Can I Be Cool Now?
My kids really don't understand how cool their parents are.

I mean, okay - I guess I've never really been cool in my entire life. That's never really bothered me - except for maybe a few weeks in the third grade or something when I really wanted to be like The Fonz. That didn't pan out.

I grew up in an era where playing videogames were not cool. They weren't strictly uncool, as pretty much everybody had plunked in a quarter in a Pac-Man machine at some point, or had played Combat on somebody's Atari with a friend. But anybody who really played videogames - who made a hobby of it - was an uncool kid from the nerd set. Just like those kids who regularly played Dungeons & Dragons. And a kid who did both? Geek for life.

While D&D never succeeded in pushing outside of the geek niche, videogames are now mainstream. And so I can't conceal some amount of pride when my daughters are into gaming. And responsibility.

Jeff Vogel's newest blog post, "Properly Molding the Gamer Child," strikes a chord with me.

But here's a variation on the refrain parents have been whining since our race first developed speech: Our kids do not appreciate the efforts we go through to support their gamerhood.

It doesn't matter that our house has three game-capable computers, SEVEN consoles (if you include the two joysticks that plug directly into the TV that have something like a dozen old Atari games on them), and that each of our kids have a Nintendo handheld (and we have an old GameBoy Color which I still play). Noooooo. What matters is that we do not have a Wii, and that's what their friends are playing.

It doesn't matter that when it's time to stop playing a game, we usually give them five minutes to get to a save point - because the stupid ^#$@ console games (the XBox 360 games typically being a notable, wonderful exceptions) like to make players have to work for the privilege of saving. No. What matters is that we didn't give them FIFTEEN minutes to get to the next save point after this one.

It doesn't matter that we're supportive of our youngest playing Wizard 101, her MMO timesink of choice. Nope. It's that we don't play it too.

It doesn't matter that we have all these cool console jRPGs for our oldest - age 14 - to play. What matters is that in spite of the fact that she watched me play some parts of Persona 4 and she's familiar with most of the cut-scenes of the game on YouTube, we categorically won't let her play any M-rated games just yet.

Oh, there are moments. When they get a new DS game or two for their birthday. And I think they don't mind it much when we round 'em all up for a family game of Rock Band. Or something. Or they join us for some Dance Dance Revolution. But those are fleeting.

Although I think secretly, though her emo-teen code of conduct may not allow her to say, I think our oldest little gamer may grudgingly admit that yeah - maybe we're not too horribly uncool.

Considering my extreme uncool status as a kid, I'm gonna call that progress.

Labels: Geek Life

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:01 AM (Permalink)