Sunday, February 27, 2011

Gaming is not the root of all evil

In the early 1980s, a movie was made starring Tom Hanks called "Mazes and Monsters". I have never seen the film, but my husband (who I hope will contribute to this blog) tells me that it was created to show the dangers of playing Dungeons and Dragons, how it warps innocent teens so that they lose a grip on reality. As a RPG player for nearly thirty years, my husband naturally disagreed with the premise of the movie.

In the early 2000s, I was asked to present at a board's guidance department-sponsored workshop. My session (Virtual Worlds: Online Youth Entertainment - The Playgrounds, Pitfalls, and Possibilities), I suspect, was supposed to be a cautionary tale of how bullying online can harm innocent children - but if that was the intent of the people that asked me to speak, they didn't get that message shared. I raved about how wonderful the MMOs are for collaborating, socializing, and communicating, with some warnings about excessive time online, privacy concerns, and pressure to purchase.

These two short tales are to demonstrate the philosophical underlying of this blog. Gaming is not evil. In fact, it has a lot to offer people, and not just "educational games".

On this blog, you'll see a lot of creations inspired by games. Our girl and our boy do their own type of research and writing/drawing. To quote my husband, "I don't worry about how P spends his time. I can see it has benefits in other areas. If P is reading a comic book, he's still reading. If he's writing a story about a video game, he's still writing. Both those things are good."

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