CGI, Monsters, and Child Development

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Wasn’t really sure where to put this, but it seems at face to be pretty mundane, and only pointless things usually interest me, so I puts it here.

About a week ago, I was driving down the street, taking my 3 year old daughter to daycare. She asked me “Dad, are giraffes real?” I said, “Of course they are baby.” She said “Ok. Giraffes are real. But elephants aren’t, right?” At this point, I feel like a failure as a parent and decide to take her to the Como Zoo in St Paul to rectify my parental errors.
Flash forward a week. I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel yesterday with my daughter. In the show, they were excavating Plesiosaurus remains, and shots of the excavation were intercut with CGI renditions of what the creature would have looked like in the flesh. My daughter asks, “Do those live around here dad?”. I told her no, theyve been gone for a long time. She looked perplexed at this, and pointed to the screen and said, “but there’s one right there.”

Later, while showing her pictures of dinosaurs online, we found this one. Needless to say, it didn’t help me persuade her that dinosaurs were extinct and therefore would not be appearing in her bedroom that evening.
It occured to me that when I was a child (I was born in 1980), it was very easy to determine real from fake on television. Star Wars did not really look real; at no point was I confused or concerned by this. Same with any other example I can think of; Jaws scared me because of the blood guts and gore, not because the shark looked particularly real.

My daughter, however, is growing up in a time when it is becoming almost impossible to differentiate between whats real and whats not. We live in a time were I, as an adult, dont bat an eye at something as amazing as this. Through a childs eyes, however, this must be extremely confusing. I worry about the ramifications of this.

Does anyone see any up sides to this issue? What happens when children are growing up unable to diferentiate real from fake?

2

When I was little I wondered how people could disappear on a TV show. Poof! Now you see him, now you don’t! My older sister told me it was ‘trick photography’. She didn’t explain that everyone stood very still, they stopped the camera, the actor walked away, and then they started the camera again and the other actors resumed motion. ‘Trick photography’ was all the explanation I needed.

Why not just give a simple explanation. ‘Some things you see on TV or on a computer are real, and some aren’t. Elephants and giraffes and [remembering another thread from a few months ago] llamas are real. Dinosaurs and monsters are just fun tricks people do to entertain you.’

3

Wow! What a good OP.

4

Well, that’s basically what I did, but it seems kind of arbitrary. What I’m saying is, SHE has absolutely no way to seperate real from not real; when I was a child, I had things like the rigidity of the plastic masks the actors wore, or the stop and go of clay-mation that made it all ok. She does not have those things. She has giant apes fighting multiple dinosaurs and it looking like it could be happening outside her window.

Like I said, it may be nothing, but I think its an interesting thought exercise to find out what the logical rammifications of this might be.

5

Just tell the kid. When I was like 4 or 5, I have this vivid memory of walking into my parents’ bedroom while they were watching some old black-and-white Western movie. This Indian got hit right in the chest with an arrow, and blood started flowing down the front of his torso. I immediately started to cry. My mom kept saying, “it’s just ketchup! It’s just ketchup!” Soon after, I was watching all manner of slasher and gore-fest movies with great glee.

I was never scared by violence, gore, ghosts, or anything conventional. The stuff that scared me was weirder, more oddball stuff, more things that I couldn’t understand and that challenged my understanding of reality than anything overtly “scary.”

When I was about 7 I was at a museum with my parents and I saw a guy, just one guy among many people standing around, who was wearing a surgical-style mask over his face. The sight of this absolutely paralyzed me with fear, and I could not for the life of me even imagine what kind of horrible thing would require a guy to wear a mask like that, not in a hospital room but in public. I assumed that his face was grotesquely disfigured underneath it.

For the next few months, literally like half a year, I could not stop thinking about that man with the mask. I totally bottled it up and didn’t talk about it to anyone. Then one night at dinner I was obviously thinking really hard about it, and my mom could tell something was wrong and she was like “what’s wrong?” I said, “Oh, I’m just thinking about some scary stories from that book I have” (Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark.) But it was a lie. I was thinking about the man in the mask.

This went on for a while and every time I was visibly worried, my mom would ask what was wrong and I’d say, “the scary stories.” Then eventually, she told me she was going to take the book of scary stories away, because it was bothering me too much. That did it. I had to tell her. “Mom…remember that time we were at the museum…I saw a guy with a mask…”

I explained everything, and as soon as I did, I felt like a great weight was lifted off of me and I no longer had any fear.

6

I don’t know that there is an issue here that is new, really. I think it’s just part of development for kids to not be sure of what is real and what isn’t and to have to sort that out. That was true well before advanced graphics–I remember a friend’s four year old asking me if unicorns were real, and that was twenty years ago. I also remember thinking Santa Claus and flying reindeer were real, and being terrified of the abominable snowman in Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, in spite of what to my adult eyes is clearly fake animation.

Your child is growing up with these advanced graphics, and with your guidance, she’ll learn that it’s quite possible to make such realistic fakes. Really, it might be us old fogeys who have a harder time learning to be skeptical of images we see, having grown up in an era where few had access to tools to do more sophisticated manipulations. As with anything else in life, thinking and questioning are useful skills to have. Sounds like your child is doing just that–she’ll figure it out.

7

I grew up under the impression there was a God and ghosts and a Loch Ness Monster. After all, there were pictures and stories that were told about them as straight faced truth. To my young eyes I could see nothing to doubt about their veracity.

I had to figure out the facts on my own, and I don’t think it harmed me as a result - quite the opposite, it made me a more critical thinker and a better person.

