I didn’t really have much of an opinion on this, but a spate of curiosity made me browse links on homeschooling and dating. I found some odd things.
Does courtship give homeschooling parents the power to extend their control over adult children?
I actually had no knowledge of the courtship movement. I was aware of Harris’s book, but had just a vague idea it was another book to give Christian parents advice on dating for their young kids. I’m in the middle of reading the book linked to by that post, and I might actually crack open Kissed Dating Goodbye. I never even bothered with it myself. It would be like a fish being given a book on how to hang-glide.
It’s something I didn’t consider though, and I’ve been subtly reading on the problems of Christian dating for some time now.
Problems of a courtship approach as experienced by a young man.
I’d take this with a grain of salt if it weren’t so lucid and rational. Usually anti-sites can go over the deep end and magnify problems as a reaction to the identity they just discarded, but there’s some issues here which seem a bit too close to home. It feels more like regret over the waste of an extreme thing than a blanket condemnation of a movement.
Creative license with the title there. Echoes of the “duck and cover” paranoia we had in public schools. Like that would help if the Soviets ever really nuked us. While I get the mom wants to make her kids safe, in the back of the kid’s mind, he’s always going to interpret any loud sound for a moment as gunfire, and size up where to hide. Look, I fully sorrow over the loss everyone faced in Sandy Hook, but these kind of things are rare, and are impossible to prepare for. To try and instill in kids a lifetime of looking and being aware for when a gun is fired is not going to help them; it will make them jumpy and not a little paranoid.
How to convince your kids to let them be homeschooled.
To be fair though, I really don’t see Penelope Trunk as a model for homeschooling. I just include this for two reasons:
1. Since homeschooling is very much tied up with parental identity, some people get pressured to justify things for reasons apart from the actual one. I really doubt Penelope is doing this because she’s discovered that gaming has wonderful potential to bring out a child’s creativity, but more because it occupies the kids and keeps them quiet when she needs to rest. But since you have to justify almost any activity per homeschooling, we get this.
2. It involves gaming, which is always fun to talk about. Mostly because it’s the kid version of beer. No, seriously; it’s fun when done in moderation, but kills lives if not strictly monitored. I say this as an ex-hardcore gamer. Man, the MMO war stories I could tell you some time.
I think we erred seriously when we created home consoles. The one thing the arcade did was enable a strict separation between gaming and the rest of your life. You went out to game, but couldn’t do it back home. You were limited in your playtime by how much money you had, and eventually you’d get bored and go home simply because all you could do was watch. It set some hard limits which helped people resist the games, and even the hours of the arcade’s operation helped.
But the consoles enabled gaming to be 24-7. There was no distance between you and the game any more, and as kids grew older, they could play later. As adults, they can play an all-nighter if they wanted to.
Consoles also allowed games to become vast experiences. Arcade games? You could only play so long after the operators wised up and made games unable to be played hours on a quarter. The games usually were short, but fun experiences you did socially with others. Now, you have these massive player experiences that can last weeks of real time if not years. No joke, check your time played in an MMO if you doubt me.
So this is a case where we got a lot more than we needed. TBH, it really has wrecked a lot of people’s lives. The sense of power and action can easily become compulsive to slightly neurotic people like myself, and unless you can administer strong boundaries and always supervise the kid, addiction is likely.
There’s more to this, especially with the rise of casino-like free to play games. I won’t go into this, although homeschoolers: never allow your child to play any game that sells virtual items for real money. But it’s just funny to see this post considering as a gamer, I’d never let my kids (if I invent a time machine and go back to have some) even touch the things.
Jan 05, 2013 @ 17:23:53
I was homeschooled until fifth grade. As a formerly homeschooled child who has also been a gamer at various times, I have some thoughts on your remarks about videogames.
Penelope Trunk doesn’t seem to understand videogames very much, and I think she may be mistaken in her assumption that children know how to make good choices with what to do with their time. I’ve certainly wasted a ton of time in my childhood, not necessarily doing things arbitrarily declared to be worthless, but doing things that I really didn’t want to do because I was too lazy and too unmotivated to do what I knew I needed and/or really wanted to do. I still have that problem.
Your view on videogames is unbalanced. Granted, having videogames available in the home certainly makes them easier to abuse than when they were in the arcade. However, that is merely a symptom of digital technology. We have computers, and the Internet. Our lives would probably be much healthier if we had to go to an Internet cafe every time we wanted to connect, because must of us don’t have the willpower to limit ourselves. That doesn’t take away the fact that the Internet brings us many possibilities and opens many doors that we would not have had if we did not have relatively easy access to it. I believe that videogames also can give us new possibilities and open new doors. You criticize consoles, but then you go on to lament MMOs. MMOs are PC games. Therefore, the issue isn’t consoles — it’s computers. Consoles are merely specialized computers.
