Parents and Psychologists Talk Screentime and More

Speaking of Pixelkin, this is a great write up of the gaming and parenting panel I was part of at PAX East this past weekend.

When it comes to finding the right games, Steve Lubitz, co-host of gaming podcast Isometric, said, “I’ve started bucketing my games into games I can play with the kids, games I can play when the kids are around, and daddy games,” a pile that got smaller and smaller as his kids got older (and stopped taking naps). He found a solution to the timing problem though: he gets up early in the morning to work out, and plays games on his exercise bike. The statement drew laughs from a crowd of parents used to finding non-traditional ways of gaming with kids in their lives.

How Role-Playing Games Can Teach Kids Decision Making

I was really honored to have my first piece published on a site other than this one, at Pixelkin, which is a fantastic site focused on gaming for families. I wrote about an experience I had playing Child of Light with my oldest daughter, and how it gave me a space to let her experiment with decision making. 

The Longest Road

Confession time: I’ve never played a game of Settlers of Catan on a physical board. I love the game; I can make wood for sheep jokes with the best of them. All that play time has been on an iPhone, an iPad, or on the Xbox 360, though; I’ve never played a game on a real board with real people. I even have a copy of it sitting in my office, still in the shrink wrap.

You see, I’ve been promising my friend Greg Demetrick that one year, at PAX, I was finally going to play a full game of Settlers with him. As long as I’ve known Greg, he’s been a huge fan of Settlers of Catan, to the point where he devoted the bulk of a day at PAX to competing in Settlers tournaments. Like most of my board game aspirations, I’d never been able to make it work on my own, and I figured he would be the best person to help me make the transition from beating on helpless computer players to making negotiations with actual live human beings.

A word about Greg: He’s one of the kindest, most fun people I’ve had the good fortune to meet. He and I were both part of the podcasting community in the early days, when the podcasting community was a single entity and not a collection of smaller communities that it is today. He’d been a supporter of my shows back then, and I likewise was a supporter (and occasional contributor) to his podcast, 5 Questions. Greg was also the only constant of my PAX experience over the first four years that I attended; one thing I knew for sure was that Greg was going to come down from Vermont and we’d get to hang out for at least part of the time that I’d be there. Going to PAX back then was for him, like for me, something that he looked forward to all year, and he was going to be there and enjoy every minute no matter what.

So I’d decided that PAX East 2014 was going to be the year I finally play a physical game of Settlers. For the first time, I’d be buying a 3-day pass, as opposed to the single day pass that I usually bought. By going more than one day, I wouldn’t feel the pressure to see everything there is to see on the PAX Expo floor in the eight hours that I’d be there, and could take time to do different things like sit down and play a board game for an hour or two. There’s so much to do and see at PAX that buying a single day pass is kind of like going to Disney for a day; you need to plan ahead to maximize the time you have to get the most out of it, and that means cutting out some things you want to do based on how much of a time investment they’re likely to be.

There was one problem with that plan, though: Greg never made it to PAX East 2014.

Shortly after we said goodbye to each other at PAX East 2013, Greg was diagnosed with stage 3 liver cancer. He was optimistic about treatment, and it didn’t stop him from buying tickets for PAX the following year, with the intention that he’d be healthy enough to attend. He wasn’t. My last interaction with him was messaging him right before the show to ask if he’d be able to make it, and he told me he wasn’t going to be able to. That’s when I knew that things probably weren’t going to get better. Shortly after that, he’d posted how much energy just responding to well wishes was taking from him, so I respected his wishes and waited for good news that never ended up coming. Greg passed away in June of 2014.

What ended up happening at PAX East 2014 is that I unexpectedly had a lot of time to myself to think, which is ironic given how crowded and full of people the show is. None of my friends were available to hang out with at the show, and Greg’s absence underscored that. As I walked around the show, passing from booth to booth, I kept coming back to that game of Settlers that wasn’t going to happen. I started to think about the opportunities that had come my way over the years, and how many I’d said no to, for one reason or another. Some of those reasons were justified, some were purely from inertia, and some were from feeling like I could always take up those opportunities later, when it made more sense to do so. After all, there’s always a reason to say no. This time, though, I kept saying no, and then the next opportunity to say yes never came.

A week or so later, a conversation with Brianna where I idly made an offhand comment that it’d be nice to get back into podcasting at some point turned into starting Isometric. This time, instead of finding a reason why I shouldn’t do it, I recognized it as the opportunity that it was and found a way to say yes. That obviously was an amazing decision; I have a fantastic, popular podcast where I get to geek out about video games with three incredibly smart women (who have also become amazing friends) every week. I’m actually speaking at PAX this year on two panels, which is something that I wouldn’t have considered even a remote possibility a year ago. It’s encouraged me to write more, both on this blog and elsewhere, which is something that I love and have felt like I’m good at, but never could find a topic that I felt was worth the time to try to write about. I’ve gotten to speak out more about parenting and games, which has in turn given me more feedback and new ways to connect with my kids and build a stronger relationship with them. It’s also made me value the time that I spend with my wife, who is an amazing woman who I’m incredibly lucky to be married to, and I’ve realized that I’d unconsciously devalued time spent with her because I’d just assumed that time would always be there.

