Trying to control the controller

As a parent, I'm supposed to take a stand on video games. But how can I tell how they'll affect my kids if I don't even know how to turn on the PS2?

By Katy Read

Jul 7, 2005 | "I just killed somebody!" I scream.

"Sweet," says my 9-year-old son, beside me on the sofa. "I haven't killed one person yet."

I fire another round. I haven't played a video game since Pac-Man was big, never so much as held a controller except to vacuum under it. Now, two minutes into "Star Wars: Battlefront," and I own this game. There's me, a white-helmeted battle droid, sprinting through a hail of bullets on the planet Naboo, blasting away at robots and clone troopers.

"Just kill everyone in sight, Mom," Jack advises.

Until now, I've never had any interest in playing a video game. Like many parents, I regard them with a queasy tolerance. I'd prefer my sons spent more time reading, playing outside, interacting with the real world. I've heard the warnings: video games are violent, addictive, that playing them makes kids fat.

But I have also wondered whether the experts' misgivings -- and, for that matter, my own -- stem from simple middle-aged skepticism toward the newfangled, suffused with nostalgia for lower-tech childhoods of the past.

Parents have always been expected to act as media gatekeepers for their children, scrutinizing and evaluating according to age and personality, banishing anything too bloody or scary or sexual or profane. For my parents, that meant tucking "The Story of O" safely away in the underwear drawer (nice try, Mom). Today it requires wading through a relentless tide of movies and music, thousands of cable channels, an Internet that seems to swell as infinitely as the universe itself. But video games are particularly hard for me to assess, because I don't even know how to turn on the console system. I'm sure I'm not the only parent who, struggling to keep on top of all of this but confronted with a yawning gap between what's ideal and what's practical, winds up drawing a shaky line somewhere in between and hoping for the best.

A contrarian new book promises to let me off the hook for much of that monitoring and worrying. In "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," Steven Johnson claims that video games, along with TV and other entertainment media, actually exercise the brain. Gamers become adept at jumping into unfamiliar video environments without a glance at the manual, poking around and testing strategies until they find ways to solve complex problems. These skills, Johnson writes, have "great real-world applicability" -- one example he mentions is how easily kids pick up and use high-tech gadgets -- and he even offers evidence that video games (along with TV and other entertainment media) boost kids' IQs.

As Jack and I play on, it becomes apparent that my first triumphant slaying was beginner's luck. I can hardly get my droid to run in a straight line -- he keeps going backward, zooming into the air, crashing into rocks. I get killed repeatedly (and reincarnated instantly, each time, as a new droid). Fumbling with the controller, I am, so to speak, all thumbs.

"What do we do with all these buttons?" I ask.

"I'm not sure yet," Jack says, explaining that the buttons do different things from one game to the next.

Testing and fiddling, he quickly learns to make his droid flip summersaults, fire a thermal detonator, ride a dinosaur. When momentarily disoriented, he calmly studies the screen for clues. "I don't know where I am ... I'm leaving the forest ... Seriously, where am I? Uh-oh, I'm in a big battlefield!" As Johnson predicts, Jack possesses a nonchalant confidence that, sooner or later, he'll figure things out.

That helps explain why Jack teaches me the intricacies of my own cellphone and digital camera, why at 8 he was the only one in the family who could operate the DVD player. But it's hard to tell whether he transfers his deductive skills to other real-life situations, whether his intelligence and self-assurance have been enhanced by playing video games.

The very idea would strike many parents as absurd. In my neighborhood, where it sometimes seems child-rearing competence is determined by how many mainstream pleasures you deny your kids, video games rank somewhere between toy guns and Twinkies. In many eyes, the medium itself is almost as bad as its message. An acquaintance told me she buys board games for her sons so that "at least they're not sitting in front of a screen" -- as if sitting around a sheet of cardboard were intrinsically preferable. A neighbor forbade her son to touch a video-game controller, though she would allow him to watch as other kids played.

What, exactly, are they afraid of? What was I afraid of? For years, I let my sons play games at friends' homes but outlawed them in ours. I had grown up just fine without them, and saw no reason why my boys couldn't do the same. They began pleading for a game system roughly as soon as they could stretch their dimpled fists around a controller, but I held my ground. While friends' kids upgraded their Nintendos and wore out their Gameboys, my ban gave me a rare feeling of maternal superiority and control. When other parents bemoaned their kids' gaming obsessions, I could smugly announce that I had never even heard of Super Mario Bros. I might be lax about bedtimes or let orange soda stand in for organic fruit juice. I might pick up dinner at a drive-through while my neighbor's kids dined on tofu. But here was one patch of moral high ground that I could proudly claim.

The only problem was, when I stopped to examine my opposition to video games, I found it hard to define their actual dangers. After all, I green-lighted other sedentary activities (drawing, checkers, TV), and mildly violent entertainment (a few Saturday morning cartoons that made me cringe). What evidence did I have that video games, in and of themselves, were so much worse? They didn't seem particularly mindless or brain-rotting; they looked as challenging as the average board game -- more so, actually. And if they weren't any worse than my approved activities, didn't my prohibition violate what experts tout as the prime directive of effective parenting: consistency?

Meanwhile, the ban only made my sons' longing grow. "Mom, I can't go over to Kevin's anymore," my older son Cy announced. "It makes me too crazy seeing his PlayStation and knowing we can't have one." Jack went the other way, developing friendships with kids purely as an excuse to use their systems. Video games were becoming more intrusive in their absence than they would be in middle of the living room. So when the kids were about 6 and 7, a friend offered to sell me an old Sega system for $25, and I caved. Since then, we've gone through the Sega, a Nintendo 64 and three Gameboys, and we're on to a PlayStation 2.

Next Page: "It's really hard to stop playing," my son says. "It's like a cigarette"

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