game

INTRODUCTION

PLATO WOULD’VE BEEN A GAMER

I NEVER PLAY video games alone; I always sit on the sofa with my two boys, ten and twelve years old. We all thumb away at our gamepads together. Gaming is one way we bond—one way we engage in “family time.”

You would probably imagine that anyone who dedicates as much of his energy to thinking about digital play as I do would want to sneak in some time with adult games like Bioshock, Fallout, or The Last of Us once the kids head off to bed. But I don’t. Games do not actually interest me in and of themselves. I am concerned only with the ways in which they bring people together—families, friends, communities. I am interested in the cultural aspect of games—what it means to be a gamer, and how digital play influences the ways we think about the world.

Video game narratives are fascinating. In some ways, they are very much like interactive versions of the stories we enjoy on television or at the movies. They can be like theater, like novels, like tales told around a campfire. When you consider that almost every child in the United States plays video games, it is safe to say that they may even be the primary form of narrative for the twenty-first century. In other words, video games are the new bedtime stories, the new fairy tales, the new mythology, perhaps even the new scripture. They are the freshest form of written or recorded communication practices, which most scholars believe started around the twenty-seventh century BCE. That is when the earliest examples of literature appeared in ancient Mesopotamia. But long before that, way farther back than we could ever possibly imagine, stories were passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth.

Take a moment to consider just how mind-blowing the shift from oral to written storytelling must have been. It represented a complete change in the way ancient humans organized their communities, their societies, their civilizations. Those of us who lived through the transition to personal computers and smartphones think it was a big deal to see the world as we knew it completely

disrupted when social networking and email became commonplace. But that was nothing compared to what it must have been like to live through the beginning of written language. It may have been the greatest technological shift of all time. The written word enabled people to remember and store information. It made it possible to send a letter to a loved one in a faraway place. It empowered folks to share expertise without ever having to meet in person. It allowed generations of humans to distribute knowledge across time.

Thanks to the written word, I am moved to tears when I take my children to visit the Plaka neighborhood beneath the ancient Acropolis in Athens, Greece. We walk along the same narrow market streets that Socrates and Plato once roamed. These philosophers died two and a half millennia ago, yet they are still educating the young adults in my college classroom almost every day. All because their ideas are preserved in writing. The ingenuity of the ancient people who first imagined symbolic language systems is astounding. Long before the telephone, the internet, and video games, this was the trendy new technology that made it possible for people to collaborate and cooperate in ways that transcend both time and space.

Of course, written language—just like smartphones and tablets—had its critics in the beginning. Most famous among them may have been the great philosopher Socrates. He did not believe “anything certain or clear” could “come from what was written down.” He compared writing to painting—what the artist presents may look like the actual thing, but it is really just an illusion, presented from a single perspective. According to Socrates, painting fails to represent experience because it is static and fixed. There is no room to probe. There is no space for empathy. It is not interactive. “Similarly with written words,” Socrates said, referring to the elements of written language as if they were autonomous beings, “you may think they spoke as if they had some thought in their heads, but if you ever ask them about any of the things they say… they point to just one thing. The same each time.”

Thankfully, Socrates’s student Plato was a little more comfortable with technological change; he probably would have been a gamer. Plato recognized the importance of recording his teacher’s thoughts. And because he did— because he wrote down the dialogues of Socrates—I have the good fortune of being able to teach the philosopher’s ideas to undergraduate college students almost 2,500 years after they were spoken. Perhaps Plato understood that written language corresponded with a fundamental change in what it meant to live in the world as a human being. Perhaps he knew it would impact the ways we worked,

played, and accomplished everyday tasks. But was he right to ignore his teacher’s wishes and put Socrates’s words in

writing? Maybe not. One could argue that history ultimately corroborated Socrates’s concerns. As twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” In other words, for almost 2,500 years we have been scouring Plato’s texts, trying to guess what, exactly, Socrates’s words really meant. Nobody can ever be certain. Interpretation after interpretation is published; one PhD after another is granted. But Socrates’s thinking remains evasive. Why? Because we cannot ask the man himself what he was trying to say. We cannot interact with the writing. Alas, all we have are words that “point to just one thing. The same each time.”

Touché, Socrates. The great gadfly-philosopher may have been correct about the limitations of

writing, but he missed the benefits. Plus, his resistance was ultimately futile because the shift from oral to written storytelling was inevitable. Just like the printing press, the mechanical clock, the train, the telegraph, the radio, the camera, and many other transformative technologies: by the time the critics could articulate their objections, it was already too late. Society had changed in ways that necessitated new tools. That’s generally how these things work. Human thinking changes; then, we build tools that help us interact with the world in ways that resonate with our new ways of thinking.

