After 9 months into the Great Lockdown year, in November 2020, we began our family gaming story – until then, we had had a mostly video game free life, gently surrounding our family free time with HUGE thorny bushes to protect them from ‘THE VIDEO GAMES’. I felt like a warrior, a mum amazon fighting against the pressure of growing screen times. What mother would want to nurture a ghost-like teenager with bent spines and pizza crusts? Isn’t it frightening enough to be bound to have to go through the usual teen conflicts when the kids become teenagers?
Although some occasional tablet game apps sneaked in, they were quickly swatted away. ‘Nasty little hobbitses!’ BANG. Shoo, go on your way. Come back in their twenties. Tablets and phones were put away, classic board games, card games, etc. were guarding against their digital versions. OK, the primary school sent some educational online games, they were allowed (but the kids quickly got bored by them if they were really, really about learning).
But, rewind to Nov 2020: by then, we had exhausted our lounges with Joe Wicks PE classes (thanks, Joe!), and as much as we love Jaime for her Cosmic Kids Yoga, our more mature kids craved for a different adventure (true, we parents were still happy with Parsnip the Cat!). We had had our fair share of mindfulness walks (rainbow, sensory etc.), home made treasure hunts, open air family trainings, etc, and the Christmas lockdown (UK) was still looming ahead of us like a rock solid statue of a curled up tsunami wave. Temporary quarantines were springing up here and there, when the schools sent home bunches of classes in a ‘bubble’ to minimise the spread of corona virus. Even if we had no symptoms, we were (what am I kidding, ‘are’) facing potential bouts of quarantines if our kids are sent home from the school, along with dozens others, because 2 kids were reported ‘positive’ in a bubble of 100 or so kids for their Covid-19 tests.
Also by Nov 2020, we had realised that our screen times had increased: our daughter was reading a book together with Granny (stuck alone at home), we were regularly using online learning resources and uploading homework assignments. We were still trying to fill in the gaps of fun family workouts – somehow ending up having a laugh with imitating retro disco movements of the Disco World Championship ‘Born to be Alive’.
Don’t get me wrong, we appreciate the good life we have, and are thankful to the NHS, life, grannies, nature, the school, all the emergency workers, bin collectors, etc. It is admittedly a first world problem, the fear of a two-week lockdown. Ridiculous, right? So it’s not a complaint. But, simply put, fear. Fear of the unknown tensions that we may have to go through if we are to stay put in our ‘family prison’. Fear of our marriage being scarred or, worst case, falling apart while juggling homeschooling, work, household jobs – stressed by the world stats. Fear of the kids going into regression and shrieking with sibling rivalry. I know, it is a problem of a family spoilt by the goodies of a western civilisation. So we kept grateful lists, and we said thank you for many things in 2020. But the fears were still lurking there, and my mum alarm went ‘eeeeee’: we need to create an inner space to let the steam out. How, how, how? How do we channel? How do you channel during a whole day while you are supposed to work? Even if I lost my job in tourism, I’ve only lost the income, not the work, the work was still there (refunds, updates, etc.) And then I gave in.
Despite all my motherly plans of postponing the teenage years of ‘THE wretched GAMES’, of instinctively putting off the digital gaming era that is sure to wreak havoc in our precious family home, I admit, I gave in. Lockdown provided the necessary kick in the butt: I have to overcome my fear and find something that we can work with, that we can let in with lesser dangers. There must be some good games out there. So I looked around the gaming market for more interactive PE games to play with, to move about at home, to be engaged in a living room, for at least two weeks.
And then, it happened: it wasn’t just gym games any more that came through our doorstep. When Christmas came, both of our Pokemon fan kids (aged 6 and 10) received a retro – second hand – video game console (Nintendo DS Lite) with a set of games. They got them from Granny’s Christmas. I picked them from ebay. At this point something silently shifted in my mind about games. Other voices started to speak: you can’t keep the kids game-free in a modern era. It’s not like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates when they raised their kids tech free. Now games are different. The games that ‘came’ with the console included a lot of dialogues (good for literacy), and required them thinking about strategy, planning forward, numeracy for the 6 year old who had to figure out health points of the characters before a battle (similarly to a card and board games).
In mid January 2021, when homeschooling was a massive extra to deal with in the gloomy winter months, we have set up a retro Nintendo Wii game connected to the HDTV (I still feel a sense of geeky mum pride for merely figuring out how to set it up), had some fun times . Since then, we have played with several games, sometimes we parents sharing the game with the kids in a local multiplayer setting, or the kids playing by themselves.
In the Video Game Journal series, I’ll be sharing our family journey in the land of gaming, our efforts to make the most of video games by doing our best to shape a smart and fun family gaming culture at home to avoid as much of the pitfalls as we can and to help our kids making games a healthy, well balanced part of their life.