A Rant of Epic Proportions
“Average” People of the World,
Adults play videogames. Many of us do. Many of us enjoy them. Many of us consider them a hobby. Of all of us, there IS a portion of us that are not serial killers and are not going to become one. Also, there’s a group of gamers out there that DON’T enjoy games like GTAIV or Manhunt 2. I know that this is all hard to believe, as your TV news programs don’t want you to.
As I may have mentioned before, I work in a K-12 school, and I have a job that gets me in all the different classrooms (I’m not a teacher). I get an interesting mix of people to converse with in the school, as I can talk with the 4th graders about Kirby (yes, he still seems at least a bit popular down there, as does Pokemon and Sonic) and then move on to the High Schoolers and discuss the possible outcomes of mixing elements of Bioshock and Portal. I love talking to the kids about games. Sometimes they mention games that I have missed and need to find out about, sometimes I can razz them about their choices in games (tell a senior gamer boy that you think the Halo series are mediocre tripe and watch the results…great fun), and we have a good time. I even have kids that feel comfortable enough using slang around me in the hallway in front of their peers.
Then I have many of the classroom teachers. There’s always those few teachers (unfortunately mostly male, but a few females are also included) that know games. Usually not nearly as well as their classes do, and usually more mainstream games (Guitar Hero with your Science teacher, anyone?), but they at least know how to wield a controller (or a keyboard).
I’m not addressing that original statement to them. This is directed to all those people at the school that know NOTHING about games. How do you do that? How can you look me in the eye and tell me that you will forbid your own children to own a game console or PC because it will stunt and warp their imagination? Give your child the Spore Creature Creator or Sim City or Animal Crossing and watch the good times roll. All of a sudden, that child will have made a creature or a city or a person that is theirs. They have a backstory for that place or thing and they are more than willing to tell you. Seems to me that it would ENCOURAGE imagination (in healthy doses…there’s also the story of the 6th grader who doesn’t know how to ride a bike but has two lvl 70′s…). You could even take it one step further and have the child write a story about how their creature eats or what kind of people live in their city. Have them send letters to every animal in their town. There’s a wealth of interaction possibilities for you and your child…and I think that’s much better than sitting in front of a TV dormant, which many of the same people don’t have a problem with.
Then there’s the people that get this look of horror on their faces when I tell them I’m a gamer…like I’ve just told them that I am a murderer that somehow got a job in their little hometown school. I’ve received such statements as “My, but you are a grown woman!” to “Well, no wonder you don’t have any kids yet…you are too busy being one yourself…” to “Those bloody things? Why would you waste your time doing something like that?” The same thought always pops into my head when I hear one of these statements. First, I would be lying if I didn’t say that I didn’t get upset. I’m very passionate about gaming and hate the bad rap it continues to receive even as those same games become mainstream (and they are, moreso everyday). Second, I just take a step back and look at the person. This person is a 5th grade teacher that has no concept of what his/her 5th graders do with their time. How are you suppose to build up any kind of rappor with a class when you know about nothing they do? I’m not saying that all the kids play games, not by any means, but there’s a good number that do…and I’m pretty sure that those same people that are questioning my hobby don’t know a lot about Barbies or Bratz or Finger Boards or Webkins or Hot Wheels either.
I gave computer lessons to a teacher the other day, one on one (one of the perks of my job, I guess). She not only had no concept of how to e-mail, or save a document, or open a web browser…she had no understanding of any of the things that the kids consider normal. She had never heard of MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia…in fact, the only two names I mentioned that she recognized was eBay and Google (but didn’t know how to navigate to either one or what they looked like). We got on the topic of slang and she had never heard the phrase LOL.
Anyway, we spent the entire day working on the computer. As we did so, we chatted, and I told her about my trip to Japan, some of my International friends, the Cucumber Pepsi my friend had brought home from Japan with her the previous weekend, my husband’s guitar, movies we liked, and things of that nature. At one point, she mentioned that she felt that I had done more in my 25 years of life than she has experienced in her (probably twice as long) time on this Earth. I told her that I was really glad she said that, as so many people tend to tell me that I’m “wasting my life on those silly video games” and she obviously felt that I was doing just fine balancing them with everything else.
The point I’m trying to make here is that gaming does not ruin one’s life…or rather, it doesn’t have to. I’ve seen people become crazy over TV shows, I’ve seen people waste their time watching every movie that makes it to theaters. I’ve known people who watch more kinds of Anime than I know words with the letter ‘e’ in them. I know people who collect action figures, I know people who collect license plates. I know people who collect and trade the stickers off of produce bananas in the grocery store. I know people who fish, hunt, watch sports, knit, sew, kayak, go to NASCAR races, and lift weights in their free time. Let me have my hobby, if you all are allowed to have yours. I won’t bug you if you won’t bug me.
And to those TV networks….quit adding fuel to the fire (especially since you folks are the ones who started it in the first place).
