The other day, I checked in on the Facebook group for alumni of my era from the college I dropped out of in 1995. Top on the page was a post inquiring whether anyone else remembered the tempeh sandwiches that had in our day been available in the campus coffee shop. It seemed that the Sysco food-service tempeh on this sandwich was the best this person has ever eaten and haunts her dreams to this day.
The coffee shop's television, for example, was one of what I remember as only two publicly available sets on the campus. (The other was next door in the dining hall.) Several commenters remembered a sign posted on the coffee-shop television in October 1995, after I'd left and was in Coast Guard boot camp: "Reserved for announcement of O.J. verdict."
And then there were the video games. Ranged against an exposed brick wall at one end of the shop were two arcade-style consoles. In the years when I attended this college, one of these was Mortal Kombat, and the other was Galaga. These stood next to a pinball machine whose name/theme I cannot recall, because I never took any interest in pinball.
I took more interest in the video games, specifically in Galaga, but not much more. As a child of the 1980s, with parents who would never have even considered buying me an Atari, my opportunities to play video games while growing up had been limited to visits to one particular friend's house (he had a Commodore 64, and for a year we regularly played a game called Choplifter on it); the public console-style games available on infrequent family visits to movie theaters or bowling alleys; and a tabletop Pacman game in the McDonald's we frequented. I understood from movies like War Games and
This first attempt at college, straight after high school, was the point in my life when I had my first or at least strongest experience of noticing that the years were going by—noticing, that is, that I was now in a decidedly new phase of my life, that other phases had existed and were now over, that this would keep happening until I passed off of this mortal coil into dust, and that memory would be an essential companion and consolation as I moved through it all. (What can I say, I was a tad dramatic and pretentious at that age.)
In this frame of mind, noticing Galaga in the corner of the coffee shop felt something like running into an old friend. While Mortal Kombat was newly released and featured what then seemed amazingly advanced graphics and gameplay capabilities, Galaga was familiar as a preferred game from the desultory arcade experiences of my childhood.
In the five semesters I attended that college, in the early 1990s, I dumped quite a few quarters into that Galaga machine in what turned out to be, for all intents and purposes, the final phase of my career as a video gamer. After a final defeat at the hands of Galaga forces lo these two and a half decades ago, I don't think I ever again dropped another quarter into an arcade game.
Like most things in life, my failure to get sucked in by video games was probably as much coincidence as anything else. I was, after all, most definitely a member of the first video-game generation. Arcades exploded in the 1980s, when I was in elementary and middle school, and I suppose that my birthdate, at least, put me squarely in the target audience for Doom and the similar games that followed, not to mention Tetris and the other games available at first only on Game Boys, the third portable electronic device—after the transistor radio and the Walkman—to be lugged everywhere by teenagers, in an ominous foreshadowing of how we would come to live.
One important reason I didn't get pulled in by all of that is, probably, the same reason I didn't spend the first half of my twenties slumped on the couch, smoking pot and watching X Files like everyone else my age during the late 1990s. Those were the years I was in the Coast Guard, subject to random drug tests and spending most of my time at sea, where the only allowed mind-altering substances were coffee, tobacco, Dramamine, and ephedrine, and the only available electronic entertainments were the videotapes of Hollywood new releases being supplied to the military in those days.
Samuel Johnson said that "being in a ship is like being in jail, with a chance of being drowned," and I certainly saw his point.
In the late 2000s, as Petra and I began to consider bringing children into this dying world, among our many naive beliefs about what lay before us was the mostly unexamined/undiscussed assumption that we would not be a video-game household. Petra had also grown up in circumstances that tended to shield her from bleeping pixelated seduction long enough for other interests to become primary, and so we were well-matched in our inability to intuit just what the hell was so appealing about this activity.
Then, too, not being part of the video game world ourselves, we only became aware of that world's goings-on when they became of broader interest, which is to say when non-video-gamers were freaking out about them for some reason. Video games had really never stopped exciting a sort of low-grade background-noise level of moral panic since first being invented. But the 2000s saw the manifestation of a new, more intense level of concern around the "massively multiplayer online" games that were starting to become prominent, and one started to hear for the first time of people becoming "addicted" to games, playing them for 14 hours at a time, and sometimes even dying from deep vein thrombosis as a result of sitting so still for so long.
I would have understood the possibility of actually dying from playing video games as an extremely unlikely edge case, but video games that sucked you in for days at a time nonetheless seemed likely to have undesirable effects on one's life even short of disability and death. The 2000s was also when the archetype of the "neck-bearded basement dweller" grew current: pale, overweight, ungroomed, dowager-humped, totally lacking in IRL friends, and uninterested in anything but online pornography and when the next Call of Duty release would drop. Petra and I certainly didn't want our children to turn out that way, and so of course we just simply wouldn't allow video games in our house.
Such a prohibition was already easier to state than to enforce and would only become more impractical as time went by. In our formative years, if parents didn't want their kids playing video games, they didn't buy them an Atari or Nintendo console. By the time Petra and I saw those two pink lines on our first home pregnancy test, it was already the case that anyone with a home computer and a credit card could access the new generation of online games, and soon only one of these conditions would apply.
