Girl Meets Game

By Lev Grossman

I love video games. I played my first one--it was Pong--when I was 7. I feel lucky to be part of the first generation of gamers. I also get to be a first-generation-gamer parent; my parents regarded games with a primitive, chimplike suspicion, but my daughter Lily will have a parent who understands them and plays alongside her. A cool parent.

But when Lily played her first game a few weeks ago, at the age of 3, I found myself wondering something I never thought I would wonder: How cool a parent should I be? Lily has always been interested in the Web. A couple of weeks ago, we found a Flash game on a Teletubbies site involving five brown bunnies that need to be placed in their correct bunny-shaped holes. To my amazement, Lily shooed my hands away from the track pad and started slowly nudging bunnies toward burrows. When the fifth bunny hit home--and an unseen Tinky Winky shouted, "Yaaaaaay!"--every neuron in my daughter's brain seemed to fire at once. Her skull practically glowed. She climbed off the chair and did a dance. Then she climbed back up onto the chair and said, "Daddy? You can go now."

My feelings about this are conflicted. I'm not disappointed that Lily is learning to entertain herself, because I've been entertaining her for 3 1/2 years and could use a break in which to perform some basic personal hygiene. All the same, I'm confused about what games mean to a person that tiny. After all, video games didn't really exist when I was 3.

The most obvious questions are the easiest. Because I'm not psychotic, I would never allow my daughter to play--or see or know about--any game involving violence. When she plays the bunny game, Lily is learning about computers and refining her hand-eye coordination. So that's all good, right? Just to make sure, I called Susan Gregory Thomas, author of Buy Buy Baby, a scorching investigative study of how corporations target underage consumers. She also happens to be the most technologically aware mom I know. Or, as I now call her, Susie Joykiller.

Hand-eye coordination? Maybe. But she pointed out that kids that age--with their delicate, still developing carpal tunnels--are especially vulnerable to repetitive stress injury. O.K., but here's something else: Lily gets frustrated easily, and the game rewards her for sticking with a problem till she solves it. "Maybe she could get the same kind of thing from trying to make a cake?" Thomas asked. "There are lots of other things to solve that have a much richer protocol." I get it: that's what the real world is for.

There is a paucity of quality clinical data on little children and games, and Thomas explains that video games often depend on analogies and symbols that kids may not understand in the way we think they do. "Very young children are astonishingly concrete thinkers. If you look at a screen and understand that everything that happens on a computer is a metaphor for something real in life, it becomes very, very murky as to what they're actually getting out of this." There are also troubling commercial aspects to a lot of games for preschoolers: they're basically ads for branded characters like Dora the Explorer and Ariel the mermaid. And Thomas points out--in the nicest way possible--how pathetic it is that I want people to think I'm a cool dad.

There's a lot more to think about than I thought there was. I'm still happy that Lily likes games, but I've resolved to limit her playing time, and I'm not going to let her play alone, personal hygiene be damned. She and I won't always be able to play games together, after all; far too soon she'll be far too cool to hang out with me. But for now, maybe it's a good idea for Daddy to stick around. Child's Play The best websites for tiny gamers [This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine.]

WHAT IT OFFERS ... AND WHY WE LIKE IT TELETUBBIES: bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/teletubbies Gentle, charming animated games featuring you-know-who They're funny, educational and well designed for little hands. They reward success but don't punish failure PBS KIDS: pbskids.org Simple games starring the Sesame Street gang, Barney and others A bright, friendly site with tons of options--maybe too many. But like it or not, kids love those characters POISSON ROUGE: poissonrouge.com Quirky, elegant, dreamlike amusements They're funny, educational and well designed for little hands. They reward success but don't punish failure