Video Games & TV

What effect do video games and regular exposure (habitual viewing) to TV have on kids?

I'd like to examine this issue from the point of view of my own experience ...

Can I possibly describe the endless hours of bliss I passed as a child and young teenager playing astonishingly exciting and novel Nintendo games such as The Legend of Zelda, Castelvania (part 2 is so underrated!), Super Mario Bros, RC ProAM, and others?

I'll never forget my first experience with Ninetendo. My best friend at the time -- we were about 12 years old -- had just acquired an immaculate, white-plastic Nintendo counsel (the first I'd ever seen). I went to his house one day, walked into the living room, and found him sprawled in front of a tv screen filled with surreal and vividly colored shapes, stationary and moving! Magically, the screen changed -- scrolled to another one -- the moment that one of the shapes reached its edge. I was awed and fascinated, uncertain what I behind. Soon, I realized I was watching an aerial view of a fantasy world -- my friend's character (Link) was the shape moving from landscape to landscape, the circular green globs were bushes, and the glinting blue surface water.

Of course, I had had minor video-game exposure to lower-tech counsels before that -- for example, Atari, Colecovision, and Intellvision. Intellivision, with it's primitive square graphics and repetitive game format still holds a special place in my heart for its mesmerizing simplicity. Maybe you remember Pong, as well -- I think it came out around 1980? -- depending on your age. My dad bought that bulky contraption when I was a tot, and I still recall my moments with it's slowly bounding white ball fondly.

Nintendo, however, captured my imagination and determined energy like no other -- only reluctantly freeing me from its clutches as I approached college age. I played every day -- or at least as much as my parents allowed me -- after school, weekends, summer vacation. The cigarette-case controller and I were fast, compulsive friends.

Besides the games I watched shitloads of tv at this time (I could also relate to you my totally unhealthy diet, but we'll leave that for another post!) -- maybe more as my dumb hours before the games waned. I tuned in to The Cosby Show, Family Ties, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire, The Monkees, The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island and many other outdated and hackneyed situational comedies (Hogan's Heros anyone? Not Greg Kinnear!) that nonetheless stimulated my juvenile's brain with the combo of slap-stick humor, muted drama and vague sex-appeal.

As for the general effect on my psyche of during these years, I can make a couple observations:

First, I believe this frequent exposure to video games and the boob tube helped create a kind of mental passivity towards the outside world, and a mistaken illusion that excitement and satisfaction in the world could be achieved through minimal effort on my part -- perhaps with the push of a few buttons! This is a kind underlying, general psychological state with me -- I'm not saying it influences my entire life -- a misplaced attitude towards a changing and unpredictable world that requires participation.

Second, my videovision experiences may have contributed to a kind of general social deprivation. I often find myself more comfortable in front of a television or computer screen than another human being, and incompetent in complex social situations.

Thirdly, I sometimes find myself easily distracted from arduous tasks by the sounds and sights of the world around me.

Perhaps the most insidious product of gaming and tv, then -- from this perspective -- is an attitude of general mental passivity or detachment from one's surrounds or (alternatively) one's necessary task at hand. After long years I have learned that the world does not respond to my wants and desires as though I could feed them to it on a program through the medium of a controller. Instead, I need to exercise patience, perseverance, and ingenuity to achieve a goal. Happiness, of course, is contingent upon achieving goals and understanding how one's actions effect the world.

What is the effect of today's drastically more violent and 'real' (but less real, because purporting to be real, which is impossible) on today's youth? I cannot say. It seems that a mind passive before and detached from the consequences of outer destruction would endanger endanger himself and others.

But I'm only one person among billions of folk, and maybe some of you had different experiences with tv and video games. Let me know!