Cut back time on watching video games
WHEN I was 12 or 13, I busied myself with a range of pursuits, from the dumb to the very dumb to the hugely and galactically dumb. Every month, I purchased a new issue of Pro Wrestling Illustrated. I memorised the entirety of Young MC’s debut album, which contained “Bust a Move” and 12 songs that weren’t “Bust a Move.” I got really, really into “Dr Mario” ( but I stand by that one, as over time I became startlingly good at it).
When you’re in those weird culturally formative years, you explore a lot of weird culturally formative options. So I understand that it is a middleaged cliche to say that my kids’ penchant for watching videos of bothersome millennials playing video games on YouTube is a remarkably idiotic waste of time.
There is a monster cottage industry of millennials who record themselves playing video games, and my boys, ages 13 and six, have plunged into it. Mildmannered on most days, my children, when presented with these videos, spot-mutate into glassy- eyed replicants who draw the shades, hide under blankets and watch as many as they can before I dramatically stomp in and do my impression of the dad at the beginning of that Twisted Sister video.
It is hard to overstate how much of this content exists. There is a guy named Sky who plays Minecraft, and he amassed a fan base of nearly 12 million subscribers before shutting himself down a few months ago to focus on his music. ( I know.) There is something that I know only as “Lucky Block Hunger Games” (12 million subscribers), in which two millennials whose voices sound like they’ve been digitally manipulated to resemble cartoon chipmunks talk for 40 minutes about cows and mods and mobs (if mods and mobs are different things, I actually can’t tell because when one is talking about mobs/mods, the other one is holding an entirely unrelated monologue about “the Nether”). My sixyearold recently announced, “Super Girly Gamer actually had the weird apple sword and she had a skelly armour and she looked like an apple!” ( bursts into laughter) (falls onto floor) (would not eat an actual apple if I promised to buy him a real sword).
VenturianTale (merely 2.6 million subscribers) is similar to Lucky Block Hunger Games, except there is a character called Homeless Goomba and another named Sally who, according my six-year- old, is a big fan of waffles. There may well be more of these, but I’m bailing on my journalistic responsibility because I do not want to research them.
Some background: For years, the video game situation in our house was happily deplorable. We had no PlayStation, no Xbox. Somewhere in the attic there was an ancient blow- on-thecartridgeera Nintendo circa 1988, which represented the precise moment at which my video game evolution ended, and that was it for video games. We were less like modern parents and more like negligent Amish.
Yet it was impossible for me to stand atop Hippie Mountain and say, “The scourge of video games shall not touch this castle!,” because in place of the Xbox we became obsessed with Minecraft. That is fine. I like Minecraft because it facilitates building, which is one of my kids’ favourite ways to play.
It became an obsession so powerful that I would have to kick my older son out of the car in the school drop- off line because he couldn’t stop telling me about diamond blocks and iron blocks and stone blocks and dude seriously you have to leave RIGHT NOW.
But Minecraft offered one resolute positive: It is interactive. Such is not the case with the Minecraft videos, where viewers simply sit there, root beer and chips in hand, and watch other people play. To be fair, this is something I did in junior high, particularly one thrilling evening when Jon made it all the way to the end of “Defender of the Crown” and we almost spilled root beer all over the Commodore 64 in the resultant celebration. And if you are holding a Super Tecmo Bowl tournament for the duration of a sleepover, watching the championship can be pretty exciting.
But there is a key element to those scenarios: Other human people were around, providing some form of tactile carbonbased interaction, the merging of the pixels vaguely shaped like Neal Anderson with your actual, real-life nerd friends.
That interaction is conspicuously missing from these videos. Watching other people play video games for hours is the only thing more dismally sedentary than playing video games for hours. Maybe the kids are picking up Minecraft building tips, or secret strategies on how to smuggle butter into the Nether, or learning if you can use axes to butter zombies ( I have no idea how these games work).
But in the conversations my kids have – the bottomless, pingpongy monologues that have taken over our breakfasts – we’re not talking about strategy, or building, or creating. We’re talking about something funny the Homeless Goomba did with waffles. — WP-Bloomberg
It was impossible for me to stand atop Hippie Mountain and say, “The scourge of video games shall not touch this castle!,” because in place of the Xbox we became obsessed with Minecraft. That is fine. I like Minecraft because it facilitates building, which is one of my kids’ favourite ways to play. It became an obsession so powerful that I would have to kick my older son out of the car in the school drop-off line because he couldn’t stop telling me about diamond blocks and iron blocks and stone blocks. Jeff Vrabel, writer