I forgot to mention that I play with the kids too. We sometimes have a video game day and we all take turns or play the cooperative games. Once in a while, I can win, but it’s usually the 11-year old who kicks my butt. But we have some great family time doing it.
Of course, Mom is only qualified to play the dumber games. Like SpongeBob. I’m really good at SpongeBob.
We were in much the same boat, and held out until WhyKid was 11.5. That summer, he had back surgery and was laid up for about three months. The Cool Uncle (with my permission) bought him a Gameboy SP. He upgraded around Christmas, using giftcards to buy the…I dunno. Gameboy SomethingElse, with a neat touch screen thingy.
It is great in the car, great when waiting for the doctor, great when used as [del]a bribe[/del] positive reinforcement.
When it gets to be too much, it’s very, very easy to take away. (I’ve only had to do that twice in a year).
As you guess, it does indeed help him socially. He’s actually more outgoing, talks more and is on the phone and hanging out with friends more now that they have games to discuss, swap, and beat each other at.
Who’d a thunk it?
I’m glad we waited, but I also think it was time to get him one. We’re still not getting a console system, though. I don’t need more frackin’ cords to trip over, and I can’t stand the glassy stare at the television screen. He can link his system to his friends’ and play together, and it’s tiny enough to fit in my pocket when I’m feeling mean.
Years ago, I bought an Nintendo off a kid for $20 ( it was nearly broken, I just finished the job.) and I managed to make it up to Tuesday in Paperboy. After several Lost Weekends of trying. Maybe I need therapy to get over my fear of games.
So you put your kids’ ability to chat at the proverbial watercooler above your own belief that video games are bad for them? You’re letting schoolchildren lead you around? I would think that if you were really anti-video games, you wouldn’t let your kids’ possible decreased socialization factor into anything.
And I don’t think not being able to socialize over games is such a big deal. Unless you’re raising your kids Amish, they will have plenty of cultural touchstones with other kids their own age. You even said that you allow them to play games online and use a computer. The kids will not end up emotionally scarred if they don’t have a video game system.
That said, I don’t think video games are bad, as long as you regulate them and keep in touch with what your kids are playing. I think gaming has a slight edge over television in that it is interactive and teaches hand/eye coordination (not that there aren’t other ways to gain those skills, though), whereas TV is strictly passive. The key is moderation.
(Background: I had a Sega Genesis as a kid, was never terribly into it, then got a computer and games when I was a teen, was never terribly into them. I’ll play, at most, one hour of the Sims and/or Sim City a month. Just… not a gamer, I suppose. But as all my SO’s so far have turned out to be gamers I’m sure my future house will be filled with the things, and I’m okay with that. In fact I would much rather have video games than cable TV, which now that I don’t have it really does seem like the end of the universe.)
Ditto what MGibson said.
I’m a 25 year old who never had a console system in the house growing up, but I certainly got enough nintendo, sega, etc at friends’ houses to satisfy. I can talk Metroid, Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star, etc etc with the best of them. I also wasn’t allowed to watch many cartoons at home for quite a while, but got my fill of The Smurfs, Snorks, GI Joe, Transformers, Jem and the Holograms, Thundercats, and My Little Pony (yeah, yeah) at my friends’ houses.
We did have a computer since I could remember, and I had a lot of the early Sierra adventure games (King’s and Space quests and the ilk) and some other small games.
By offering a game-free environment, you’re not locking your kids in a room away from culture and other people. You’re providing a space that challenges them in a way that none of their friends’ homes do, and I think that’s a good thing. They don’t ‘need’ video games in their home. MrJackboots talks about moderation, and I agree. However, if the kids do nothing but video games whenever they’re at friends’ houses, it sounds like their ability to moderate is already severely limited. I imagine the other kids’ moms love it when they’re at your house because they don’t enforce/their kids don’t practice moderation with their video gaming, and these are the children whom you kids are learning ‘video game socialization/habits’ from.
You are doing your kids a disservice by not buying me an Xbox.
And Burn Out 3.
I don’t have any particular bone to pick with video games in general, although I recently saw a clip of GTA and I’m still traumatized. I just wanted to speak to the social deprivation issue a little.
I’m 30, and I was raised with no television in the house when everybody else had one. Didn’t get one until I was 20 and off at college. When I graduated and got a job, I got cable, was addicted for maybe two years, and then pretty much stopped watching. I have a TV now, but only watch the occasional library movie on it.
I’m really not scarred at all by this. I’m well-rounded, and I can carry on a genial conversation with nearly anyone. Other than not being able to sing the theme from the Brady Bunch and answering the occasional silly question (“Do you, like, have indoor plumbing?”), it hasn’t been a social problem.
I know it’s different as an adult, but I can remember how it felt as a kid, too. It just wasn’t that big a deal. If you have reservations about getting an Xbox, don’t let everybody-else-has-one-and-I can’t-talk-about-it-with-them be the deciding factor.
I’m the father of two kids AND I work for Sony designing videogames. As you can imagine, we’re a very pro-videogame household.
First, if you can wait until Christmas there’s probably a big price drop coming. XBox is releasing it’s next generation system then and Playstation and Nintendo will probably slash prices on their existing systems in response.
