market responded in kind, and the newfound "casual gamer" started playing Wii Sports and classic games on Virtual Console, then Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja on their iPhones, and now most game makers have almost everything that was ever popular in their back catalog available on a modern platform, and indie game makers are producing the next generation of "old" games. The formerly-derided casual gamer is now the core target market as cell phones are by far the hottest selling game consoles by several orders of magnitude.
It's terribly difficult to hide our passions from our children, so if you enjoy video games, there has never been a better time to share that passion with your children in a way that might possibly constructive. You can have a little fun, their minds might expand a bit, and you can both enjoy accomplishing something together.
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