How much time to game?

Children and gaming are rattling around the news rooms again. The UK’s gaming violence study with Dr Byron has been up and running for a month or so. On the other side of the pond, a gaming poll has indicated that 43% of parents never ever play a video game with their kids, and only 27% play for more than an hour alongside their kids. Perhaps its a simple lack of time rather than a fear of pwnage from your own offspring. It is a concern, just yesterday I was asked the same question by three different parents, “how much should we let kids play?”

Games have changes since I was a kid. Growing up with a Dragon 32 and a geek-dad for company there were quite a few games for me to play. Granted we had to have a chittering tape player to load them over a timespan usually reserved for intercontinental drift, and in which choosing the wrong cassette led to one of pa’s ‘I’ll teach you to spell’ games. Though quite usefully this taught me to hack so as to achieve top marks, with probably more effort involved. But the one factor in all these games were that they were unanimously one player enterprises. The closest we had to ‘team’ gaming was to let one brother wiggled Tails lamely back and forth, whilst the other took full control of Sonic. Gamers were generally solitary oyster-like creatures whilst at play.

Things have moved on, Ultimate Alliance and Fantastic Four have four way cooperative play. Games can now be bought with pocket money. Games are now a lot more watch-able from the sidelines through their HD glory. And the umbrella is wider, games like Nintendogs or Scrabble on the DS have taken games to new or old places. Video games are now anything but solitary.

At casa welikeplay I’ve thought long and hard about this and I run the following with my kids.

You may play for as long as your dad/mum is interested. There will also be a mandatory day off every week. Arguing with the judgement of parents makes tomorrow a game free day.

Such an arrangement limits games to those which are either multiplayer, so we growed-ups can join in. Or games like the new Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction which, though only a one player game, is highly engaging and watchable. Or games like Big Brain Academy, which we’re happy to feign interest as we’ve bought the line that they’re somehow making my kids smarter.

I’m lucky, I’m at home to see my boys after school. And I like play. So I do get time to do the whole interest-rule-thing. If I didn’t I’d have to find some sort of arbitrary time slot.  I also like to think that it this parent play lifts the genre, perhaps they’ll be up there with film one day. So I’ve got them young, and perhaps those teen years will be easier as a result; though I’ve a lurking suspicion that unless I hone my skills I’m going to get pwnd time and again in the next 12 years.

tag... play, gamer, geeky, philosophising