Why won’t she get off Minecraft?
deangroom.wordpress.com
deangroom.wordpress.com
The internet is like a parallel universe based around the exact opposite rules. You can look at whatever you want, talk to whoever you want, say whatever you want, do whatever you want, and no one is going to stop you. There is no wonder that so many suburban children become "internet addicts" these days, given that it is the sole element of freedom in their lives.
And Minecraft is the ultimate embodiment of this freedom. There is no structure or goal to it, just the freedom to wander about a crude approximation of the natural world, go on adventures by yourself or with friends, and build things with your own two hands. In short, it is a safe, sterilized version of the ancient childhood experience of wandering the woods, building forts, and carving out a society secret from the adults. It is the solution to problems we created ourselves out of fear of the world.
When I was growing up in the sixties I spent most of the summer outside from breakfast time to teatime at least. My parents had no idea where I was, who I was with, or what I was doing. If the sun was shining and I was still indoors my mother would want to know if anything was wrong and once she had decided that there was nothing wrong I would be shooed out to get on with my life while she got on with hers.
But now children have no society of their own; they have invaded the adult space and adults have invaded their space. Fifty years ago children learned about the world from other children and transmitted their own culture to each other but now there is nowhere to hide and nowhere where you cannot be contacted by outsiders (adults).
Damn, I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm just glad I was born where and when I was and I feel sorry for those who will never feel the freedoms that I felt; I just hope that I'm missing something and that today's children will look back in fifty years on their own golden age.
I remember my thought process at the time was like "I can't jump very high or fly out here like Spyro, there are no items to collect, no puzzles or enemies or portals.."
Video game worlds in general always felt more interesting, fun, and cool to explore at the time. Structured and rewarding, a lot more things you can do, characters and stories intertwined to be invested in. You don't get tired, you don't have to struggle to keep up with faster-running others, and you don't get bug bites or broken bones. Kids today have online games and skype for a nicer experience.
Nowadays I do appreciate some hiking or other nature walks but I'd never choose that as a replacement for computer usage. I don't get why people think it's so important for kids to run around unsupervised and get bruised up.
Someone earlier complained about "play dates" rather than randomly ringing friends' doorbells. You should always know where your kid is, and who would rather walk than be driven?
The attitudes on this issue I always see on the internet are baffling.
It's important, I think, to do that while you can. There's always time for the rest.
This attitude is the difference. Children are human beings with rights, too, and they are capable of much more than contemporary American parents give them credit for.
iPad games are a lot less constructive than normal ones, though, usually.
People who want agency.
These days when I go for a walk, there is almost no kids playing or riding bikes or anything and it's kind of eerie.
For my dad, it was his car. For me, it's my Macbook.
A month after my 16th birthday my little brother was born. He's 13 now and when I look at how little freedom he has compared to what I had when I was a kid I sometimes wonder how he's going to figure out how to do anything for himself.
To echo your point about the internet... My brother is online, often playing Minecraft, all the time. He loves the internet. He loves that he doesn't have to ask permission to look at anything. He enjoys meeting random people to chat with online about video games and weird youtube people that teenagers are into now. I think it's pretty awesome. He has a sort of digital version of what I experience IRL.
The contrast is actually kind of amusing when you consider that in 1996 I also got my first computer. A Mac running System 7. At the time the internet was considered dangerous for children and my parents heavily monitored my activity on it much like they monitor my brother's real life experiences.
I wonder what I'll be worrying about when I have kids.
From the parent comment:
> The days of packs of children running around town or exploring the woods are long gone, due to fears of dangerous men and accidents.
Fear is fear. What you fear will manifest itself further if you and others continue to fear it.
I have read any number of thinkpieces about the hazards or the educational value of Minecraft, but not one of them meaningfully described the sheer beauty and joy of the game. I'm an adult with plenty of life experience and I find Minecraft to be an intoxicating experience; I can only imagine the effect it would have on a battery-farmed kid from a sterile suburb.
If you're worrying about your child being obsessed with Minecraft, ask what sort of experiences they're getting from the game that are lacking in their real life. Watching the sun rise over a soaring mountain range. Illuminating a newly discovered cave system and seeing a vast cavern reveal itself. Planting seeds, watching them grow and harvesting the crop. Building something for the pure pleasure of creativity and showing it to your friends.