On a typical weekday, Axl and Belle spend at least 1-2 hours playing video games on our home computers; on weekends, this stretches out to as many as five. Other than eating, sleeping, and eliminating waste from their bodies, there is virtually no other activity they engage in so regularly. I tease them that they are bowing down to their "screeny master," but in the etymological sense they can be said to play video games truly religiously—that is, per my American Heritage Desk Dictionary, "scrupulously and conscientiously"—or as though adhering to a doctor's stern prescription.
How did this happen? Like most accidents, it was not the result of a single catastrophic event but rather a cascade of small errors.
From early days as parents, Petra and I were committed to limiting "screen time," which—during the children's first years—of course consisted entirely of TV shows and movies. Then Axl was in school, and—on the playground with his fellow kindergartners and first graders—he began to hear rumors about something called Minecraft.
The thing was, we didn't even need to let him play this game for him to become obsessed with it. The brilliant marketers employed by Mojang, the company that makes Minecraft, had had the idea to sell "mini-figures," or little plastic figurines of the game's characters and creatures. We did not at first see where acceding to his desire to start collecting these might lead.
There were also books, both non-fiction reference works and fictional stories set in the Minecraft world. Having long held the belief that it matters less which books children are drawn to than that they are drawn to books at all, we also did not resist when Axl expressed interest in these.
The other not-to-be-overlooked essential component of the video-game ecosystem these days are the many—let me say again, many—YouTubers whose accounts are devoted to videos showing them playing Minecraft and other games. The main action in these videos is the game itself, with running commentary provided by the person playing, the channel's host, visible in a little postage-stamp screen-in-screen in the upper left corner of the image. Videos like these further entranced Axl, and he absorbed the information they provided like a sponge.
Finally there came the day when Axl had been interested in all of these Minecraft adjuncts for so long and had learned so much about the game and wanted to play it so badly that it began to feel cruel not to let him. As a kind of consolation present on his sister's birthday one year, I signed him up.
I still remember how sweetly thrilled and grateful he was, how clumsily he attempted to manipulate the keyboard controls, and how good it felt to have made him so happy.
He readily agreed he would not ask to play it "all the time"; it would be for weekends only; and we were off.
One thing that made it easier to let Axl step into the world of Minecraft was that it was in the category of what are called "sandbox" games.
Among many striking developments between the first time I dropped a quarter in an arcade game, back in the 1980s, and the world of video games today is how few of the latter really feel like "games" at all. When I was a kid, video games all had objectives—some way to win, in other words, and of course also to lose, with the game simply ending once you did—and a restrictively prescribed path to be followed.
Even if, while playing Pacman or Mario Brothers, you decided you didn't really want to eat all the dots or rescue Princess Toadstool, there wasn't much else you could do, any more than if—while playing Monopoly or Candyland—you decided to stop rolling the dice and forego moving along the squares in favor of pushing your game piece around the rest of the board to check out the scenery.
Nowadays, of course, as a result of vastly expanded computer processing power and graphics capabilities, many video games offer players whole worlds they can romp around in. Some of these games, like Grand Theft Auto, still have objectives and a way to "win," but others—like Minecraft—simply present you with a fully imagined if strangely and stylistically rendered world in which to do as you please. (Actually, Minecraft can also be played in "survival mode," in which your character can die, but—in an eerie mirroring of real life itself—there still isn't really any way to "win" other than just, you know, living as long as you can.)
In the year or so leading up to that fateful day when I first set up Axl's Mojang account, I had become aware of both the open-ended nature of Minecraft and some of the more famous resulting uses of it . I remember reading in the newspaper about a West Virginia high schooler who had built an extremely—one might even say insanely—detailed model of the state capitol in the game. There were also apparently schools that were using Minecraft in class, for things like geometry lessons. (If you are familiar with the way everything in the game consists of regular-sized blocks, this will instantly make sense.)
So it was that, at the moment of decision, it was possible to rationalize that playing Minecraft was a creative and possibly even educational activity; that it was not—like Doom and Call of Duty—simply a consumer version of DARPA-developed tools for desensitizing young soldiers to violence and blood (although perhaps that's an urban legend); and that in many ways it might not even deserve to count as the "screen time" everyone was obsessing about because, although it involved a screen, it also involved thinking and planning, unlike a mere TV show. Certainly actually playing Minecraft seemed better than passively watching pale basement dwellers play it on YouTube.
And it must be acknowledged that both children did and do, in fact, use Minecraft in creative and idiosyncratic ways. Most of Axl's Minecraft time has been spent in so-called "Creative Mode" (i.e., your character can't die), building elaborate models and recreations of both the settings of other video games he'd heard about on YouTube but which we wouldn't let him play (mostly "horror" video games like Five Nights at Freddy's, Evil Nun, Baldy's Basics, etc.) and representations of his rapidly shifting real-world obsessions, such as the Reactor 5 building at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Belle's use of Minecraft goes in other directions and mostly reflects her fascination with animals and role-playing and fantastical dwellings: zoos, farms, and elaborate mansions with adjunct menageries.
