The infantilization of video games is a serious problem

[Sarahfeena]

@WhyNot

Sarahfeena, I used to look askance at video games as well, and elevate reading. Then I realized that video games today are not the simply eye-hand coordination mindless entertainers that you and I grew up with. Today they’re much more like interactive movies. I overhear conversations the 14 year olds are having about the plots, the art, even the themes of their favorite games. Once I thought about it, I remembered how much I loved those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kid. Today’s video games are like Choose Your Own Adventure but in an audio-visual format. At least, that’s how I justify their continued existence and growing influence in his life!

You aren’t going to be able to fight it much, anyway, so you might as well roll with it! I don’t exactly look askance at videogames, and I know they are more sophisticated than in years past. My husband plays some of those war computer games where you have to fight battles & such, and he is a very analytical type who would get pretty bored if the game didn’t necessitate little brain power.

I know some guys, though, who are pretty obsessed with their xboxes, and while the games do seem pretty cool (remember when football players were literally just blips on a screen?), some of them seem like a waste of time to me.

[Darwin_s_Finch]

@WhyNot

Because we (you, me, **Sarahfeena **and everyone in this thread probably) grew up during a period of time, from the 80’s to the late 90’s, where video games WERE, with a very few exceptions (LLL, already mentioned), for kids. They were marketed to kids and kids asked for them for Christmas and kids picked out the games and spent most of the time playing them. I’m not saying there was never an adult out there who played a round of Donkey Kong. I’m sure there was, but it was not marketed and advertised as an adult activity. No one ever tried to sell my grandmother, or even my mother, a video game system of her very own. They tried to sell my grandmother and my mother a video game system to give as a gift to her grandchild or child - namely, me.

I think it is less a matter of the games being for kids and more a matter of kids “getting” the idea. Adults, in general, are more phobic of new technology than kids are. Witness today’s rants about cell-phone usage; it’s not the young folks who are doing the complaining, for the most part, and guess who cell phones are being marketed towards… Even Walkmans and CD players were marketed toward the younger generation when they first came out. Nowadays, same thing with mp3 players. Just about all new leisure technologies are marketed more towards the youth than the older generation, regardless of the content or actual usefulness of the item. That does not, however, mean that those technologies are necessarily for kids. The tech-savvy adults are in there right along with the younger generation playing video games, loading up their mp3s, using their iPhones, etc. Just as they always have been.

Couple that with the fact that most video games require a certain amount of coordination to play well, and you see why kids will take to them better than adults. If the first video games were not games of skill (of the sort requiring reflexes rather than smarts), they may very well have had a wider adult audience initially and wouldn’t have been stigmatized as “kid stuff”.

[mswas]

@Marley23

I’m not old enough to know for sure - I’m 25 and I think I had this idea about five years ago - but my general idea is that as the Baby Boom generation aged, they noticed what Mosier said: kids have more fun. So the idea of a buttoned-up parent who put away childish things went out the window.

Gotta love those Cougars competing with their daughters for the fresh man meat. It’s a good thing that childish things went out the window eh? Now that we have botox and tummy tucks who says a 40 year old can’t party like she’s 19?

That might be true. But lately, people are paying more attention to the post-college years - just this morning, the New York Times wrote about the “odyssey years” of 20-30 (although I don’t agree with everything David Brooks wrote), and a few years ago, who’d ever heard of the term “quarter-life crisis?” On the one hand, it all sounds new, but on the other it reminds me of the wanderings of the post-WWI Lost Generation.

It’s interesting that you should put it this way. There is this book I saw the other day, a sociological study of Generations. The authors had a theory that there are four generational archetypes that repeat throughout American history. They claim that Generation X and the Lost Generation are of the same generational archetype. I don’t recall the name of the book off the top of my head, I apologize.

[The_Hamster_King]

@mswas

I don’t recall the name of the book off the top of my head, I apologize.

Generations, by Strauss & Howe.

[shamrock227]

It’s not like I woke up yesterday and decided I was going to start playing video games and to hell with the kids they’d better start designing games for me.

My Father brought home the Pong console for Christmas in 1975 (I believe it was ‘75) when I was 6 years old. It was like playing with the oscilloscope we had in the basement, only better *****. I have been playing video games ever since. And, while I agree with WhyNot that we couldn’t have TVs in our dorms, we could have computers. Although I swear I only used it to work on my papers (that’s a lie). This is where I think some of the perception problem is, I am not trying to horn in on kids’ stuff. In my mind they never made video games for kids, they made them for me.

I’m not suggesting that kids shouldn’t play video games, that would be stupid. But, just because I am 38 (definitely not a kid anymore) doesn’t mean I have to stop. In fact, that’s one of the great privileges of being a grown up - I can eat dessert instead of dinner and I can play video games whenever I want (and I don’t have to clean my room if I don’t want to ).
***** (my Father was a computer engineer so he brought home every gadget and game he could get his hands on. I was the first to have an Atari, a Nintendo, and a Commodore 64. [sarcasm]My Mother was thrilled[/sarcasm]).

[Marley23]

@Pochacco

Generations, by Strauss & Howe.

Are you sure it wasn’t "The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down? I’ll try to give it a look sometime soon. I’ll be let down if somebody beat me to this, though.

[Pazu]

@WhyNot

Sarahfeena, I used to look askance at video games as well, and elevate reading. Then I realized that video games today are not the simply eye-hand coordination mindless entertainers that you and I grew up with. Today they’re much more like interactive movies. I overhear conversations the 14 year olds are having about the plots, the art, even the themes of their favorite games. Once I thought about it, I remembered how much I loved those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kid. Today’s video games are like Choose Your Own Adventure but in an audio-visual format. At least, that’s how I justify their continued existence and growing influence in his life!

And, ironically, his love for video games has increased his reading skill and frequency, as well. Video games => manga => graphic novels => regular novels => speculative nonfiction => nonfiction.

Here’s an example of one positive effect of the video game generation from which we might all potentially benefit: Increased skill at laparoscopic surgery.