Why I Cut Video Games Out of My Kids' Lives
We all know the capacity of the deluded, addicted and deranged to justify the worst of their habits and behaviours. We’re familiar with the pattern of excuses and explanations to know why the smoker still lights up, or the alcoholic pours another drink, seeking some escape or absolution from the unrelenting memory of a trauma, or the pleasant satiation, kick or click that hits an itch you nurture, just to scratch. We’ve made a modern art of self-indulgence and satiation, and although the technologies have adapted, the mechanisms are much the same.
A few years ago, I consciously and deliberately took up an old habit that I hadn’t dabbled with for many years. I’d been reading about flow states, the suspension of a sense of time and complete, peaceful immersion in an activity that gives a sense of expansion and release. I thought about my life at that point, and how I’d consciously cultivated and maintained a range of pursuits and disciplines that granted that sense of unconscious application, time dilation and a silencing of an internal chatter. I had a daily habit of prayer. An almost daily habit of writing. I read. I played guitar. I lifted weights. But I felt an absence of something I used to have.
In my youth, I’d wiled away many an hour, blissfully engaged in a pixelated world of another’s making. Whether it was alone, or often, with friends, I’d enjoyed an innocent exhilaration, abandonment and joy that began only in other homes, starting with a humble NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) at a family friend’s home. The engrossing oddity of losing yourself to such a simple process, a distillation of action and reaction, is no doubt confusing to the uninitiated onlooker. But for my friends and I, it gave a safe and enthralling avenue for play. I was able to enjoy the simple pleasures of a Commodore 64 at home, and in time Nintendo finally made its way into the family in the humble Gameboy - a purchase no doubt secured with a combination of my own savings and the fortuitous timing of a birthday.
I remember carting it around with me, wiling away the time on Tetris, Dr Franken, The Legend of Zelda and their ilk. We’d tether our Gameboys together and lose ourselves in manic competition that conquered any kind of weather system and salvaged many an afternoon from the doldrums of adolescent discontent. In time, with months upon months of saving, I bought my first home system, which was the Nintendo 64. I still fondly remember recovering from the removal of my wisdom teeth, playing hours of Donkey Kong 64 not to mention the frantic, obsessive and all nighters playing Goldeneye with my nearest and dearest of friends. A Gamecube was next, following Nintendo into their ill fated experimentation with their own peculiar storage formats (such as the mini-disc), resolutely refusing to follow every other system into more conventional storage formats - an obstinacy I still respect them for.
As an adult, a father, I missed that sense of play. I had disciplines, but I didn’t have the same joyous abandonment to play and missed it dearly. Of course, I played with my kids. We wrangled, and wrestled and kicked and threw around all manner of balls, toys, and each other. But that wonderful, colourful, imaginative and immersive experience granted by gaming, I missed. Is that because it’s superior to time spent with others, without the engagement of a screen to stare at? No, of course not. But the nature of the experience is different, and I missed the reckless abandonment to colour, shape, dynamism and flow. I missed the surreal and comical caricatures, bounding about technicolour landscapes. I missed the benign thrill of the final seconds, the close call, the tightest competition. So I bit the bullet and threw myself back in, selling off my old Gamecube and Nintendo 64, having gathered dust long enough in my cupboard to have become hotly contested collector’s items.
The renaissance started with a Wii, then upgraded to a Wii U, with most of our gaming hours thrown into Smash Bros. The kids absolutely loved it, and the opportunity to grab a wiimote each and have five or six of us wailing on each other in the guise of Mario, Link, Rob and Pikachu, was a blast. There were more settled moments, lost in the multiplayer delights of each new Mario Bros outing, but all in all, as a family, we did gaming well. It was always a joint experience, collaborative, joyous and innocent. Then, with the release of the Nintendo Switch, we sold off the Wii U and (much to the chagrin of my beloved wife), I pre-ordered the console months before its release.
The day rolled around, sure enough, and I grabbed a copy of Breath of the Wild and Bomberman-R to kick things off. Splatoon 2, Shovel Knight, Arms and Mario Kart soon followed. For the kids, they began with Mario Kart more than anything, but were soon enough initiated into the beautiful expanses of Hyrule, romping around, batting Bokoblins, chasing chickens and grappling with the occasional shrine to bolster their spirit orbs, hearts and stamina. We worked the Switch into our family reward system that we were experimenting with, reinforcing behaviours such as self-regulation, calm bedtimes and staying in one’s bed for the whole night. Every day, there was another kid that had scored enough points to continue their quest to defeat Ganon. There were new weapons, new clothes and side quests that fuelled a hitherto unknown devotion, obsession and compulsion.
It was all they talked about, all they thought about and all they wanted to do, despite the strict rules and boundaries we’d established on how and when they could play. But the frequency of exposure, even if it was watching someone else play or updating each other on the progress of their shared file, had them frothing at the mouth and unable to keep their attention on much else. Dinner conversation revolved around Hateno Village, Divine Beasts and exactly how much damage a soldier’s claymore could do. It defied every expectation and understanding, having meted out their play time so carefully, and always ensuring that it was balanced with fresh air, other games, reading and free play. But as my beloved insisted, it was hard for anything else to compete with the immersive quality of the game.
Something had to be done, so we instituted our first family detox.