Minecraft remains a solid favorite around here, but these days almost all of this household's game-playing action is on Roblox. Roblox is not a game but a "platform," a free-to-join website where you can find and play a massive variety of games as well as the tools and templates to build your own. How massive a variety? The corporate Roblox website boasts of offering "millions of immersive 3-D experiences," there seem to be somewhere north of 30 million daily users, and the company—which, it must be said, has benefitted immensely from the pandemic and associated quarantines and lockdowns—will go public via direct listing sometime next month, with a valuation of $30 billion.
We were willing to let Roblox into our lives because it seemed generally PG and didn't cost money upfront, although of course we've ended up giving money to Roblox nonetheless through the magic of "in-game purchases," the latest advance in the now seven-decade-long campaign to separate U.S. adults from their money via their children. The children periodically use their allowance money to buy $5 worth of Robux, the in-game currency, which is used to purchase new outfits and special abilities for their avatars. Once upon a time, allowing the children to spend real money on digital clothes and accessories felt like a betrayal of all that was good and right in the world, but—like frogs whose originally cool bath is gradually warming up—we're getting used to it.
Roblox's common development platform and programming language gives all of its games a similar, somewhat cartoonish aesthetic, but the games vary considerably in quality and content. Some are obviously made by children, but there are others that are clearly developed by professionals. The main categories of games are "obbies" (obstacle courses), role-play (total sandbox worlds, often tying into movie franchises or one or another young-reader graphic-novel series, as well as historical settings, like a World War II battlefield), and what I think of as "world of work" games, in which players essentially have jobs and earn points (another, less valuable, form of in-game currency) for doing things like fulfilling pizza orders or loading ore into cargo ships in collaboration with whatever other random players are present.
I feel I would be remiss not to also mention "Broken Bones," a game in which you fling your avatar off buildings and down hillsides and win points based on, as the name suggests, the extent of resulting injuries.
One of the undeniably fun-looking aspects of Roblox is the ability for kids to meet up and play games with their friends. When the children sign on, they can look at a list of other accounts they've "friended," including both people they know IRL and strangers known only by their Roblox avatar and user name, and join them in whatever particularly game they're playing at that moment.
Belle is the household's leader in this sort of social gaming. Last spring, not long after the schools closed down, one of her third-grade classmates moved to the suburbs of Salt Lake City, and the two girls soon developed a fast online friendship that was both genuinely heartwarming to see and, in combination with the psychological stresses and pressures of the pandemic, a major contributor to the upending of what had been our rules forbidding any screen time at all on weekdays.
We felt bad enough that our own kids were cut off from their friends, and then here was this poor girl who had moved across the country to another place where schools were closed and so couldn't make any new friends—well, you get the picture. Belle and her friend now "meet up" in one or another Roblox game pretty much every evening and sometimes also at noon on weekend days, chatting via video call on Facebook Messenger Kids while joining each other mostly in role-play games, where they act out their own make-believe storylines while inhabiting dragon or wolf or flying cat avatars. Axl's Roblox time is less social—apparently his friends just aren't as into it as he is—but of course we couldn't let one kid have daily screen time while still restricting the other, and so here we are.
Periodically, Petra and I grow frustrated with one or another of what you might call the externalities of this much screen time—Axl, in particular, has a kind of red dye #5 reaction whenever his screen time ends, turning loopy and hyper, and Petra and I both sometimes mourn that, for so much of each evening, we mostly only see the children from behind, tousled little heads silhouetted against their respective glowing screens. On the other hand, this often gives the two of us—our brains too frazzled by plague life for real conversation—the chance to curl up on the couch together to watch something of our own.
Like most of what looks like parenting "decisions," our choices related to screens have usually been made more out of exhaustion than anything else.
We were wrong to think we could avoid video games, or at least that it would be easy to do so. Were we also wrong to try to restrict screen time at all?
I was taken aback once to hear a friend mention how, after Halloween trick-or-treating, he tells his children to eat as much candy as they want and then offers to buy the rest from them for such a substantial fee that they never say no. He told me he does this with two purposes in mind: one, of course, is the hope that they will sicken themselves and develop a negative association with the stuff (one can dream, I suppose); and, two, he doesn't want them to spend the next two months getting used to eating even an allegedly "sensible" small portion of candy on a daily basis.
His approach makes a certain sense, if you think about it, in a way that raises questions about Petra's and my approach to screen time. Granted that the development of a healthy relationship with digital entertainment technology is crucial to a happy and fulfilling life these days, what's the best way to help children do so?
Looking back, I see that we behaved as though screen time was a potentially toxic substance that we had to limit from the start, but when I see how the children—especially Axl, as it happens—are drawn to screens like moths to porch lights and go to extraordinary measures to make sure they get what they clearly account for as their allotted daily doses, I can't help but wonder if this is not despite but because of our restrictions.
By taking such a hard line, did we make screen time scarce, in the economic sense, and thus inflate its value in the children's minds? Was it a mistake to try to limit it at all? Have we made screen addicts out of the kids just as surely as vegan hippies end up raising soda-swilling McDonald's addicts?
So far, it certainly looks that way.
