GAMER DAD: KIDS ARE SMART
“Why are they lying down, Daddy?”
My three year old son has an eye for detail.
Because they’re tired wasn’t going to cut it.
“Because they’re dead.” was the honest answer – and I believe in being honest to my kids. It gets rapidly worse though, as it always does.
“Why are they dead, Daddy?”
“Um, err, because my soldiers killed them.”
“Did you make your soldiers kill them, Daddy?”
At this stage, I gave up. There have always been games that I don’t play around my kids. Half Life, Bioshock and Company of Heroes are no brainers. I thought I could get away with Rome : Total War. The combat was reasonably abstract; no head shots or blood splatters here.
It turns out I was wrong. It had all been going so well, here I was entertaining both of the kids, getting in some ‘quality time’ and also doing what I wanted to do. Now another game has been consigned to the crowded time slot of ‘after the kids are in bed, the house is tidy and I’m still awake’.
Video games cop an awful lot of flak (some justified) these days. When I grew up, no one saw any harm in Space Invaders or PacMan. Playing Dungeons and Dragons though, was selling your soul to the Devil.
But I digress, and that’s a story for another post. What can a Father do to pass on his love for games to his young children when a huge portion of the games coming out these days are violent in nature? Quite a lot as it turns out.
Not long after the “Why are they lying down?” debacle, I downloaded the Spore Creature Creator demo. Wham! – there goes the weekend. Before I knew it my children are kicking me off the computer, creating creatures the likes of which the world has never seen before, making them dance and sending movies of them to their Grandparents.
And occasionally asking for help spelling the names they dream up. While not quite the success I’d hoped for in terms of me playing games, I couldn’t deny they were having fun, learning to be creative and exploring new ideas, and best of all, keeping out of mischief.
Then there was the minigolf game we found in a bargain bin one day. The kids love it, even if they can’t play it very well. Who cares? They just like hitting the ball around, and if it goes in the hole we all celebrate.
This last weekend, I downloaded the demo for Audiosurf – and I bought the full game about 10 minutes later. Anyone can play it, the game works well with any music – be it Vivaldi, The Wiggles or anything ‘as long as it’s Rock and Roll’ (my son’s favourite).
The moral of this story is that there’s a lot of good stuff for kids out there, and some of the best games are not marketed at kids. They’re just fun to play. No need to dumb it down, kids are smart.
