We’ve had an Xbox One S in my house for about a month and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I might regret buying it.
Our family has always been big on video games. Most of my writing and research focuses parenting and childrearing in the 21st century. I write about education, schools and family in an era of networked communication and always-on digital media.
My boys are nine- and eleven-years old and we’ve been playing video games as a family for a long time. Years ago, when I wrote my first post for Forbes, we were still using the Wii to play New Super Mario Bros. Back then, I had just written a book that analyzed classic video games from the perspective of archetypal psychology. I was concerned with the ways in which the metaphors of the game-world impacted how players make meaning out of their experiences in the life-world. The book was for grownups, but as I wrote more and more about the topic—and as my kids got older and started making autonomous gaming decisions—I became increasingly interested in kids’ experiences with digital play.
Photo by Jordan Shapiro
At this point, all the research around child development is pretty clear about the benefits of play. For example, it’s one of the primary ways in which kids develop executive function and self-regulation skills. There are so many studies that have connected play with agency, motivation, identity, critical thinking, confidence, etc. Kids are never just playing; they are always simultaneously reinforcing lifelong habits. And while there may be some differences between how life-world play shapes kids’ long-term behaviors and how game-world play does the same thing, there is still relatively little good research that addresses differences between the two. Therefore, at least for the time being, you can ignore most of the anti-digital-play rhetoric. It’s grounded in nostalgia for the good old days of stickball and sandlots more than it’s based on any good empirical research about child development.
Bottom line: digital play is a form of play. And most play is good for kids. A variety of different kinds of play—digital and non-digital—is even better.
Moreover, when parents and kids play together, magic happens. Because they’re not just playing together, they’re also talking together. And you’ve probably heard all about how vocabulary develops when kids converse with adults—and how literacy is directly related to the size of one’s vocabulary. When those conversations are contextualized around something kids are passionate about, like video games, the impact is substantial.
Wait, there’s more: when you’re playing games with your kids, they’re watching you. And not only do the kids learn from mirroring the behaviors their parents demonstrate, they also get a chance to practice making meaning out of their experiences in the game world under the mentorship of an experienced adult.
No doubt you can see why so much of what I’ve written over the years has promoted the idea of family gaming. But there’s a big stigma to push back against: the image of digital play as anti-social. Despite the huge social aspects involved in gaming, the image of the overweight isolated slacker-nerd just won’t go away. Of course, the stereotype is false. One need only consider how much gaming now happens in big online multiplayer arenas to see that it can be a social activity. Dig a little deeper and it’s also clear that digital play is always essentially about interacting with a virtual landscape. That landscape often involves other characters, beings and avatars. But even when it doesn’t, it is still all about how a player responds to the feedback that the external, albeit virtual, environment provides. The game rewards some kinds of interactions and not others. See what I’m getting at here? This process of responding to feedback is analogous to the way we navigate complex social interactions.
But the best prosocial benefits of gaming come from local multiplayer modes. Personally, I don’t care whether its cooperative or competitive. I suspect parents, teachers, and caregivers probably like coop mode better. It feels more like a positive form of “community.” But the benefits of playing together are probably similar in both cases. When kids sit in the living room next to each other, munching on popcorn and thumbing away at the controller, they are practicing a whole slew of prosocial behaviors. They are learning. They are exploring. They are growing.
Which gets me to the problem with the Xbox: I can’t find enough games that include local multiplayer modes. If you’ve got suggestions, please put them in the comments because ever since we got the console, my kids have been arguing nonstop. They squabble over who gets to play next. They fight over the color of the controller. The younger one screams whenever his older brother won’t help him figure out what to do. And it makes me miss the cozy pro-family attitude that Nintendo brought into my living room.
The trouble is that my kids are mostly done with the WiiU. Now that they’re in their Tween years, they want darker games. They want edgy, gritty, violent games that push them into psychologically uncomfortable places. And that’s all okay with me. If what they need right now—as they move toward adolescence—is something more destabilizing than the Mushroom Kingdom, I get it. I remember what it feels like to be their age and I’m sure that there’s something that feels cathartic about all that shooting and combat. But I don’t understand why it needs to be so independent, so insulated.
Maybe it’s because, in the United States, we tell the story of adolescence as an experience of separating into adulthood. It is a weening, a chord cutting, a schism. The psychologist James Hillman once explained that our cultural expectations for individual growth and development start with sharing, community, and cooperation and then quickly turn isolationist, preoccupied with self-preservation. “First fusion,” he wrote, “then separation in order to find identity and individuality.” But do things have to be that way? Is it really the attitude we want to cultivate in the next generation? Do they need to push away from others in order to find themselves? Hillman says no, “they deceive us, the psychologists of growth, when they say: things must divide in order to grow and the pain is of parturition, the destruction really a creation in disguise.”
It seems to me that in a world dominated by networks, high speed transportation infrastructure, and global trade, tomorrow’s elite will be the ones who excel at connecting, not separating. Certainly, a great deal of the future’s workforce relationships will only exist online—tomorrow’s laborers will likely telecommute to virtual factory floors where folks assemble information widgets and operate drones. It will probably be very similar to massive multiplayer online games. But that’s all the more reason why kids need to learn how to connect locally. They need to know how to be dialed-in and connected to faraway places, while simultaneously locally emplaced.
Digital play can (and should) be preparing today’s tweens for tomorrow’s adulthood. But I worry that it is inadvertently reinforcing the sense of individualistic self-preservation that dominated the 20th century. Maybe I’m just playing the wrong games.
