I remember being addicted to video games as a kid, like so many of my friends coming up in the 80s and 90s. I grew blisters on my thumbs from hours-long sessions of Double Dragon, Super Mario Brothers 2 & 3, Golden Eye and Star Fox on my Nintendo 64. That mostly fell off as I got more serious with sports, but I enjoyed a revival in college playing a lot of Mario Kart with roommates and destroying Uncle Scott in Halo duels on Xbox.
I see hints of your gaming potential, and it’s hard to avoid. You get quite a bit of screen time on long drives to the cabin and on the occassional plane ride. I have to admit, I like to look in the rearview of the car, see headphones on your and Eliza’s ears and enjoy the quiet or conversation with your Mom without interruption.
Your Kindle Fire has had a good run so far, but the “little kid” games are starting to bore you. I’m thinking abotu upgrading soon. To its credit, the device survived your abuse — spilling drinks, tossing it to the side and actually stepping on it, frequently.
While we hold out as long as possible for the next device with bigger games, you’ve taken to our phones playing a lot of Wordscape and some Tetris variants. I tell myself that spelling is at least educational to justify our parenting leniency. You also like to contribute to Wordle, the trendiest of all adult word games at the moment and spew at us of plenty of 3 and 6-letter guesses for the 5-letter word requirement. To feed your new obsession, you’ve learned Mom’s phone code and have stolen her phone several times to hide under a bed to try and complete a Wordscape puzzle without asking.
As these things go, we’ve leaned into your gaming interest as a punishment option, like “If you hit your sister, no games tomorrow.” Sometimes that really works. Sometimes we all forget what happened yesterday and you get to play your games anyway. Parenting is an imperfect science.
On a recent drive back from the cabin, both you and Eliza were restricted from games on the car ride because of bad behavior. You both whined dramatically about the punishment for the first 10 minutes of the car ride, and I thought I was going to break. But after those early minutes, you got distracted by each other and the views outside. We made it the rest of the way back home in a far-from-silent but enjoyable ride home without games or headphones.
We can survive without the games and devices, but they have their place. A lot of the smartest people I know play a lot of games — and read a lot of books. I am personally excited for you to get into some more mature games and eventually kicking your butt at Halo.
Love, Dad