I grew up playing (and becoming addicted to) MUDs, which are, from an outside perspective, quite good for you. They promote reading, high imagination, social interactions, a sense of accomplishment, etc. and there are MUDs which focus on or require player building (MOOs/LPs etc).
What did my addiction to MUDs get me? Bad grades in school, and no 'real life' experience. I had no idea how to take care of myself, which would cause me issues later in life when I did start forming RL relationships. And while my online social ability was amazing, in real life I could barely talk to people (I believe there could be a lot written about this very subject). I didn't make friends, much less girlfriends. All I cared about was getting through the school day so I can could get home and play MUDs. The one thing it did give me was programming, since I became so interested in them I began programming them.
From an outside perspective? In my experience, it's only the people playing MMOs that tout the benefits :)
But I would also agree that playing RPG games of any description for a large portion of your day is a net negative.
Just as virtual skills don't always translate perfectly to the real world the reverse is also true. There's a large market out there for digital goods that most people are blissfully unaware of.
And the author didn't seem to ever explain how a kid that refuses to get off Minecraft and fights with his family isn't a problem. Unless the point was "don't tell him to stop". While I generally appreciate the sentiment, maybe the kid has other things he's neglecting...
Same argument for drugs. People resist the term addict when talking about SSRIs, but that's probably because they never run out. And likewise, since everyone agrees that opiates are addictive, they must be bad. The thought that you can be an illegal opiate addict yet reap huge benefits from it is a contradiction to many people. (Unless a doctor is involved -- then it's OK.) It's just intellectual laziness.
Btw, MUDs were awesome, and I had my first real relationship by meeting someone via a MUD. It contributed to me dropping out of school, but getting more info software was far more useful.
So my impression after a week is that it is weirdly fun and addictive. I've now put more hours into Minecraft than anyone else in the house. I got my wife playing it and she's still experimenting around. My son likes to play creative and just kind of fool around. I think he's a bit too young yet to really get into it. But he does love watching me play and we discuss everything together. It's probably the most engaged he's been with me on the computer.
But I have stayed up way too late playing it...
Now my girls are 7 & 8, and for the last year they've been building these huge things in creative. They're in love with Stampy (on YouTube... Annoying voice but he shows some neat tricks). This week they took vacations, and I agreed to play survival with them. (I must admit, it does scare me just a bit; the rush to setup before nightfall and the sound that something is nearby.)
Well... Every night we've stayed up until 1am or so (kids are lightweights) playing Minecraft. Coordinating expeditions, streamlining resource usage, building sky palaces. It's a blast and my one daughter told my wife how much she enjoyed it and was so happy I did this. Now it's probably because I'm a terrible father and don't spend enough time with them, but they really enjoy this time. And they tell stories, laughing, about how the time a creeper blew me up, or when they accidentally attacked something or whatever. It's some serious "together" time. (And I can't imagine am easier way of being a decent parent.)
I'm gonna install it on their laptops (I was lazy and used 360) and I'm hoping there's servers aimed for littler kids. Just because teenage boys seem to be real dicks online. (It's not language, we swear a fair amount while playing, I'd just like to increase the chance of them making real friends vs endless griefers.) There's gotta be other parents like me that'd be willing to run a private, verified identity, server, eh?
I'm sure there are. By the way, isn't this basically how football clubs, etc. get formed? :).
It's also great if you're traveling to get on minecraft together to have fun instead of a short phone conversation. (it also works well for divorced parents)
Note minecraft can be awesome for siblings that fight all the time. You'll be amazed when they actually get along on building something.
It's basically 21st century Lego.
I haven't played too much of Minecraft to understand the "pieces," but I think the problem we had with Lego would be solved :)
However, when defining addiction, I think "causing the child to do poorly in school" is a really, really dangerous standard. Several psychologists and teachers told my parents I was addicted to computers because I did poorly in high school and also spent a lot of time on the computer. Never-mind that I had worked through Cinderella, SICP, the first half of Dragon, and an undergrad crypto course in addition to a Discrete Mathemtics and Linear course by the end of high school... all while fueling my "addiction".)
