Very young children and video games

The Brainy Gamer (a proud new parent, as well as a terrific blogger and podcaster) recently asked for thoughts on what age kids should be introduced to video games. I began writing a comment, but it turned into a post, so I’ll put my thoughts here instead.

My simplest answer: I haven’t yet seen a video game I’d want my two-year-old daughter to play.

I still believe that games (in general, not just video games) are among the absolute best learning tools available. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most good education involves games and most of the best games involve learning. I haven’t examined the thought in detail, nor searched for evidence, but I suspect that peak playing experiences and peak learning experiences are biologically and socially very similar. I think humans (and other animals) have an evolutionary imperative to play that, at its root, arises from our need to learn and adapt.

But of course that doesn’t mean we should be plopping our six-month-old children in front of Halo 3.

My own daughter is now two and a half years old. We’ve been very careful in the consumption of all sorts of media. We decided to comply with the AAP’s recommendation to avoid all television before two years of age before she was born. I know some quality children’s programming may not hurt, but I also know that a you child’s mind may be one of the most powerful things in the universe.

Children seem built to learn, and to learn fast. It’s a good thing, too, because they have so much to learn. I remember thinking, in the first few weeks of her life, how many things I knew and knew how to do. Somehow, she’d have to pick up most of those, as well as learning millions of things I’d never know. Staring at the little warm bundle, I couldn’t imagine how it would ever happen.

Watching her walk and dance and do puzzles at two and a half, listening to her sing and laugh and have imaginary conversations with a toy llama, marveling as she happily matches pair after pair of Memory cards, I can see that, yes, it’s possible. She will successfully transform from the helpless tube she was to a wise, fun-loving woman. She’s built for it!

So much of what she’s had to learn exists in the “real” world. She had to learn that when she’s holding a toy and opens her hand, the toy drops to the ground. She had to learn that she can roll a ball. She had to learn that the cat doesn’t like to have her tail pulled but loves to have her face rubbed. She had to learn that when she laughs, her parents almost always laugh too.

Do you know that feeling of euphoria when you get completely immersed in some new and fascinating subject? Or when you begin to internalize the mechanics of a game? A new human has to be immersed in life. Every moment—even one so simple as picking up a rattle—is a moment of full engagement. As adults, we get experience this total engagement, this mindfulness, only occasionally; for children, it can be a full-time experience.

My daughter was exposed to some television before her second birthday. Not a lot. We never once left her in front of a set while we rushed about getting things done. (We still haven’t. When she’s watching, we watch too.) Whenever she caught a glimpse of that glowing, musical box, though, it grabbed her attention and sucked it in

The first time I saw it happen, I was a bit terrified. She directed her full concentration to the screen. She didn’t have any words, but the faces and music and colorful lights consumed her full attention. I knew her mind was fully engaged.

But her body had gone slack. The wriggling, the grasping, the giggling, the wild kicks . . . they all stopped. She became almost 100% watcher.

Television is so ubiquitous we forget how powerful it is. Watching my daughter get caught up in it, though, reminded me: it is awesome; it is terrible.

My daughter did have some positive early exposure to games. Although we resolved never to play World of Warcraft (despite the compulsion) while she was awake, when she was ten months old I did once log in long enough to move a character from one location to another in preparation for an event after her bedtime and she caught a glimpse of the screen. She loved watching “the bird” (I don’t remember if it was a gryphon or a hippogriff) fly gracefully over the forests.

She responded differently than she had to television. She sat in my lap, stuck her arms out, and leaned back and forth the way the bird did. She flapped her arms. And she laughed.

It seems to me that she knew, somehow, that we were involved with the flight. She saw the figure sitting astride this fantastical animal, and she understood that, in a way, we were riding it. I’d been pretty liberal in letting her play with my job-provided laptop. She’d bang on the keys and laugh or squeal when the screen changed. (We even have a record of some of her earliest “e-mail messages,” long strings of characters that delighted her grandparents.)

