Parenting, Gaming and Addiction

In less than two months (eleven weeks to be exact) I will be a gamerdad. Needless to say, I have done a lot of thinking about what to do once my boy is here and I'm responsible for (mostly) shaping him and his values. I also read just about everything I come across about parenting. One of the websites I have stumbled upon is ParentHacks and more specifically an article titled "Video Game Addiction. Talk Amongst Yourselves." The author's family owns a Wii and the family loves it but is a bit nervous about the "addictive personality" that has emerged in her kids.

It's a good topic that spurs a decent discussion of the numerous methods employed to manage gaming time. It's all very fascinating for me because as a pre-gamerdad, I didn't have to think about this stuff. Now I now have to think about not only how I'll manage my own gaming time, but my kid's as well and what he can pay. While at the same time, I take a bit of offense to the addictive qualities that the mainstream puts on gaming, categorizing it in the same ghetto as smoking and alcohol.

Then one comment caught my eye and directed me to an essay by Henry Jenkins about the validity of casting gaming into this negative light.

A few highly publicized stories, particularly around Massively Multiplayer games show that some people do let their gaming get the best of them, forgetting (or refusing) to sleep, shower, eat, or take care of loved ones. Of course, any activity from work to working out can have an adverse impact on our family, health, and relationships.

Most pleasurable activities stimulate the release of brain chemicals.We don't know how, say, playing a highly competitive game of basketball affects the brain because you can't sit in an MRI while playing point guard, but we do know that working out also leads to increased dopamine. So does eating food. Basically, if we banned activities that lead to changes in brain chemistry, the species would die out from starvation or a lack of procreation. Maybe just plain boredom. And once we start asserting that some activities are simply more meaningful than others, we are back in the business of making cultural, rather than "scientific," judgments and in that space, it is hard to justify why the AMA should have any more say than, say, professional organizations devoted to studying the cultural impact of media.

If I fail at everything else as a father, I hope at least one things sticks with him: diversification. I'm a gamer and I work in the video game industry, but it's not who I am. I am also soccer player and a mountain biker. I like to go out with my wife and friends or stay home with a book, movie or a select few TV shows. I dabble in game design and obviously I blog. All of these things combined make up who I am and yet I am not addicted to any of them (well, maybe Lost).

On a side note, it still amazes me how crazy the "casual" market is eating up the Wii. I guess that's why Nintendo is making billions of dollars and I'm not.