I think there's a lot of danger in conflating "interferes with good grades" with "harmful". Especially in high school. Taking grades seriously in high school would have been far more harmful than my computer "addiction".
A younger friend of mine gained his first digital electronics knowledge building 8-segment displays in Minecraft, and the time spent on setting up and managing Minecraft servers gave him skills he now directly uses every day, for money and for fun.
The point is, school is bullshit (and kids smell it, they're incredibly good bullshit detectors). Pretty much anything a kid does on a computer that isn't literally browsing 9gag all day teaches them more than the same time spent doing homework. Parents need to be very careful here. School-related tasks are very inefficient way of spending time, but are easy for parents to focus on because they're quantified. You just have to look at the test scores and grades (and their first derivatives). The fact that they're totally unrelated to any education taking place is too much to think about.
So if you see your kid spends a lot of time building, creating and exploring stuff on the computer, do him/her a favour and don't mind too much if they occasionally forget about their homework. And most important of all - don't introduce insane time limits like "1 hour of computer time a day, every other day". With such strict limits, there's literally nothing a kid can do except of watching funny pictures of cats on-line or playing games. Exploration and learning takes time, and is something you don't even start if you know you are on strict deadlines (note: this also applies to adults at and after work).
I've heard this from a lot of people. It's probably the most understated advantage of online gaming among students from non-English-speaking countries.
He's been through Minecraft, done some stuff, and then fell off when it got harder than he liked. Likewise with other video games. He loved Kerbal for 45 minutes and was done. He gets hooked on video games because they are shiny, and sniffs at some of the possibilities, but then drops out. They provide enough stimulation to distract him from whatever is bothering him, and to keep him from getting so bored that he might actually read a book. But they don't provide any steps up to an actual learning threshold.
Yes, some people can learn enormous amounts from video games and such. But I worry that those people have a particular set of focus and problem-solving and follow-through skills. I don't see much in the online environment to help identify and fill those gaps for other people. Ideally schools should be able to do that, and no, too often they don't. But at least they have the opportunity to put great teachers in position to do just that.
I definitely get the possibilities of video games and I hope I'm not hung up on conventional learnings. But I fear that for a large category of kids, these games are really net negatives. I'm definitely worried about my son.
But the games are a problem as an attention sponge / stimulus hit. Thirty years ago the kid would have gotten so bored that he would have read a book or picked up a basketball or listening to music or something. Those initially would not have provided stimulus, but in time they would have, and he would have begun to associate the work done at them with stimulus and thus become more engaged with them. (I would hope. Maybe he'd start on weed, right?)
Today, it is just too easy to get a small stimulus attention hit from some game, or surfing around. God knows I struggle with it sometimes, don't most of us? For a kid who hasn't developed real engagement and follow-through, those little hits stave off boredom, sort of, but never lead to anything more rewarding.
All I'm saying is, I think the whole online environment definitely poses a new set of risks and that some people are more at risk than others.
I had some problems with following through on hard tasks in grad school. When I got to the point where Google was completely useless and I knew I had six months of work to do (at best) with very little outside guidance, I kind of got down and couldn't focus. I found that biting off small pieces that seemed either easy or interesting and then convincing myself to forget about the long-term picture until I figured out that piece was a helpful way to avoid paralysis.
Also, whispering "I could give you a hint" in your own ear is pretty amazingly helpful, for the same reason that just knowing you could just Google for the answer if you need to is helpful when you're working on a hard assignment. Less stress, I guess.
Not sure if or how that applies to your son. Also seems like the sort of thing a kid would have a very difficult time doing for themselves. In any case, it sounds like you're very in tune and thinking about things the right way. Good luck with your son.
But again, the point the author makes, and he tries to be nice about it, is that it's not Minecraft or any other games fault, it's parents using it incorrectly. Poor parenting can create bad habits, which yes can eventually become addictions. But that doesn't make the focus of the addiction the culprit, that makes the parents the culprit.
> Non-gamers are bombarded by messages from the larger media-culture.
>So parents hear constantly that games are harmful, that gamers are all potential crazed gunmen, isolated shut ins and so on.
No they don't. Has the author noticed it's not 2007 anymore? To find substantial video-game addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They are not a part of mainstream culture, especially the crazed gunman stories.