She understood that this device wasn’t there just to show her things, that it was a tool for doing things. She’d ask for the bird every couple of days for a while, so we’d send one of our characters on a longish flight. When it landed, she was sated.

Now, our daughter watches a little bit of TV almost every day. That is, as a family we watch from fifteen to forty-five minutes of TV together within the hour or so before she goes to bed. We choose the content from DVDs and video tapes.

See, now she’s ready for it. She has a huge mental vocabulary, so she can understand what’s happening on TV. When she was one year old, she didn’t necessarily understand that everyone had a name, that animals couldn’t talk, that balls never fall up, that letters had sounds. Now, when she watches a few clips from Sesame Street (out of distaste for Elmo, “the Red Menace,” we only spin up selections from Sesame Street: Old School, which offers a peaceful five minutes of cows instead of an overproduced barrage of self-promoting music and colors), she asks insightful questions about how the characters are feeling or sings along with the girl bringing her llama to the dentist.

So what about video games? Is she ready? She may well be ready for video games, but I haven’t found a single one that I’d waste her time with.

We don’t think she needs to master touch-typing by the time she’s five, and we know that a program that splashes bright colors on the screen in response to bangs on the keyboard will only interest her for a little while, while costing more than the handful of animal figures that stimulate her imagination, figure in her storytelling, and keep her happily entertained for endless hours.

Really, these things aren’t so much games as toys. They’re virtual toys controlled by the keyboard, but toys nonetheless. As for the educational programs designed for slightly older kids, like the ones I see running on computers in the children’s section at the public library, I haven’t found one that appealed to me. Why? Because they don’t seem fun. (Defining “fun” can make for an excellent exercise when discussing the theory of games, but I still maintain that games should be fun.)

And she’s not ready for games requiring skill, dexterity, and timing, though they may be somewhat more fun. She’s still working on catching balls, the mechanics of fitting puzzle pieces together, and living without diapers.

My daughter shares my passion for games, but she doesn’t truly play them. For example, she adores chess (I happen to have a Simpsons chess set, and the brightly colored, anthropomorphic figures are a big part of the appeal), but “playing” consists of setting up the pieces—along with other toys—on the board. When she helps roll the dice while the grown-ups play Arkham Horror or Descent, she’ll carefully count the dots, announce the number, and then throw her hands up in the air and cry, “I win! Daddy wins! Mommy wins!”

In a year or two, she’ll really be playing games. She’ll delight in figuring out how the rules work and developing strategies. She’ll take pleasure in a hard-won victory and (I hope) a fair defeat. When she does, I won’t hesitate to play video games with her.

But I’ll sure as heck be playing board games, ball games, card games, skill games, and roleplaying games with her, too!

2 comments January 17th, 2008

More on games for girls: Ubisoft’s new line

Take a look at this post concerning Ubisoft’s new “Imagine” series of video games targeting girls aged 6 to 14.

Based on Ubisoft’s study, the first games in the line, to be released in October, are “Fashion Designer,” “Master Chef,” “Animal Doctor,” and “Babyz.” [My wife observed that “Babyz” looks a bit like the detestable “Bratz.”] “We did research, and we are studying the market… that’s what the girls actually like, so we should try to fulfill their needs,” Shara Hashemi, Ubisoft’s Brand Manager for the Imagine line, told Multiplayer in an interview last week.

My response: Ugh!

I don’t have special access to the “research” Ubisoft did, but from the descriptions it sounds as if they’ve fallen into the same trap that so much research in general does. However good their data gathering, they’ve asked the wrong question. They claim the main goal of Imagine games is “to have fun.” Then they turn around and say, “The games are built on ideas and concepts that every girl can relate to and they allow girls to expand their creativity while they’re learning real facts and real-life concepts.”

In other words, as with so many girl-targeted products, these games give girls a chance to play at being older girls or women . . . and little else. These games give girls a chance to change diapers, shop for clothes, and cook.

