GEIS-新闻详情

My son wants to make video games his career. I’m trying not to hate this.

2021-10-12 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

I remember the moment clearly, in an electronics store, the plasticky, new-car smell of those places assaulting my nose.

“Please, just don’t become one of those gamers,” I thought, looking at the display of gaming chairs.

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They are sleek, with elaborate head and arm rests perfectly positioned for a mom to envision a pale, flabby, blue-hued version of her sweet son, wired into the digital world, friendless, unemployed and surrounded by pizza boxes and empty 2-liters of diet soda.

I was on Day 4 of a whirlwind tour of colleges with game design and esports programs. He not only became a gamer, he’s captain of his school’s gaming team and wants to create games for a living.

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Kids really know how to push our buttons, don’t they?

“Three billion people are gamers,” the dean at one of the New England colleges said in his presentation to a room full of confused, cross-armed parents.

“The average age of a gamer is 31,” he told us.

Okay.

“And it’s a $175 billion industry,” his next slide said, and the parents perked up and there was more than one teen with widening eyes mouthing, “Seeeeee.”

In fact, industry experts estimate that the video gaming industry is about to be bigger than North American professional sports ($75 billion) and the global film industry ($100 billion) combined.

Alriiiight. I get it.

I’ve been trying to make peace with video games for years now, and have told readers all about the first time my boys asked for a shooting game; the move to make e-sport athletes eligible for a varsity letter in all Virginia high schools; the Summer of Pale, when the nation’s children were lost to the wildly popular game called Fortnite; and my own terrifying addiction to Animal Crossing, which was like Fortnite for moms (and we all still shudder over the depths to which I — and the entire household — sank in those dark days).

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But in that journey, it never dawned on me that one of them would want to do this for a living. This is a hobby, not a career. Right?

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It was a gut punch to think all the times that I sent them to zoo camp or architecture classes or took them on hikes or to museums or to volunteer at soup kitchens didn’t translate into ambitions of being a veterinarian, an environmental scientist, an architect or social worker.

Nope, the child wants to make the very thing we fight about — constantly — his life’s work.

It felt like an alternate universe where Gloria Steinem’s daughter worked with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R).

“This is what makes me happy,” my son told me. “And I’m good at it.”

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I had suggested computer engineering and hard sciences programs while thinking: “Ya, I’d like the major in ice cream eating, but is it a real career?”

And how quickly I became that trope parent, cringing at the path my child is choosing. I wanted to be Nuwanda, urging him to carpe diem. But I became Tom Perry, the Dead Poets Society dad who excoriated his son for wasting his time on theater.

And so my education began. My Class of 2022 son and I looked up the top-ranked schools in game design and we created a road trip to hit them on the days their programs had open houses.

With college tours opening back up, we had the chance to talk to faculty and students, to get a better sense of what they do in those gaming chairs.

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“It’s about narrative, character development,” one professor said. “Making a compelling story.”

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Oh. Wait. This sounds familiar.

Others talked about the gamification of society and how game designers are using gaming concepts in business training, education, government and health care.

“A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at [or getting better at] and enjoy,” wrote the dynamic game designer Jane McGonigal in her book, “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.”

“In other words,” McGonigal wrote, “gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.”

In her juggernaut TED Talk, she points to the collaborative efforts in gaming, the optimizing of skills and teamwork and how all that can be applied to real-world solutions.

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And in between colleges, on our long drives, I see my son running his video game teams, motivating them to practice while he’s gone, organizing their scrimmages, suggesting strategies and plays to drill.

When we got to one school, he joined their video game chat and immediately got a response from a gamer he knows by his screen name, Flambee.

“Why did you join?” Flambee asked.

“Because I’m thinking of going to school here,” my son said.

“I go to school here!” Flambee said.

And they met up in his dorm room, shared a box of chicken nuggets and talked about the campus, in real life.

And I counted my good fortune: at least he doesn’t want to be a newspaper journalist.

Twitter: @petulad