Complex Numbers

In the Game

Everyone has an opinion on video games. Most of them are wrong.

gaming, in kids' own words  

I'm going to go ahead and note the precious no-caps headline, and then forget about it.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Rachel Kowert about the new genre of alarmist rhetoric around kids’ pandemic gaming and screen time.

As is often the case, I'm behind the curve, here; this article is from early 2021. But the "alarmist rhetoric" has been going on since long before the pandemic; enforced social isolation only changed the narrative a bit.

You might not have kids, and you might not spend much time worrying about gaming.

I don't, and I'm too busy playing games to worry about them.

But you can still recognize that as a society, we often spend a lot of time worrying about how a cultural product is affecting a group of people — kids, teen girls, grown-ass women — and very little time actually talking to the people actually consuming it.

Right, because teen boys and men can be safely ignored.

The problem, then, is that some people don’t want things to be complicated. They don’t want to hear people talk about why they like things, because if they listen long enough, it will challenge neat understanding of things that are “good” and “bad” — especially when it comes to children, or teens, or women.

I'm going to spend the rest of this entry not being salty about the demographics there.

I'll just note that this bit is otherwise pretty insightful, and argues against the pervasive good/bad binary. It's as if the great philosophers Beavis and Butt-Head live in people's minds, where everything is either cool, or sucks, and there's no nuance. One star or five stars, never anything in between.

Kids don’t know everything. But they often do know themselves. So I wanted to hear them talk about their own relationship to the games they play: what they like about it, when they like to play, how games make them feel, who they like to play with, and how they respond to anxiety about their gaming/screen time.

So, most of the article does just that. I won't highlight much from the interviews, but I found them interesting.

There's just one caveat:

I gave adults a list of potential questions, and then asked them to transcribe answers in as close to their kids’ voice as possible. Some of the answers have been shortened, but none of the wording has.

I'd like to believe that, but this is, like, hearsay of hearsay. Some of the "voices" are questionable to me. So I wouldn't take any of them as accurate; some might be flat-out lying.

I won't exacerbate that situation by quoting a lot from the actual interviews; just highlight a couple that I found to be interesting, whether it's actually a kid's "voice" or not.

(5 year old kid) I hope you really enjoy video games too. They're invented to be really cool.

They're invented to be engaging, rewarding, and at least borderline addictive. I say this as a gamer, but I'm also an adult (at least by chronology).

(15 year old kid) Gaming is so new that there's no conclusive evidence yet to prove if it's actually harmful. It feels like they’re just trying to control us and tell us what to do.

Now this, I can believe coming from a 15 year old.

(13 year old kid) People need to make sure they don’t get correlation and causation mixed together.

Which is what I've been saying. I'm tempted to not believe he actually said that, but other things in that kid's interview make me think he's rather advanced for a 13 year old.

There's a lot more at the link. One final point, though: a lot of these kids focus on the social aspects of gameplay. I prefer playing solo games, myself. Unlike these kids, I followed the evolution of computer games from text-based adventures all the way to near-VR experiences. I've had a lot of good experiences playing multiplayer games, but I also think there's a toxic culture there. Not just online trolls, but the whole conversion of a leisure activity to cutthroat competition.

I don't know. Maybe you think I don't get to have an opinion on the subject, because I don't have kids. That's your prerogative, of course, but these kids are part of the society I live in, so I do have an opinion.

So do they.