This week I’m going to take a look at a technological phenomenon that has affected nearly everyone my age and younger – video games.
I was with some kids the other day and wanted to introduce them to the games I grew up with – you know, the classics; Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Zelda…
It was an interesting, and surprising, thing to watch.
While these kids regularly entertained themselves with their mom’s smartphone, playing games that consisted of zero long-term skill (ie: popping bubbles), they couldn’t seem to muster more than a minute of attention to give to a game as simple as Super Mario Bros. They became frustrated and quit almost immediately.
I was baffled.
When I was a kid, I was glued to the television when Super Mario Bros. came out. It offered just the right amount of challenge to keep me playing. My hand-eye coordination developed, my skills increased as I learned new techniques and strategies, and my patience and sticktoitiveness helped me to learn from my mistakes and persist through my failures.
With Tetris, my spatial intelligence was tested and honed. With Zelda, long-term incremental success based on a wide range of tactics and strategies was evolved. And then when the Super Nintendo came out, games like Super Mario World, Zelda: A Link to the Past, and SimCity all continued to push what I now consider to be valuable skills to the next level.
Indeed, from these games I learned much – things I’d go so far as to attribute much of my success in life to. Seriously.
It’s now 2016, and my how things have changed.
From what I can tell, the games young children are now playing have almost no substance at all. From the mindless bubble-popping style games like Angry Birds, to the aimless wandering of Minecraft, the games today seem not to engender or build skills, but rather to suck time away without giving anything back whatsoever, except perhaps, a shortened attention span.
But this is just the beginning.
As the kids get older, the game choices of course change. And the most popular games among older children downright scare me. Games like Battlefield, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat X, and so forth.
If you thought video games were violent when I was a kid (as in, the original Mortal Kombat), you might want to take a look at what kids are looking at these days. It’s absolutely grotesque. I mean, downright horrific. So much so, that I don’t even want to insert any of the extreme images that pull up on a Google search as an example – even a single screenshot of some of these video games is too much to look at. I simply can’t imagine ‘playing’ on a huge HD screen with surround sound. The very thought makes my stomach turn. Especially when I consider that millions of kids will do just that today.
Tragic to say the least.
So here’s my two bits: Video games can be awesome. They develop real world skills that can be applied in many areas of life. But they can also be disastrously and disgustingly harmful – used for controlling and priming an upcoming populace devoid of any sensitivity to violence or loss of life, ready to take the controls of missile-dropping drones. I think it’s critically important we pay attention to what are kids are playing, and not only discourage the use of negative video games, but indeed, encourage the use of good ones. There are plenty of both. Choose wisely.
Go forth and save the princess!
