Let me paint a scene for you.
The year: 2011
The location: The Silver beach house, Emerald Isle, North Carolina
The time: Earlier than anyone should be awake on a holiday weekend at the beach; approximately 8am.
The main players: Tyler Silver, age 13; Christopher Silver, age 11; Ryan Silver, age 8. [Caveat: I’m not sure these are the exact ages of my cousins, and I will probably get a scolding email from my mother telling me otherwise. Sorry, Mom.]
Background: It is the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. The temperature is in the low 80s. There are a few scattered cotton candy-like clouds dotting the otherwise pure blue sky. A gentle breeze comes off the water, pushing the humidity and biting black flies safely inland. The Silver beach house is a beachfront property, and you can easily see the ocean through the huge windows and sliding door at the back of the house.
The bickering begins from the moment the boys crawl out of bed and descend on the main room.
Ryan: Give me the DS.
Chris: No.
Ryan: Give me the DS, it’s my turn.
Chris: No it’s not, you played it forever last night.
Ryan: It’s my game, give me the DS!
Chris: No!
Ryan: But it’s mine!
Chris: Fine, you can have it after I die.
[Twenty minutes later]
Ryan: Give me the DS.
Chris: I haven’t died yet.
Ryan: Chriiiiiissssss…
Chris: No!
This scene was rinsed and repeated for the next two hours as the grownups woke up, prepared breakfast, read the paper, consumed coffee, and generally reconciled themselves to being awake (or at least, I had to do some heavy work on this last point).
In the meantime, the oldest cousin, Tyler, was enthralled by a documentary about Alcatraz. [Please note, Harry Potter fans, I started to write Azkaban.] After an hour of scintillating discourse—Did anyone who escaped from Alcatraz survive? Startling new details revealed!—the programming switched to Real Life Prison Breaks. With the use of actors in orange suits, cops that looked like they were borrowed from a bachelorette party service, and voiceover from the escaped cons themselves, the program daringly recreated the botched escape attempts of some of the country’s most vicious criminals. And guess what? It was a marathon! Never mind that if the cons were doing the voiceover, probably they didn’t escape. Tyler planted himself in a rocking chair and prepared for an entire day of “And I was lost in the woods, and there was nothing to eat or drink, and I could hear the dogs barking behind me and the helicopters overhead. I knew I was running out of time…”
Not one of my cousins looked outside that morning. Not one of them was in a hurry to get down to the beach. Eventually my aunt and uncle kicked them out, but it was not without protest.
I don’t understand it. When I was a kid at the beach, I will admit that I was up at about 6am, probably making a lot of noise and bothering the grownups, but my entire morning revolved around when will they get up, when can I be done with breakfast, when can I get out on the beach, I hope I see dolphins, maybe Grandma will take me fishing, I am going to feed the sea gulls, I think I’ll build a sand castle. Even when I got older and my concerns morphed to I need to get an awesome tan today, maybe I’ll see some cute boys, I hope the waves are good for boogie boarding, I still wanted to be outside. There was never a question of spending the day inside. Any day on the beach that was lost to rain or thunderstorms was mourned.
I am profoundly grateful for the fact that the only video game my parents allowed in our house growing up was a Gameboy. Even then, I can remember the hours melting away as I played Jurassic Park or Mario or Kirby. I would get sucked into the game and nothing mattered but getting to the next level, beating the next big boss. I think my parents did a pretty good job of setting limits for how long we could play the Gameboy before we had to read or go outside or do something else. It used to be an occasional treat to go to a friend’s house and get to play Mariokart or other Nintendo games.
I worry less about my cousins than most kids. They all play about a billion sports between them and get good grades in school; my uncle and aunt know how to set limits. But what about kids whose parents don’t pay attention? Kids who don’t have other activities to distract them from the all-consuming need to play just one more level, try to beat the enemy one more time.
There are practical implications to the virtual reality/video game culture kids grow up in: the obesity epidemic, plunging test grades, heightened exposure to violence, but I worry about other things too. Will there become a day when kids just don’t go outside? When all the reality they need is filtered through a screen? What will society look like when those kids grow up and become the ones holding the reins?
It’s a sobering thought.
I think in the hazy distant day when I bring my own kids to the beach, the video games will stay at home.
This week’s synchroblog topic was “What we might become if…”
And hey, we have a nifty new setup! You can read the other posts here:
Pingback: What we might become if… | The Creative Collective
It’s enlightening to read your post so soon after Aaron’s parable about what a little girl most wants to do in the hours before the end of the world. I grew up somewhere between your incessant drive to be outside and your cousins’ compulsive gaming. Even after video games infiltrated my home, I was outside more often than not, by choice. But I could no more easily be pried away from Tetris than I could be coaxed indoors on a sunny afternoon, and I found both enterprises to be enriching. I would even now choose to spend a few minutes of the world’s waning hours with a controller in hand.
The evidence that gaming desensitizes kids to real violence is weak, sometimes even built on the backs of children who were already mentally ill. It is for most kids only cathartic, a way to vent the intense stresses of a rigorously (over)scheduled childhood. The link between obesity and gaming is likewise tenuous: let’s talk about how a diet that includes Coke machines in the cafeteria creates a problem that lack of exercise exacerbates, and then let’s note that the best-selling game system in history (the Wii) became so successful precisely because it allowed for a more physically active way to play games. This is all leaving aside the debate about whether video games are a legitimate art form. Guess which side of that argument I’ll take
Obviously kids who can’t moderate themselves should be offered guidance, whether in terms of exercise, nutrition, spiritual development, or entertainment. But when you think about dismissing altogether something they love, even for a beach weekend, would you be prepared to do the same for something you better understood–books, let’s say? What about cell phones and the ubiquitous cameras through which so many adults now process the natural glory of a pristine coastline?