Part 4 of How should video games and computers be handled in Adventist boarding academies...
As I am now raising an eight year old I am struggling in my own mind with the balance between reading The Bible Story and teaching him how to play strategy games like Risk, Stratego, Chess, Connect-Four, and yes, maybe even some card games. As a kid, I'd play, solitaire style, complicated space conquest games with 60 page manuals and 1-yard-square playing fields. One of the games was a board based strategy game of goblns vs. ghouls, using dice to determine the outcome of individual battles. I taught myself at least a dozen solitaire games with cards, and explored statistics and probability in relation to some gambling games. Did playing those games teach me logical thinking skills and math in a way more interesting than a dry textbook on logic would have? Could the chance to explore what was underneath those things innoculate me from a desire to get rich from games of chance?
Right now my eight-year-old son's biggest interest is legos, building space ships and airplanes and cranes, and various other things while watching on TV a lot of "Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe", and "How It's Made", and the show about ships fishing for king crab off of Alaska. I did liberate him the other day by taking him to a friends farm without his handheld video game or legos. He got to entertain himself for the whole day with ropes, finding pipes in the creek, and picking fruit from the trees in the orchard to eat when he got hungry. I think one part of the answer is assuring that kids get a variety of experience. At first when his mom told him to come to the farm, he complained he wanted to stay home and play legos with his friends, but when I told him lets go, "Now!", he knew it was not an opportunity to argue. He ended up having a great time entertaining himself at the farm, not a single remark about "I miss my video game".
I am sympathetic to the lament of parents who watch their kids just wasting time. As a privacy advocate, I'm alarmed by the prospect of school administrators inspecting a student's personally owned computer. If the school owns the computers in the dorm rooms, that's probably more permissible, and exactly the reason that I carry my own personal laptop with me to work. Laptops are now well within the price range of every family. Some bloggers pointed out that having the administrators searching the kids computers would encourage students to hide their contraband on easily hidden thumb drives, and that's probably very true. I agree that kids shouldn't have unrestricted internet access, but whatever safeguards the admins put in, they are easily circumvented by a $60/mo. sprint data access card isn't overly expensive to allow the student their own onramp to the net. Depending on their access to phone lines in the dorm, a good old fashioned modem and dial up connection could do it just as well. Do we want to restrict kids from having cell phones, which can get a tethered computer onto the net in a way that administrators and parents can't control? What about the possibility of taking the cell phones away from the kids, and heaven forbid, they are caught in a Columbine type situation?
I think I would have really lost out if the computer lab administrator at my school, Dr. T. Michael Flick, had told me I couldn't use the school computers to attempt to program my own video games. I vaguely remember getting banned from the lab a couple of times, but I always found my way back in. I earned a nice allowance as a freshman teaching the seniors how to do their programmng.
These days, when I have the skills to write web based games, or desktop games, I wish I had more time to pursue the fascinating technical issues in creating a game. I recently used writing a space game star map generator as a way to learn Adobe Flex programming. However I am slowed down on the idea of going all out to write a new computer game by the thought of being responsible for helping so many people waste part of their lives playing whatever game I've developed. But do we want to take away the opportunity from our youth to learn to program games, and maybe launch a successful company to sell the game? I'm hesitant to go down that path too....
No easy answers in this interconnected technological society we live in. What do you think?
I think I need to get back to work. Writing blog articles is almost as much fun as playing games!