>This is why we have televisions, magazines and newspapers – they are technological devices to sell us advertising.
Lots of media companies own video game studios.
To be sure, video-game addiction is a minor problem compared to drugs, alcohol, and sex addiction. But sticking your head in the sand is not going to win you any allies, nor does a persecution complex. Instead, stick to the positive benefits that video games have, and DO NOT overstate them, like marijuana activists convinced the drug is a cure-all.
The world has moved on. We(gamers) won. It's time to stop pretending we're a persecuted minority.
I'm not sure if things have changed all that dramatically in 8 years. Video games remain a convenient scapegoat for various societal ills.
What do you mean by "nowadays with games like Hatred on the market"?
What is special about Hatred? It wasn't a particularly violent game, it just got propelled into notoriety by demagoguery and the developers' guerrilla marketing. It's a near verbatim clone of Postal, and that came out in 1997.
There are now clinics in some countries that cater specifically towards video game addiction. Playing world of warcraft, I witnessed these events firsthand with myself and some of my "real life" friends.
I am aware that some people cannot get addicted at all, but it's not true for everyone.
Edit: some links
RPG addiction can be traced all the way back to MUDs: http://abandonedrealms.com/essays/addiction.php
Wow addiction: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/29/world-of-w...
Video game addiction on webmd: http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/features/video-...
I haven't made mods for it yet, but there are people that go down that rabbit hole too. Quite a bargain for the $30 I paid.
When I first bought KSP, I had no idea you could even get into orbit. So many different levels of accomplishments to strive for, especially now with career mode.
This game has it all - you need to learn being precise (targeted landings if you want to build a structure somewhere or picked up kerbonauts you crashed the previous time), you need to plan and do logistics (hello fuel shipments), and you need patience (rendezvous and docking). And, as OP said, you quickly end up learning a lot about orbital mechanics, rocketry and space exploration. You don't need to know the maths, but you'll end up learning it anyway, because formulas are the easiest way to compress your intuition about "why bigger ships need helluva bigger rockets" or "why when I go faster I go slower".
Oh, and a fun thing I observed watching the community - because KSP runs on Unity 4, which has an unusable 64bit version for Windows, and the game itself starts quickly eating your RAM when you go for installing part or visual mods to the point of crashing the 32bit version, a lot of people install Linux for the first time in their lives just to play a working 64bit version of KSP. Yay for more education :).
For those who don't know KSP mods, RemoteTech adds the requirement to maintain communication links (via powered antennas) in order to be able to control unmanned vehicles. You can create relays as well (usually the first thing you do is to launch a geostationary comm network over the home planet), and the mod can account for the speed-of-light delay if you so choose.
Combine it with bunch of other mods like Kerbal Attachment System (attaching and detaching parts by kerbonauts during EVA, including pipes that let you transfer resources without docking) and one of many life support mods, and suddenly you really have to think a lot about logistics in game.
I challenge you to show me a way in which video games can be optimally good. Not just better than some carefully selected bad alternative, but better than any alternative. As in, actually a good thing to do of all options available.
> Our bodies are just a way to move our sub-conscious around. We spend most of our lives in our own sub-conscious because our brain likes to do stuff. The brain is in charge, not the body, and the brain is just as interested in solving problems in Minecraft as it is getting hands to move lego-bricks around a table.
Errrh. I like gaming but dualism is a poor excuse for that (and one I believe to be very wrong both empirically and philosophically).
• How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices;
• how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not;
• how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets;
• further, how talking to friends is talking to friends, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook;
• and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook;
• but also how there are also structured leagues that kick out creepy people, both for soccer and Starcraft;
• and, most importantly, that "playing on the computer" isn't an activity. The simplest and most useful metaphor is that the computer is a place, like "school" or "the park" or "a friend's house", where your child goes and all sorts of activities happen. Those activities are not better or worse for happening on a computer; they're exactly as they were when they weren't happening on a computer.
Ideally, parents would treat the computer, the medium, as an irrelevant distraction to finding out what their child is up to. One is not "chatting on Facebook"; one is just chatting with friends, or with a kid in my class, or perhaps with some random person who started talking to me. That information, the important information, gets buried under the medium.
The thing that is particularly bad in our age is that we're demonizing many realms of experience with the language of addiction. It's stupid. I hope we get over it.