So as PAX East is coming up again, I’m thinking a lot about Greg and that game of Settlers that we never got to play. A lot has changed in my life for the better over the past year, and I see PAX East 2014 as one of the major turning points where everything changed for me. With all that, though, I’m sad that Greg never got to see it, and that I can’t tell him what a positive force he ended up being for me; he almost certainly never knew.

So wherever you are, Greg, thank you for everything. I hope all your rolls land exactly the way you want them to and every card you draw is a victory point. You’ve certainly helped me earn more victory points than you ever knew.

Final Frustration

One of the things I’ve decided to do this year, in light of finally getting a diagnosis and treatment for ADD, is to try things that I’ve always decided just weren’t for me, for one reason or another. It’s an interesting process, reevaluating one’s tastes in light of new information. There are a lot of things that I’ve just written off because I just couldn’t get myself to understand the appeal; it’s natural now to wonder if that lack of interest was legitimately because it’s something I don’t like, or if it’s something that ADD has kept me from being able to focus on enough to enjoy.

Whenever you start something like this, it’s natural to try to tackle the biggest rocks first, so I went for something that’s always been a huge blind spot for me, gaming-wise: Japanese role playing games (JRPGs). More specifically, Final Fantasy games.

I’ve never considered myself a Final Fantasy person, which is the gaming equivalent of saying you don’t like The Beatles. (Side note: I also don’t like The Beatles.) I played the first one on the NES because everyone did, but that was the last one I played through. For starters, I never had either an SNES or an original PlayStation at the time they were first out; I’ve caught up to the former largely through emulation and the Virtual Console, and the latter through whatever discs I could find to run on the PS2 until that eventually got banished to the basement. Even despite that, I could never really see the appeal of wandering around looking for the next dungeon to explore; the games always seemed too difficult with not enough reward to justify the effort.

I did try both Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII when they came out, but I didn’t stick with either for more than a couple of hours apiece. The games were more linear at this point, but the systems were inscrutable to me. It felt like the games were complex for complexity’s sake. Add to that XIII’s first ten hours or so being more or less a glorified tutorial, and I was out.

So since I made up my mind that I’m going on this journey, I decided to do things the right way. I have a Vita now, which removes the issue of the game being too long to monopolize the television for, which is the other main issue with playing these types of games in this stage of my life, what with having a full time job and three kids. To make sure I wasn’t going to pick the wrong game, I refused to let my Isometric co-hosts off the Skype call one night after recording until they agreed on what Final Fantasy game was best for me to play. So I bought Final Fantasy VI and went about figuring out if there was a Final Fantasy person locked inside me or not.

I’ll say this: Final Fantasy VI is a pretty compelling game. I’m only maybe 3 hours in as of when I’m writing this post, but the story is really engaging, and just the small tweak to the battle system to have each character attack according to their speed stat as opposed to each side inputting all their commands at once does add a bit more strategy to the battles, even if it does make them slightly more stressful. I’ve stuck with it and felt myself wanting to come back to it after putting it down, even if the reason for putting it down was that I was stuck at a particularly frustrating part. (The battle with Vargas probably took me an hour to clear that’s not reflected in my overall play time because I kept dying without saving; for whatever reason I couldn’t figure out how to press the buttons for the Blitz command the way that the game expected me to.) It’s early, but I’m liking the game a lot, and I think I could conceivably overcome my perception that I’m not a Final Fantasy person.

That said, playing Final Fantasy VI now has led me to believe that I’ve figured out what’s gotten in the way of me enjoying these types of games: The random encounters.

If you’ve never played a game like this, the general flow of the game is that, unless you’re in an area like a town that’s safe, you move your party around on a map, and every so often the screen freezes randomly, and the game shifts to a battle. It’s kind of like playing musical chairs as a kid; everything’s calm for a while and then the music stops and there’s a mad scramble. This is supposed to represent the danger of the environment; your party is wandering through the wilderness, and every so often, monsters jump out and attack them. The party then defeats the monsters and continues along their path.

