Computers and their games

Oh me oh my computers and their games and temptations, oh sigh - they have taken over the world of my teenagers, and therefore the world of my family, and indeed the whole world, and I've tried, I'm trying, but I can't do a thing about it, for computers have lead my teenagers away from me as surely as the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

It's beyond me this computer gaming, it truly is, it's beyond me over the hills and far away;  nothing could be further away from my interest, my inclination and my ability than these ill-drawn and ill-conceived fast-moving ugly-sounding screen representations and their endless battles.  But beyond me is exactly where my children are to be found (along with their excitement, enthousiasm, joy, determination, concentration, fun, friendship, achievements and new skills...).

All that I know is what's left behind;  irritating clickings and noises, and the absences:  of my children in my life,  their helping hands around the home, their ideas and projects, the pleasure of their company and the fun they used to have with me.

So today I decided to go after my teenagers and find them where they are, and find out just what the temptation is, and I determined to find the positive. I can't, I just CAN'T play the games, so I decided to do an interview with B instead:

What skills and aptitudes are you developing from computer games?

• Ability to take in a 'wide range' view, multi-focus, the 'all at once' that is going on all around - a kind of mental agility of hopping instantaneously from one thing to the other to get the whole picture.
• Think strategically (research the game, observe the game, guess the game, strategy to win)
• Think and act quickly and well (or 'dead', lose)
• Be fully alive and attentive to the task on hand
• anticipate situations (to get help, avoid danger)
• quick and good analysis of situation (to get help, avoid danger, win)
• Team cooperation of thinking, strategies, action (need the other to win, of other fails, all fail)
• Automated hand response rather like playing a musical instrument
• Perseverence, concentration (on the game) (by the way not on much else...mother comment)
• Working with the unknown, in a mad (bad dangerous) world, and carrying on

Why always war, always attack and destroy?

I was trying to see the positive, perhaps this kind of situation brings you alive, makes your fully concentrated and present, to stay alive.  B's reply surprised me.  "Not always war" he said, and he described a game called Portal.

Playing the Fable

Who are you, where are you, why are you here?
The game designers write a modern fable, a tale for our time.  Instead of reading it, or hearing it told, you play it.  You are dropped into the fable, you 'wake up' on a hotel bed, you don't know who you are, where you are in time or space, or why you are here. 

and where here do you think you're going...?
What motivates B is the challenge, the intrigue, the discovery, the hunger for knowledge, to know what's at the heart of it - like a mystery story or a detective story.  He also appreciates the jokes, the absurd, the comments on the dreadful aspects of our society, the just-like-life mind-twisters;   "where do you think you're going?  Because I don't think you're going where you think you're going"

In this fable, you gradually discover you are a 'test subject' - at first your only guidance and option is intoned by a robotic (female) voice which gives you instructions.  You pass from room to room, in each room is a puzzle to solve before moving to the next, the way into another room is opened by a 'portal gun' which shoots a blue oval portal onto the surface it's pointed at.  The player goes into a blue oval, comes out of an orange one into another unknown challenge.

He meets a robot who follows him on a type of monorail.  This robot seems to dodge the perfectly controlled mechanical world, he makes cock-ups and does unexpected and unexplained things, such as helping the player, and saying 'if you take me off the monorail I die', and when you take him off, he doesn't die.  With the help of this robot, who is called Wheatley, you break out of the test area, and gradually learn (if you play it right) that you were a test subject, controlled by an immense Artificial Intelligence called Glados, who has wiped out her creators with neurotoxins and taken over the lab, where she tests for the sake of testing and for no other reason, because that is her created nature.  

You find yourself enslaved in a senseless mechanical world, and you just carry on...and of course eventually you learn your fate, and escape.

The more I heard of the fable, and applied it to our life condition, our modern times, the stage in our human evolution, the more amazed I was...and the more I realised what the generations coming and to come are after.  They are training for it mechanically.   At some point, they will have to live it.