I play games for exactly the same reason that I read speculative fiction novels. I want to be immersed in other realities and have adventures that feel more significant than my confused and dull life. It’s escapism, but I hope that it is the escape of a prisoner rather than the desertion of a soldier. The only difference is that the interactive simulation of videogames allows the experience to be more meaningful because I — as the player — am an active agent in its development. The experience is more real. I’m not saying that videogames are categorically better than novels, or movies, or any other artform. Novels can deliver much better narration and character development. Despite the fact that modern commercial games have impressive graphics, movies are better for a purely visual experience. But videogames are a form of interactive literature that can deliver stroytelling in ways that novels and movies cannot.
Penelope Trunk does have a point about the similarities between reading and gaming. Reading too much can be bad, too. I’ve read for six hours in a day once, polishing off most of a long novel. I felt physically sick afterwards.
About free-to-play MMOs, I agree that there are problems. However, you should understand that the MMO industry was forced to adopt the free-to-play model. The single MMO World of Warcraft had a monopoly; no other commercial MMO could survive with a subscription model. So, they made their games free, but tried to hawk all kinds of digital benefits in microtransactions. I dislike many of these microtransaction items. You can often buy power-ups or experience boosters to make your character advance more quickly. That cheapens gameplay. Sometimes, cosmetic outfits for your character — digital clothes — are sold for real money, and I think that is absurd. However, I’m fine with free-to-play MMOs selling content (new quests and expansions) or the right to play restricted classes and races.
I take the good with the bad. I’m thankful to be able to play MMOs at all. I’ve been occasionally playing both Lord of the Rings Online and Star Trek Online since they have become free-to-play, and I have not spent any money at all. Both of those games have given me immersive literary experiences that helped me see my own life in the perspective of the fantastic. As such, I wouldn’t mind spending some money on microtransactions one day, because I think the companies deserve to earn money. I’m truly grateful to have been let in at all.
Jan 05, 2013 @ 21:55:48
Well, the problem of the technology is that it’s removed barriers in the games themselves that contribute to greater addiction. It’s not just the games being physically removed from us: battery saves enabled games to be much longer, higher capacity storage enabled them to be far more complex, and online broadband play enabled games to be played perpetually in multiplayer. The consoles aren’t that different from the PCs in this. The games themselves changed as well as became ever-present, and many limits were removed. Willpower is one thing, but when the nature of the game itself can work against it, it suffers. It’s sort of the same thing as credit, when the studies say simply buying something with a card makes a person inclined to spend more.
I used to like the storytelling too. I’m a big JRPG fan, but after awhile (I think MMOs made me realize this) I found that the game’s journey was doing a lot of tedious sorting, sum-toting, and menial work with story as a reward. A good example is Disgaea; the story is a hoot, but apart from it it’s just a lot of stat grinding and fusion, and some puzzles. So while I like games for the experiences, I find that for storytelling, I just put on an anime these days. Maybe I’m just getting old, get of my lawn, etc.
The microtransaction issue is really a subject for another post. I’ve spent money on them, and I’ve debated them fiercely with others, and there’s a whole world of issues with them. I’ll just toss one out in that they penalize the people who fall in love with the game by often requiring tremendous sums to be spent to unlock an enjoyable endgame experience. Addiction again, but it can be very bad: I used to play EVE Online and was present when some guy had thousands of dollars of PLEX go up in smoke, and I’ve had countless tales told to me of just how much it can really cost to be endgame worthy in many of the popular games. It would have been better for us all if most of the struggling games had just folded or changed their mechanics than go FTP.
Thanks for stopping by Baines. Sorry I couldn’t approve you in a timely fashion. I can’t access the blog easily while working.
Jan 06, 2013 @ 00:03:50
Thanks for the discussion. I think you may be on to something in your criticism of newer game technology. I play a lot of old games and indie games. I play “text adventures,” where you are presented with a description of the player character’s surroundings and type what you want the player character to do at the command prompt, and then the game responds with more text describing what has happened in the simulation. I don’t think its the new technology itself that is the problem. Maybe the real problem is today’s commercial game industry, with its emphasis on graphics and raw entertainment over storytelling and meaningful interaction.
I’m less qualified to criticize your dislike for videogames than I thought. I’ve never been a true hardcore gamer, only a wannabe. Have you ever heard of the Bartle classification for different kinds of MMO players? I’m an Explorer, which means I don’t care much about “winning” or dominating other players. I’ve never seen end-game content, and although I would be interested in the story, the idea of end-game content goes against what I play MMOs for. I see the game as another world that I can become a part of and have adventures in. If it has an “end game,” that hurts the illusion of the alternate reality and my immersion in it.
Jan 06, 2013 @ 01:57:01
Yeah, I’m familiar with the Bartle test. I’d peg myself as an achiever. I think gamers have aspects of all the classifications in them, and they can change-some MMOs are slanted to different player types. Just one tends to be dominant at a time.
Immersion is hard to do, because of the unwritten rules often surrounding playing with others in them. The metagame-the optimized path of gear, skill selection, and equipment-really has hammered immersion lately, as well as the decline of in-character roleplaying. At some point, if you play the game you’ll always run into choices that break immersion for the sake of play efficiency. It’s very frustrating, because even in free-form games you find you have little real choice to play the way you like unless you solo.
I think this is why games like Skyrim and others are so popular, because you can skip all that, and they usually don’t need to worry about pressure to find the best path through the game.