Turns out this has been what’s been keeping me from enjoying JRPGs all this time. Here’s the thing: Some of these dungeons are really complex. They often have multiple branches, and it can be very easy to get lost and forget where you’ve been and where you’re going. That’s under normal circumstances. Now imagine that you’re easily distractible to begin with, and now to try to keep track of a complicated dungeon like that while every 30-45 seconds you’re getting interrupted by a battle that can last several minutes, only to be thrown back to the world map to try to remember where you were going before that happened. More than once while playing Final Fantasy VI, I finished a lengthy battle and ended up walking back in the direction I came from, which was both frustrating and then ended up generating even more random battles because I was taking steps that I didn’t need to take. Worse, even while benefitting from the medication to help my focus, there were points where I got so turned around that I was totally lost, and got increasingly frustrated as I got continually attacked while trying to regain my bearings. There’s a point where that stops being fun and starts being irritating, and I think that’s what ultimately made me decide that Final Fantasy wasn’t for me. To a person with ADD, getting lost in an area with frequent random encounters can feel like walking in quicksand.

This got me thinking about the two JRPGs that I can remember enjoying: the Pokemon games and Bravely Default. Both of those games have the same large story, and both have similar turn-based battle systems to the Final Fantasy games. So why was I able to put 30-40 hours into those games and get turned off by other games?

In the case of Pokemon, there are random encounters to a degree, but once you’ve learned how the game works you can plan around them. In Pokemon, when traveling around the overworld, there are two types of battles that can happen: Trainer battles, where you fight against a trainer who has one or more Pokemon; and wild Pokemon encounters, where you fight against a single Pokemon with the goal of either defeating it for experience points or capturing it in a Poke Ball to add to your roster. Trainer battles aren’t random at all; you can see the trainers along the path and it’s clear when they see you that you’re going to battle. Furthermore, once you’ve defeated a trainer on a path he won’t challenge you again, so you can progress safely knowing you won’t be interrupted there. Wild Pokemon battles, on the other hand, only take place in specific areas like tall grass and some dungeons. There’s usually a path to avoid these encounters should you not want to gain XP or catch Pokemon, and even in larger dungeon type areas that do have more traditional random encounters, you can buy Repel items for relatively cheap early on that will stop the random encounters from happening temporarily. So even though Pokemon has these random encounters, being able to avoid them is both possible and encouraged, so I could do that if they were getting in the way.

Bravely Default is even more accommodating in this regard. Not only will it allow you to skip random encounters, there’s actually a setting in preferences to turn them off completely. It does warn you that doing that will end up biting you if you leave them turned off for too long, which is true; you need to battle monsters to gain enough experience to proceed at some point. But even then, the game has options also; you can both turn up the rate of encounters and the game speed, and preset a series of commands for each character to take to facilitate “grinding”, the act of searching for random encounters for a while to earn enough experience points to level up sufficiently to proceed, which can be extremely tedious and boring but ultimately necessary, anathema for some players with ADD. Bravely Default requires just as much grinding as other games in the genre, but these settings make it much less painful; upon hitting a point where I needed to grind, I could just put everything on autopilot and wander around a cave for a while as I watched television, only pausing every so often to replenish health and magic.

What both these games prove is that it really was the random encounters, and not anything else about the JRPG genre, that caused me to give up on Final Fantasy early on. Corroborating this is a game that came out in 2013 called Ni No Kuni, which I was extremely inclined to enjoy. The story and art was done by Studio Ghibli, which is responsible for several of the very few movies that I love, like My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Spirited Away. The battle system played more like an action-RPG than turn based. And yet, the dungeons were so thick with random encounters that it frustrated me in exactly the same way the Final Fantasy games did. So I put it down after a couple of hours and never picked it up again.

Ultimately I’m glad I did this experiment, even though it does prove that there must be something literally wrong with me for not liking Final Fantasy all this time. It’s reassuring to be able to point to a specific mechanic to determine whether I’m going to like a game or not, and know that if I’m in a state where my ADD is under control, I can probably get past that now. I should be sure to say that ADD is different for everyone; what serves as a roadblock for me likely won’t be for everyone with the disorder. After all, hyperfocus is still a factor that can kick in, and it’s hard to predict where that will happen; I’ve heard other people with ADD say that they loved Final Fantasy VI and hyperfocus carried them through, the same way I managed to learn to play Rock Band guitar on Expert difficulty despite my own struggles. That said, I’m hopeful given the popularity of Bravely Default that more designers will look at that particular mechanic and provide a way to work around it for those who do find it a challenge. After all, no one should have to go all their life without getting to ride a Chocobo. That’s no way to live.

When Ratings Get Squirrelly

I took a trip to Newbury Comics with my oldest daughter yesterday. It’s a treat for both of us, and while I don’t really read comics anymore (mainly because I already spend way too much money on video games and something has to give), she loves them, and I’m happy to encourage any of her potential routes toward geekdom that she wants to pursue. There’s a problem, though; it’s incredibly difficult to find comics that I can feel good about giving her without reservation.