The Sony Playstation has the largest market share and the largest variety of games.
Microsoft’s XBox has fewer titles, but a few of them are really, really popular (Halo, for example). The XBox also has the most powerful hardware of the 3 systems (although the difference is pretty marginal).
The Nintendo Gamecube has the smallest selection of games. Nintendo tends to focus more on “kid” games. They also tend to focus on quality over quantity, so even though they have the smallest selection of titles, many of their games are excellent.
I’d ask your son what system his friends have and what games he’s interested in playing. If all his friends are playing a particular game that’s exclusive to Playstation, and you get him a Gamecube he may be disappointed. (In our household we have both a Gamecube and a Playstation 2 and my 8-year-old son tends to favor the Gamecube slightly.)
You also might want to consider a handheld. My son actually plays his Gameboy more than he plays games on the TV. Handheld games are cheaper and tend to be more strategy-oriented than the more twitchy console titles. (For a while we joked that he was teaching himself to read by playing Pokemon.)
There are two new handhelds that just came on the market: the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS. However, for a new gamer I would recommend getting the previous generation Nintendo handheld: the Gameboy Advance SP. They’re still being sold and they’re relatively cheap and there’s a large library of games to choose from.
One other thing your should be aware of: the game rating system. The game industry has a very good rating system that can help you as a parent determine if a particular game is appropriate for your child.
The ratings are:
A/O – Adult Only. (NC-17, very few games get this rating)
M – Mature. ®
T – Teen. (PG-13)
E10+ – Older kids. (PG)
E – Everyone (G)
EC – Early Childhood (as mild as “E”, but geared toward very little kids)
You can read more at the Entertainment Software Ratings Board website.
(For example, my son knows that “M”-rated games (of which I own a few) are totally off-limits and that he’s allowed to play “T”-rated games only if I am familiar with the game and give my okay.)
Honestly, I think you are doing your kids a disservice.
Video games are slowly edging from “neat toy” to “art”, and within our lifetimes I think we will see games with the same emotional, artistic and cultural impact as movies or books. To deprive your kids of literacy in what will be a pretty important new medium simply because you don’t like them is wrong.
I say this as a person that games a little, but thinks about games a lot. Games represent the biggest space for artistic innovation and exploring new forms of expression. The future, like it or not, is going to be on the screen. Already the computer is the main leisure-time-activity-center, work station, communications device and media viewing device in the lives of college aged people.
If video games make you anti-social, we are going to have a whole generation of anti-socials. Games are literally all college students do besides study. But I really think video games don’t have to be isolating. I’m sitting here right now with my two best friends, because we finally got a copy of Killer 7 (a video game) delivered and we all want to see it. We actually spend a lot of time playing, discussing and analyzing video games and I must say we have a pretty rich social life.
More importantly, pretty much all jobs in the near future will involve computers, and games are one of the best ways to get kids interested in computers. I know as a kid by all rights I should have known nothing about computers- I was poor, a girl, non-mathically inclined, etc., but thanks to a love of games I learned how to build a computer at eleven years old. This early exposure and comfort with computers has done nothing but help me over and over again in my life.
At this point, I’d hold out for a PlayStation 3, but that’s just me. 
As for the OP, video games are – like a lot of other things – inherently neither good nor bad. Whether or not your kids use them to grow or abuse them depends on your supervision and your limits.
Holding out for Burnout 4 here. I’ve been drooling over the box in EB for weeks now 
Anyway, back to the OP.
I don’t think you’re doing your kids a disservice by not having an Xbox in the house. There is still plenty of things a kid can talk about with his mates besides computer games. Plus if they have PC access anyway, then there’s still games they can share with their friends and talk about at school. It’s not going to scar him to have access to an Xbox, and unless you’re going to buy all the consoles, then there’s always going to be something at least one of his schoolmates has that he doesn’t. Hell, when most of my friends were getting N64s and then the first gen Playstations, I still had a Sega Megadrive. With four games. I just had other things to talk about, like TV or movies or music or whatever.
(FTR I’m a long-time gamer, I have a PC, XBox, PS2 and Gamecube, as well as a gameboy now. I’ve gone into overkill a bit after my gaming-deprived childhood G)
If you’re looking at what console to get, if he’s already interested in Pokemon and carries his cards around with him all the time, then a Gamecube or a Gameboy would be ideal. There’s a stack of Pokemon titles for the gameboy, and if you get an Advance SP I believe it’s backwards compatible so it will play all the old pokemon games that were released for the gameboy colour. And because they’re all older games, then they can be picked up for dirt cheap as well. For the Gamecube there’s ‘playfight’ games like Super Smash Brothers Melee. Yes, it’s a fighting game, but there’s no gore and blood and if you get two controllers then it’s something you can sit down and play with him too. And it also includes pokemon
The PS2 has some good kids games, though not so much that’s as “Kids oriented” as the Gamecube or Gameboy is. There’s a much larger selection of games than for the Nintendo systems, but a lot tend to be marketed towards adults more so than kids. The Xbox suffers the same problem, IMHO. It’s marketed as a “Big Boys’ Toy”.