It was a hard break, for about four weeks. No Switch, in any way, shape or form. There was a brief revolt, but funnily enough, the most ardent players seemed almost relieved. There was an opportunity to breathe, to step away and wean themselves off something that clawed at their attention and desire like nothing else they’d known. I flirted with the idea of selling the console and just getting it out of our lives, but we decided against what seemed like a rash and reactive response.
After things settled, after they could think and relate to life without the games as their point of axis and reference for everything else, we carefully let the games back into their lives, in small and infrequent doses. The old school charms of Celeste vied for time against Super Mario Odyssey, which supplanted the intensity captivating nature of Breath of the Wild. The kids seemed relieved to romp around the more colourful, innocent worlds of Mario Odyssey, with clear and frequent points of satisfactory achievement and moments of completion, but every time we played, there was still the issue of an unnerving obsession with the events, movement, motion and progress of the game.
There was a restlessness that followed, which punctuated the rest of the day with odd outbursts of flashbacks, exclamations, reminiscing and shallow and fruitless role playing that rendered the world and its wonders in such a dull palate of experiences and ideas, that it broke my damn heart every time it happened. Our five year old would pretend to jump around and throw ‘cappy,’ with little nobility or intent to his quest. At least with Breath of the Wild, there was some sense of mythology and meaning, a disproportionate inbalance of power that pitted good against evil in what was presented as a timeless and cyclical endeavour to restore peace, goodness and light to Hyrule. Sometimes, the symbolism of light and darkness itself is enough to spark the right conversations about sin, death, virtue and redemption, but there was enough inane references to ‘spirit,’ gods and goddesses to make me squirm and contritely look over at our prayer table in silent apology.
As seemingly balanced and deliberate as our gaming had become (only on Sundays, and alternating with a family movie every other week), it still sat at the pinnacle of recreational options for the kids. There was seemingly little that could compare with the thrill, the pace, the stakes and the visual aesthetic. And unlike a good film or story, it never ended. Almost never, anyways. When I finally defeated Ganon at the closing of Breath of the Wild, the entire family seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. After tens of hours of game play, it was over. It had been wonderful, but I was glad it was over.
I thought about a recent afternoon we wiled away around the Monopoly board, the kids laughing and celebrating every real estate purchase, rent paid and house and hotel built. It was an afternoon spent with one another, revelling in our own quirks, our own banter, in communion with one another, facing each other, rather than the screen, completely lost in a world of another’s making. Don’t be mistaken or misled, we love to get lost in good art. Every night, we would huddle up on the couches and read together, often CS Lewis or The Little House series by Laura Jean Wilder. The Silver Donkey by Sonia Hartnett, or something from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But we listen attentively, we construct our own wondrous depiction from the beauty and balance of the language, the form, syntax, every word selected and every word omitted. There is a different thrill, of being lost in the beauty and poetry of character, plot, suspense and fulfilment.
The video games are an inversion of this co-creative endeavour between the author and the audience. You can make choices, yes, but the richest palate of colours is already there. The epic music drives you forward. The frequency of risk and reward punctuates the experience with an epic dose of adrenaline and dopamine, which among other things, deadens our capacity to build our own sense of promise, peace and fulfilment in the written word on the page, the gentle and deliberate pace of the novelist, the poet, the painter. The kids latch on to the saccharine characters, tropes and banality upon which the games are based, leaving little room for the beautiful labour of reading, writing, imaginative play.
The games and the system aren’t inherently problematic in and of themselves. The problem is how the change they way we relate to other art forms, other labours, other forms of leisure. We become overwhelmed and dependant on the colours, the sounds, the noise and the thrill of these forms, with a cost to our capacity to dwell, to wonder, to ponder, to contemplate. What suffers is our relationship with the more subtle beauty of the world around us, the world within us, and the ones we build between us. So I hit the elusive limit that parents hit, when a tipping point is reached and you know that there is no unknowing what you’ve come to, what you’ve realised. And I know that my kids will, in the long run, be better off without it. I used the occasion of our family tree change, a move interstate and a new life on five acres of our own as the opportunity to sell the Switch and hit our own little reset button.
I hoped and prayed that there would be an attuning, a reorientation that would wash away the flurry of colour, sound and light. I prayed that my children would be more deeply drawn into the art and music of their own making. I prayed that they’d grow impatient with endless, repetitive pseudo-narratives that underpin any excuse for button bashing and a sedentary extension of oneself into graceless, banal worlds that teach little, say little and give us little room for our own imaginations. I wanted them to build, play, scratch, do battle with their own bare hands and the wondrous materials that God has granted them in this wondrous world of ours.
Months have passed, and it’s not perfect, but the changes in their temperament, their play and their ability to wile away the hours in an adventure all their own has been well worth it. To see them spend an hour in silence at adoration all but confirms the fact that we made the right choice.
I pray that more and more, when they see children their age frozen in place in a maniacal, self-fulfilling stupor that demands that they cut themselves off from their immediate, physical and social experiences, they reel in alarm, as any sensible person should. At the very least, even if they do lose themselves to these mediums in time, I’ll know that I’ve learnt from my mistakes, and tried to redress them, before it’s too late. Any child deserves no less.
By Gaetano Carcarello