This came into stark relief today when we went over to a new rack that this particular store had put in highlighting all their comics that were intended for kids. I’m used to this rack; it’s usually full of My Little Pony, Archie, and Sonic the Hedgehog. There’s nothing wrong with any of those, per se (My Little Pony is a big hit with the younger girls, in fact), but my seven year old is beyond that, for the most part; I bought her a few of the Legend of Zelda manga books and she devoured each of them in an afternoon apiece. It’s been a struggle finding any super hero comics that are appropriate for her; she loves super heroes (DC, primarily), but comics I can give her to read are few and far between. Even the good ones like Superman Family Adventures and Tiny Titans are definitely aimed toward early readers and aren’t challenging for her at all. What I’ve been looking for is a series that’s written at a more mainstream reading level but with content that’s appropriate for someone at her age.

That’s why I was excited when I saw The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 on the rack today. I’ve heard a lot about Squirrel Girl; everything I’ve seen ahead of the series’ launch was funny and well written, and Squirrel Girl’s alter ego, Doreen Green, is starting college to major in computer science, so she seems like a positive role model for my daughter as well. There’s one problem, though: That letter T on the cover.

This is the problem that I run into constantly with comics. Between both Marvel and DC, comics that are rated All Ages are rare. I still remember the first time that I brought my daughter to a comics shop, having not read comics since the mid-90s. I opened up a random Spider Man comic to find depictions of a fairly grisly murder scene, and decided that the T rating wasn’t to be trifled with. Even when I find series that I thought might be OK for her to try, like the new Batgirl, I discover that it broaches subjects like revenge porn in the early issues of the current run. Next to nothing is rated All Ages, though, so the fact that this T comic was in the “Comics for Kids” section was perplexing.

I read through it quickly in the store while she looked at some other things, and confirmed that this issue was OK for her to read. In fact, not only does she defeat Kraven the Hunter, but she ends up doing so not by using her super strength or super speed, but by figuring out what makes him tick and convincing him that he was hunting too weak a foe and should aim higher. I think that’s a pretty great message, that even if you have superpowers, sometimes it’s just being able to think on your feet that can help you save the day. All in all, I think this particular comic is fantastic and I can’t recommend it enough.

The issue is that I keep coming back to the T on the cover. As a parent it’s my job to filter the stuff that my kids see before they see it and decide if they’re ready for it. That doesn’t mean that they can’t see “mature” scenes eventually, but they’re seven and five now. They should be allowed to be kids without understanding what serial killers are for a while longer if I can help it. So what the T on the cover says to me as a parent is, “This issue might be fine, but this series may stray into directions that are more mature eventually, so be on guard.” If this was a movie or a video game, then I could either preview the entirety of it myself or go to a site like Common Sense Media that would help me make a call if I wanted to watch it together.

The thing that makes comics different is that they are episodic, though, and by getting involved in a series, we’re starting a relationship with it. If my daughter likes a series she’s going to want to get every issue that comes out, because that’s kind of the point. So a T rating makes me very hesitant to start that relationship, because it means that we might have to skip issues based on their content, and that’s going to leave me with a very disappointed girl in the comic shop. It’s hard for a kid to understand that she can have this issue but not that one for reasons.

In the case of Squirrel Girl, my public fretting on Twitter eventually led one of my awesome followers to reach out to the writer, who put my fears at ease. But what if that didn’t happen? I’ve had several people reach out to me recommending the new Ms Marvel series, which also looks fantastic, but that’s rated T+. I can reach out to the author of that series on Twitter as well, but I shouldn’t have to do that every time I want to introduce my daughter to a new series, and that shouldn’t be the writers’ responsibility either. Further, if a book is being written for all ages, why not rate it that way so that I can know that there aren’t going to be any subjects that my kids aren’t ready to read about yet?

The problem here, from what I can tell, is that Marvel and DC seem to be using their ratings as marketing and classification and not as a tool for parents to make an informed decision, which is what ratings are supposed to be for in the first place. I want to get my kids more into super hero books because that’s something they’re interested in, which has to be good for the publishers both in the short term (they sell more books) and long term (because they get future customers who are starting younger and then more inclined to buy comics of their own once they have their own money). The way they’re running their ratings, though, it’s hard for me to feel good about introducing new series. So I don’t. And I know a lot of other geek parents who often feel the same way when faced with the same decision in the comic shop.

So, Marvel and DC, help me help you. I’ve got money to spend and I come home with it burning a hole in my pocket every time we leave the comics shop. My kids and I are starving for comics that are for all ages that we can enjoy together. So please rate your comics appropriately so we can read some of them together as a family. You’re turning away potential customers by doing otherwise.