I’m completely pro-games, but if I was buying a console for a niece or nephew or something, I totally would be going down the GC route before looking at an Xbox or PS2, simply because there’s more games on the GC that I feel comfortable for a kid to be playing. But again, YMMV. Perhaps see what he really wants, then look at some titles in the range, and see if you’d be comfortable with him having that sort of content in his games.
Also, re: games being a brain waster.
I have to completely disagree with that sentiment. Resident Evil and its fiendish puzzle-traps helped me develop some nifty lateral thinking skills. You can get game guides to go with most games, and they’ll help develop reading comprehension skills. Plus you can even get games that you can play in multiple languages, so if he does start learning a language at school then that can only help him as well (if the game comes in that language of course). And then there’s that whole hand-eye co-ordination thing that they keep going on about.
When my 3 brothers and I were younger we used to play our ZX Spectrum non-stop, as well as our first 286mHz PC.
I honestly believed it served us well in later life - cooperation, teamwork, lateral thinking, hand-eye coordination, sharing, you name it.
Games like Monkey Island or Thunderbirds (even Jet Set Willy) require a huge amount of hard thought to complete… we had a pact never to use cheats unless we’d been stuck on a section for more than 6 weeks.
We used to recognise that one or other of us was better at certain aspects, and would cede control for “tricky” bits to the most appropriate player… a useful skill in any project team.
My folks made sure we went outside plenty, and read a lot and played music.
Balance in everything innit!
Anyway, we turned out fine (so far!): 1 x Oxford-educated doctor, 1 x Cambridge-educated civil servant, 1 x professional musician, and 1 x bio-sciences freshman.
I really appreciate all this thoughtful advice Especially Pochacco.
I am now convinced otherwise. I shall start the Grand Quest for The Game System and begin talks with Mr. Ujest .
Thanks everyone.
They can also help later in life! I’m the only woman in my IT department, and World of Warcraft is all my coworkers talk about. Good thing I play too…
My first game console was the Intellivison (just dated myself there), and I’ve had nearly every console ever made since. When I wasn’t studying in college, I was playing Doom with my friends. I graduated with a 3.76. Overweight? Who has time to eat while you’re saving the world from alien scum?! I’m currently drooling over the arival of the XBOX 360. I also build high-end gaming PCs for fun. I blame all this on Pong.
One last note before you go out and buy an X-Box, if you do.
I know to your kids it may seem forever away, but I would wait until October or November before making the purchase. First, the X-Box 360 will be released on November 4th and will be the newest generation of the video game system. I still don’t know if it will be backwards compatible (that is, play original X-Box games), but if it is, then it might make sense to buy this one.
If it is not backwards compatible and you might want to save a few bucks, the release of the X-Box 360 would likely drop the price of new and/or refurbished X-Boxes as they will be considerably harder to sell.
Lastly, as someone who owns all of the major video game systems, you may want to consider a GameCube. No instance is 100% true, but in general, the games made for it are generally more kid-friendly (while being no less fun). If nothing else, you owe it to yourself if you get the GameCube to pick up a pair of Bongos as well as Donkey Konga 1 (the sequel is fun too, but I prefer the music of the original). Before you know it, you will be playing just as much and having a blast with it (this is my ‘transition game’ that I show to non-gamers to get them to play along).
Not being allowed to play video games isn’t all bad. I never had Nintendo, which many of my friends had. I was horribly jealous at the time, but now I understand why my parents didn’t want me to have it and I thank them for it. I was allowed to play some computer games—mostly educational (remember Math Blaster and Word Munchers anyone?)—and if they weren’t, my dad played them with me.
I have an Xbox in my house now. I never play it (the husband does). I’d rather play word games on the computer. Admittedly, I do love the Sims.
If you do plan to get one of these video gaming systems, just remember that it is up to you, the parent, to monitor what your kid is playing. Kids have a way of getting things they shouldn’t, and will find ways to get games rated Mature if given the chance. My nephew used to do this all the time. I’d find out that he was playing Grand Theft Auto or some such and notify my sister that the game wasn’t really appropriate for a 13-year-old. She had no clue! Also, if you choose to be a parent who allows your child to play video games, don’t be one of those parents who blames all their children’s problems on those video games later on.
From what I’ve read, the 360 will emulate the original xBox rather than be truly backwards compatible. Some games will work on the 360, some games will not; a comprehensive list will be made available at some near point in the future.
I’ll add my me too to some of the other posters in recommendng a Game Cube. The games are more kid friendly and it’s much more accesible to adults who don’t play. My wife who never touched a game in her life before she married me loves games like Super Monkey Ball, don’t be surprised if you’re playing more than your son.
Meh. I never had a video game system growing up and most of my friends did. Not a big deal and never hurt me socially. I probably wouldn’t bother buying my child a system (if I had one), except I’ve got an XBox now and would likely have some sort of system in the next several years when a child would conceivably arrive, so I’d just put controls on it.
If you don’t want your kid to have a system, don’t get him one just because everyone else does. It won’t hurt him. On the other hand, maybe if you look into them a bit more you may find them to be benign like the Pokemon and change your mind.