This week I spent a lot of energy on video games. Thinking about them, writing about them, and listening to my seven year-old explain many many things about them!
Before marrying my husband, I had played exactly one video game (and through it I learned to type thanks to Mavis Beacon). Finding myself partnered with someone - and their Steam account - required of me some serious personal growth! When my son wants to talk in great detail about the dinosaurs he and his dad are taming in a game called Ark Survival Evolved I don’t just listen…I have learned to ask questions! The past few weeks have been filled with questions about their game play, asked because I’m striving to be really interested in what’s important to them, but also because I’ve been working on an article I pitched to a gaming magazine. The piece is about gun violence and how gaming with your kids can be a healthy entry point to talk about it.
Games like Ark Survival have inspired many important conversations in our family, and just as I have watched Clifford and Frankie navigate the use of guns in games together, I learned from academics and gaming experts that such co-play and dialogue is key to game-based literacies. In my conversation with Dr. Jennifer Jenson, Professor of Digital Languages, Literacies & Cultures at the University of British Columbia, I felt seen when she validated what has been happening educationally in our family’s gaming practice. “One of the things that continues to be missing from the conversation is [how] games [are] a medium of creativity, of play, of knowing, doing and being for the 21st century - and it’s something we need to do with our kids,” said Jenson, whose research focuses on gaming and gender. She emphasised the need for co-play and said, “game-based literacies are real and need to be modelled, taught and learned.”
Though the experts I spoke with acknowledged the toxicity that underscores some of what goes on in game chatrooms, they all felt equally passionate about the educational possibilities of gaming with kids. “Meet them where they are,” said Joel Willis. Founder of the online family-focused gaming platform TheDadGaming, he emphasized the need to play with kids. “It starts and ends with conversation [and] language is important!” Willis went on to say, “It’s not just about the violence, it’s about being able to differentiate between the real and the imaginary. And that comes back to dialogue between kids and parents.”
The article discusses much more about this important topic in detail, and can be found here on the DBLTAP website.
Having started my career as an educator in a youth detention centre where so many of my students were directly affected by gun violence, I have seen great mitigating potential via education at home and at school to stop violence before it starts. The creative potential in gaming is only one part of a larger conversation that needs to be had in our culture that celebrates violence in so many forms. There are ways we can fight for change as communities of care - I have to believe that.
The kids will be alright…as will we. If you’re like me and gaming is new to you, you might start as I did by asking all the questions, channeling your inner paleontologist, and giving yourself a little more time to play.
Looking for more questions, both asked, answered, or at the very least pondered? Check out the Reframeables Podcast and newsletter, as well as the writing of both my brilliant sister and father who offer observations and musings on living our best lives.
Find the complete article here: https://www.dbltap.com/posts/just-ones-and-zeros-a-parent-s-role-in-navigating-video-game-violence-01gb0q7x6a7s