Steve Johnson has a great post up on Boing Boing about how the games that kids play today (say, video games) as opposed to what they played when I was a kid (Candy Land).
My older boys have been playing Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii since they were four and six, and there is more decision making in ten seconds of that game than there is in ten hours of Candy Land or Sorry.
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what sort of message does Candy Land send to our kids? (And I’m not just talking about all the implicit advertisements for cane sugar products.) It says you are powerless, that your destiny is entirely determined by the luck of the draw, that the only chance you have of winning the game lies in following the rules, and accepting the cards as they come. Who wants to grow up in that kind of universe?
I’ve been making this argument to my youngest two brothers for years, specifically about the card game “war,” where players get half the deck and both draw cards off the top, with the higher card winning (and ties being determined by drawing yet more cards where the highest one wins). There is no strategy in war (outside of cheating). I told them that a game of war could be played by a computer. And since there are only two outcomes, each with equal probability, it doesn’t even need to simulate the game… it can just pick randomly. “Is that really the sort of game you want to be playing?” I’d ask them. “A game as deep as flipping a coin?” They weren’t convinced.
Now they play Gears of War and other video games. They’re somewhat less innocent now — it’s hard to retain childlike naïvité when your on-screen character is using a chainsaw to remove the limbs of your brother’s on-screen character — but at least they’re deciding which limbs to saw off, and when. The winner isn’t the one randomly assigned the “King” chainsaw to their brother’s “7” chainsaw. There is real strategy and skill involved. So now we’re in the strange position of calling a game with “curb-stomping” as one of its headline features the more beneficial game. Stomp away, boys!