I've been in that camp -- I got a degree from DigiPen before I decided to do something more meaningful with my life. But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play.
That sounds like you were in the opposite of that camp, actually. If you embraced the idea of medium irrelevancy as a child, then you would default to ambivalence between, say, playing a sports game, and playing an actual sport. This would let you freely weigh the pros and cons of each, which would likely end up with you playing the actual sport.
The medium may be irrelevant, but the individual activities are not identical, they're just in an equivalence class with one-another. Playing with wood blocks can be better or worse than playing with abstract-vertex blocks, exactly insofar as either of those can be better or worse than playing with jello blocks, or imaginary blocks, or building something out of real fired-clay bricks.
What I'm getting at, is that activities done on a computer are not in a separate magisterium where their "computerness" is their one and only property. Ignore that they're on a computer; look at them for what they actually are, what they actually require and enable you to do, etc.
Soccer is better as a real physical activity on a field. Scrabble (as my grandmother continually attests) is better as an asynchronous online mobile game. The reasons why have nothing to do with the "computerness", and everything to do with the required affordances and social goals of the two activities.
I should also note that frequently there isn't an either-or distinction. I "hang out with my friends" strictly more than I used to, because I do the same amount of real-world "hanging out", and a bunch of additional low-engagement online "hanging out." This is especially true of the friends I have in other countries; 20 years ago, my relationship with them would be something like "I write them letters and see them once every three years." Now we talk all night.
How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices;
No. Muscle memory and spatial skills are based on physical manipulation with the hands and arms. One cannot develop good body awareness/proprioception without actually using their limbs (this becomes even more important as we potentially move away from finger-based controls for computers).
how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not
No. Control over the outcome and process of an artistic object fundamentally changes the object -- an appropriate analogy would be to an echo chamber where people manipulate art into forms they prefer rather than be challenged by it. Games can be art, but a process you engage with and alter is different from a process imposed upon you as a single vision by a writer.
how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets
No. Physical reflexes and adrenaline responses operate in different ways when someone is perceiving real operations rather than an obvious simulation. Virtual reality may overcome some of these issues but it will do so by narrowing the analogue, not by analogizing bullets and packets.
and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook;
No. Humans use an incredible number of feedback mechanisms to interpret person-to-person interaction, ranging from facial expressions to pheromones -- the idea that these responses can be coded into text or emoji in a coherent way is absurd (particularly given that many of them occur at an unconscious level).
The computer is not a place -- it's a manipulatory environment that currently engages the fingertips, the eyes, and occasionally the ears, three of dozens of sensory inputs that our brain uses to model the world. The brain is plastic in many ways, but it is not so plastic that these inputs can replace scent, visual responses to faces, physical action of the limbs, the skin's response to environmental factors such as cold or sunlight, and many more.
Messages are never independent of their medium, and this is never more true than when those messages are human experiences.
I'm not saying that there is no difference between the two things; I'm saying that an "activity" is a concept that belongs primarily to the cluster in conceptspace representing that activity's goals and affordances, and you should evaluate an instantiation of an activity relative to other instantiations of that activity, rather than relative to other activities available in the same medium.
Or, to put that more simply, I'm saying that you should treat e.g. Minecraft as an instance of the kind of thing that Lego is, compare the two based on their merits (with e.g. Lego on the motor coordination side, as you said), and only then decide what you want or don't want your kids playing with.
The point I was trying to make is that, for example, telling a child to "turn off their computer and read a book" is nonsense if they were reading a book on the computer. Both things are books. In this case, there is no additional merit on either side of the ledger; in either case, the affordance is "text" and the interaction is "moving your eyes to absorb it."
Likewise, it is nonsense to tell your child to "get off the computer and go play with your friends" when all their friends are stuck at home due to their own overprotective parents, and so the only place they can freely see their friends is on the computer. You're making an assumption based on the medium (that the computer is solitary and real life is social), whereas in the specific case-by-case evaluation at that moment, the opposite is true.
Again note how I'm not suggesting the experiences are one-for-one replacements for one-another. Of course they're not. But the degree to which they're not is exactly the same degree that any other instantiation of the same {goals, affordances} tuple—any other instance of the same activity—is not.