I think context matters. Most of the time that kind of “fakery” will be within a fictional TV or movie context, which after a while, especially with your help, will become clearer to your daughter.

8

Think of it this way…in 1903, a few weeks before the Wright brothers flew, a New York Times editorial proclaimed that it would take one to ten million years of effort to design and build a manned flying machine. Think of that kind of lack of imagination.

Now, and in the future, the attitude towards even the most fantastic and preposterous idea might become more thoroughly “yeah, I can see that working. So how much is this going to run…can you take a check?”

If you don’t like that angle, I have others. :smiley:

9

Perhaps more depressing is the other side of that coin in the inhability to diferentiate between fact and fiction; more and more I notice how people, when presented with something that goes agains his/her preconceptions dismisses it as “it’s computer work” or “it’s photoshoped” or some other argument along the same lines.

Seems that, finally crossing the uncanny valley, humanity has been left as clueless as it ever was.

For your daughter, SuntanTigerTamer, as long as you strive to teach her critical thinking she’ll be fine; you can’t teach her everything that’s true and not, but you may instill her with the capacity to use her wits to tell the difference.

10

That IS a good OP. But my concerns aren’t only for children. It’s pretty easy to fool adults with media manipulation “War of the Worlds” style or the new CG techniques. Dinos and aliens will likely ever raise incredulity, but what about political montage?

11

She’s three, right? Sounds to me like her questions are geared to her trying to figure out how to make that distinction. “Daddy, is this real? Daddy, is this real?” Perhaps you could point out to here how to distinguish real from not-real images. Or that CGI is like her drawing a picture, but because the people doing it have a lot more practice at it their pictures look very real even when they’re not.

This isn’t really new - I was born in the 1960’s and, needless to say, even Star Wars CGI was far in the future. As it happens, at the time the Odd Couple of that era was showing my father and Jack Klugman (Oscar) had a really startling resemblance to each other. As a child, I was utterly baffled as to how daddy could be in the living room with the rest of us AND on TV at the same time! When I got older, though, I figured it out.

Likewise, I expect in a few months she’ll have a better grasp on all this.

12

Well, luckily for me, she seems to be able to understand that not everything she sees is real.

About a month ago, while she was napping, I was watching the extended edition of the Two Towers. Toward the beginning, she came down from her nap and asked what I was watching. I told her that it was a show for grown ups, and got up to turn it off. She begged to watch it with me, and because children are so snuggly and convincing post-nap, I relented under the condition that if she got even a little scared she should tell me so, to which she agreed.

During the scene where Merry and Pippen are trying to escape from their Orc captors, a particularly gruesome looking Orc came on the screen. I was sure that this would put her over the edge, but she looked up at me and said “Wow Dad, that really looks real.” I was totally blown away by this, and we ended up watching all of them together. I’ve never seen her more interested in something that was on television.

It was then that the OP started forming in my head. She clearly saw that the goblin wasn’t real, but beyond that, she saw that its goal was to look as real as possible.

This is why I’m not extremely worried for her in particular. She seems to be assuming that what she sees ISN’T real, as opposed to believing everything because it looks real. But I wonder why she, as an impressionable three year old, would assume that. It seems to me that it would be much easier to believe that if it looks real, it must be, especially to a small child.

13

I have a fantastic book of letters kids wrote to Mr. Rogers, including his answers and some commentary on them. The whole first chapter is mostly young children with questions like “Are you real?” and “I wish you could get out of the box.” and “How do you fit in the TV? Do you go through the plug?” His answers were always about how it can be hard to tell what’s real from what’s imaginary on TV, and his letters to parents were often about how young children are learning to figure it out.

So in other words, it’s not necessarily CGI that’s hard for kids to understand; it’s fiction and such in general, and it’s not new.

ETA - it’s the opposite, too - when I was 4, I was crazy about dinosaurs. I had all these books about paleontology and I read them over and over. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. In other words, I was in love with “real” dinosaurs, not cartoon ones or anything, and I understood that they were animals that lived a long time ago, etc, etc. We went to see my uncle in D.C., and I was so, so excited to go to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to see the dinosaur bones!

I took one look at them and freaked the hell out and had to be removed from the museum. Wouldn’t go back in for love nor money. I guess I knew they were “real”, but not real real. I knew they were big in my head, but the actual reality of it was just way too much. Of course, my dad was all, “What’s wrong with her? I thought she wanted to come here?!”

14

I think that’s true, my friend and I always joke about the “little people” in the TV who act out the parts when you change the channel. Obviously we know it’s not true, but it stemmed from a very real confusion some people had when they were little. Even so, I think telling people that it’s just a bunch of pictures (use a camera as an aid) is a little easier than explaining how people can create virtual life-like images from scratch, but at a young age I’d still give them plenty of time to grow out of it. It would only start worrying me in the 6-8 range if despite my efforts they still believed a lot of images were real. And kids are pretty smart, with a bit of guidance of just even saying “that’s real” and “that’s not real” they’ll figure out signs to look for (without even actively looking for them) without anyone having to explain those little signs (reflections are off etc).

I think what we have to worry about (as usual) are the parents who use TV as a babysitter and never try to explain this stuff, there’s almost a coin toss on whether they’ll accept it as fact or figure out what’s not real entirely on their own.

So you were interested in the dinosaurs when they were still underground?[sup]1[/sup]
:smiley:
:stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks, I’ll be here all week, try the veal.

[sup]1 I think I stole that, but I can’t remember where[/sup]

15

psst…xkcd: Paleontology