I know all the evangelical D&D hoogaballoo out there but can I make a few observations? A few elements were part of our "adventure" that seem to be absent from a lot of the video game scene today. Like...Imagination. We spent hours weaving tales, reading storylines, listening to a storyteller, preparing, writing, drawing, mapping, using pencils and erasers and real paper...graph-paper...do kids today even know what that is? We used dice...not to conjure demons but to count...which means we used math. Imagine that, a game that encourages and uses mathematics in its core play!
We played our games with a group of real people, face to face...not alone in front of a computer. Our togetherness meant friendships were also developed. We hung out, joked, talked, eat together, went to each others houses, met parents and other people. We read magazines to learn more stuff. We learned about mythology and history, other cultures and all kinds of information about artifacts and basic principles about time, space, archeology and biology. Sure there was the occult stuff that was part of that era too, I am not sure it was more engrossing or a door way than a 500 page Potter book; but it was a part of it. A part that I now shun but I can still recognize elements of play that seem to be getting jettisoned for a controller or a keyboard era. I think that's a shame.
As a parent...I think today's kids are getting ripped off..not just cash wise HELLO! Have you seen the price of these games and systems; but imagination and socially too...oh I remember the days of just paying for a couple books (that you could use forever), some dice and a pencil and paper...oh and using your brian to make it all happen.
2 comments:
Point well-made... I played a few games of D&D back in the day and the social and creative aspect of the game was something most kids don't experience. I'd much rather my kids play something like that than sit around on facebook or myspace or whatever the artifical friendship device of the day is when they reach the "social networking" age.
When I was 5 and just entering my school career, there was all kinds of edutainment used in school, even back then. Computers were hailed as a new way to teach kids, and all kinds of video games exploded onto a new market under a now mostly dead genre called edutainment.
The same video games that shot my typing speed up from 30WPM to 80WPM were banned in school. Why? Because gaming has no place in school apparently. There doesn't seem to be any edutainment advocates in the education system anymore. We even had a tabletop version of The Oregon Trail in 6th grade...
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