And one more alternate phrasing, for redundancy's sake: in the set {computer game, board game, card game}, the adjective "computer" doesn't magically make the first element more N-dimensionally distant from the other two than they are to one-another. You should do the same evaluation when comparing the merits of the computer game to the card game, that you would when comparing the merits of the card game to the board game. Don't bias yourself by assuming that anything on a computer is going to have the same merits and the same drawbacks. The medium is not the central cluster to which the activity belongs. It's just a property in the equation.
I think the onus is on the person claiming virtual blocks are an equal or better substitute to prove it.
No ad-hoc social interaction with other kids either, especially on public servers where lots of kids hang out.
have you even played minecraft?
As for the particular statements:
> development of motor skills
Video games also help with developing motor skills. "The findings demonstrate a positive influence of computer games on psychomotor functioning" [1]. Although this study tested adults, here's a similar one with children [2].
> physical exercise
Moving blocks with fingers offers as much exercise as using said fingers to press buttons or move a mouse. In any case, both activities offer negligible exercise compared to sports.
> development of a reality-based sense of consequences
What kind of consequences? That blocks will fall if they are not supported? 4.5-month-old infants are aware of that already and at this stage it's unlikely they played with blocks [3].
> ability to feel embodied cause and effect
Unless they step on a brick bare-foot, playing with blocks won't improve the perception of causality any more than interacting with everyday objects in children's environment [4]. The only behavior on that list that is remotely related to blocks is "holding a block in each hand and banging the blocks together" - hardly a unique purpose of blocks.
> chances for ad-hoc social interaction with other kids
This is not an inherent property of playing with blocks, but rather of all potential group activities - including video games. Besides, online video games offer something that blocks cannot: a possibility of interacting with kids from other countries and cultures.
> truly open-ended possibilities for play unconstrained by the imagination of the video game creator
In theory, yes. In practice, you're heavily constrained by the number of pieces you own. The pieces themselves are constrained by their designer and manufacturer in terms of shape, size, and color. Compare this with gigabytes of RAM which can hold millions of virtual blocks and their properties.
1 - http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-4546-9_4... 2 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01933973949... 3 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00100277939... 4 - http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itf09cogdevfdcae.asp
I think the only real way to "fix" the issue is to set strict time limits out of the gate so that your children learn early on to mediate their time.
Yes, Minecraft is available for PC. But I would say that is the vast, vast, vast minority of how kids under the age of 16 consume it. I see it almost universally on tablets, phones, and consoles.
Unfortunately, playing a lot of Minecraft won't help you detect humongous logical fallacies like these. Whether it's addictive or not is orthogonal to the knock-on effects of that addiction. The article has more than a few of these woozy rationalisations, which is sad as there are some decent points in there.
There are benefits that can be obtained from playing games, video or otherwise. I, personally, have used pokemon to teach reading, story-telling, math, strategy, problem solving, and a myriad of other things to my oldest son. His brother isn't far behind him. We play minecraft, smash bros, mario kart; I even recently introduced him to portal 2. Some of what I let him do is for fun. Some is to gauge his interest in things. Other times I use the time to teach him something new. But the biggest factor of this strategy working is and will almost always be parental involvement.
Most of the backlash I see/hear/read about from other parents is due primarily to an unwillingness to get interested in what their children are interested in. They'll buy them the game and go enjoy some "peace and quiet" and never think twice about it. There's something to be said of a parent really taking an interest and learning about a new universe with their children. I'm far from perfect, but that's what I've been attempting, and it's working out pretty well so far.
There was a quote in an Orson Scott Card book, "The Lost Gate" where the main character speaks of his sort-of adopted mother/trainer/mentor where he mentions that "Love ... it's a term for the woman in my life who loves me enough to read the novels I'm reading just so she can try to figure out what they're teaching me."
TL;DR - Games aren't inherently good or bad. But it's up to the parent to actually do the parenting. They can't just throw a "good video game" in front of their children and expect them to magically grow into engineers or doctors.
As a kid I was often bored - playing outside with friends was the only interesting thing to do.
My kids have unlimited YouTube/App's/Minecraft to enjoy.
Some of my later interests came as a result of having to occupy myself, I don't see this process happening with them.