The boy games that the Ubisoft representative said girls aren’t interested in, in contrast, give players a chance to involve themselves in larger-than-life stories and activities. In other words, the results of this “research” confirm industry and cultural expectations that while “boys will be boys,” girls will be women.

The one Imagine game that sounds like it offers something other than a pixelated version of dolls, babysitting, and dress-up is “Figure Skater,” a game in which the player strives for career-life balance in pursuit of an Olympic gold medal. That actually sounds like fun, with a narrative and an opportunity for escapist fantasy.

Okay, Ubisoft just wants to sell games to girls, so they did research that tells them what they can expect will move off the shelves and into girls hands. Unfortunately, such girl-oriented games have performed notoriously poorly, because even though many existing games have elements hostile to female gamers, women wind up playing the fun ones anyway. On the other hand, almost nobody buys the pink boxes.

I bridle at this game line because, as the parent of a two-year-old daughter, I can see the onslaught of cultural expectation coming hard and fast. By the time a girl is “6 to 14,” she’s developed her own tastes, but she’s also been given heavy-handed lessons in what she’s supposed to like.

Remember, Ubisoft began this effort because “A quarter of DS owners are young girls but less than 10% of DS games are aimed specifically at them.”

The point is not that a quarter of DS owners—the girls—are stuck with a toy that doesn’t target them. It’s that a quarter of people who find the DS appealing are girls already! Already, one in four DS owners is female, no doubt mostly playing some of the 90+% games targeted at people.

The most interesting question is: which ones?

Add comment October 2nd, 2007

My daughter’s very first game

When I (finally!) cleaned out my garage this weekend, I unearthed a fairly cruddy croquet set. We last had it out at my daughters second birthday party, two months ago, as something for the adult guests to play with. She recognized it. “That’s from my birthday!” she squealed.

I’m not surprised it appeals to her. Brightly colored balls and, especially, colorful giant hammers are bound to delight a toddler. I offered to show her a game, and she eagerly agreed. I grabbed one wicket, one ball (orange, one of her favorite colors), and two mallets, and gave her a quick lesson in noncompetitive croquet.

Since she recognized the mallet as a hammer, she tried to deliver a vertical blow on the ball. The mallet—as tall as she is—struck on its side, knocking the ball toward her feet. She liked this quite a bit, taking a step back and hitting the ball toward herself over and over again.

When she realized the ball wasn’t heading toward the wicket, she tried to adopt my side swing. The mallet was really just too unwieldy for her, though, and she finally got frustrated enough that she demanded “a different game!”

I figured I could design something that would be more fun for a two year old, so I drew three concentric circles with sidewalk chalk on the driveway and my daughter, my wife, and I each took a pebble. The goal was simply to drop the pebble so it stayed within the outer circle. Each person had a different line to stand at.

Again, this game was a big hit. My daughter’s first drop (from all of twenty inches or so) landed pretty near the middle. My wife and I didn’t have as much luck, as our pebbles tended to bounce right out.

My daughter started gaming the system. She considered it fair to “drop” her pebble by squatting down and placing it in the middle, so we changed the rules: you have to keep your knees straight. She still managed to beat us, and finally she gave up hope that her parents would get the hang of the game. She collected up all the pebbles and, one at a time, played them. But she still wanted everyone to have a turn.

“Now it’s your turn, Mommy,” she said, dropping my wife’s pebble. “Now it’s your turn, Daddy,” and mine landed right near the middle.

As she closed her eyes to sleep, she told me, “I want to play a game with you tomorrow.” I promised her we would.

This kids version of Mumblety peg won’t win any awards, but it’s the very first time my daughter has engaged in an activity circumscribed by (admittedly loose) arbitrary rules with a mild competitive element.

In other words, I think it’s the first time she’s every really played a game!

Add comment July 25th, 2007