Tools do not use us, we use them. We are in control. Still, we seem to have some primordial fear of our own creations. Robot

uprisings. Clone wars. Time travel gone awry. There’s nothing quite like a good sci-fi disaster movie expressing the fear that human ingenuity will eventually lead to the creation of tools that threaten our supremacy. It is a story as old as innovation itself. Frankenstein was The Terminator of the nineteenth century. Jewish mystics in sixteenth-century Prague told the story of The Golem, in which a clay man, brought to life, wreaks havoc on the community. The ancient Greeks had Daedalus and Icarus.

These stories all represent the same technophobia that currently surrounds video games and digital play. Journalist Mark Kurlansky calls it the “technological fallacy: the idea that technology changes society.” To those of us living through a huge technological shift, it feels like machines are taking over our lives, dictating new behaviors, altering the ways we communicate with one another. But Kurlansky says, “It is exactly the reverse. Society develops

technology to address the changes that are taking place within it… Technology is only a facilitator.”

What are the new technologies of the twenty-first century facilitating? For one thing, it is a shift in how we tell stories.

Digital interactive media allows for new methods of storytelling. And when you consider that the majority of our narrative content is really just recycled material—reoccurring narrative tropes, such as Frankensteinian technophobia— it becomes clear that the method we use for transmitting that material is even more significant than the content itself. Marshall McLuhan suggested as much in the 1960s. He famously wrote “the medium is the message” in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan was a scholar of communication theory who was interested in “the personal and social consequences” of a life lived with, and through, electronic media. He recognized that changes in communication technologies—written language, the printing press, the telegraph, the radio—always correspond with huge cultural shifts, not only in the way we think about our experiences in the world, but also in the way we organize our economic, social, and political structures.

It is from a broad cultural and historic perspective, like McLuhan’s, that I initially became interested in the question of digital play and the future of childhood. I was sitting on the sofa, playing New Super Mario Brothers with my sons, when it occurred to me that digital play will make their childhoods drastically different from mine. Their formative years will be lived with screens —portable game consoles, tablets, smartphones. They spend enormous amounts of time in front of these devices. Therefore, they will reach adulthood with an entirely unique set of seminal experiences. They will eventually take the world’s reins, thinking in ways that I cannot even comprehend. They will create a world that I can only barely envision.

So how do I prepare my children for a future I can’t imagine? How can I get them ready for a life lived through new technologies? What does it mean for every individual, family, school—in fact, for all of humanity—that entire generations of children are now being raised on video games, a new kind of bedtime story?

These are big questions, without easy answers. But they’re not new. Even when I was a kid, playing Q-Bert on my Atari 2600, almost every adult seemed to have an opinion about the way video games would impact children’s thinking. Mostly, they were worried. They were concerned that too much exposure would affect children’s fragile young psyches in negative ways. The grown-ups of the

1980s thought screens and games would rot kids’ brains and corrupt our moral fiber.

I am pretty sure that they were wrong. Screen time didn’t rot or corrupt anything. Still, the fear was understandable. It’s basic technophobia. Changing tools disrupt our habitual ways of being. New devices shepherd us toward an unfamiliar and therefore frightening future. There will always be people who see what’s new as a threat to the status quo. This is how ingenuity has always been greeted.

Consider Gutenberg’s printing press, which made it possible to distribute Martin Luther’s Bible, translated from ancient Greek/Hebrew into plain- language German. Looking back from our twenty-first-century perspective, we see the origins of modern media. We are grateful to Gutenberg for standardizing and democratizing the distribution of knowledge and information. We credit his invention as a critical pivot point in history, decentralizing power and leading to increased liberty and equality as well as the creation of modern democracy. But we completely overlook the negative consequences of print. We forget that the printed word led people toward a more private and isolated relationship with ideas. As cultural critic Mark C. Taylor explains, “Oral culture was of necessity more communal than print culture; with print and the advent of silent reading, people could wrap themselves in their own cocoons.” Folks living in the sixteenth century resisted the change. “Commenting on the solitude and isolation of the reading experience, some early critics of print sounded like today’s parents worried about their kids sitting alone in front of computer screens or mobile devices playing video games and texting with friends they rarely, if ever, see.” It’s almost funny how much twenty-first-century parents have in common with Gutenberg’s detractors.

Today’s grown-ups panic and fret about Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Discord, YouTube, or whatever digital platform-du-jour manages to capture preteen, tween, and teen imaginations. Almost every morning, when I open the news app on my smartphone, there is some fresh study, op-ed, or interview with an expert speculating on the impact of digital screen technology.

I have been that specialist. As a guest on hundreds of radio talk shows, I’ve listened to concerned parents, teachers, and caregivers call in and ask questions. Sounding exactly like the worried technophobes of centuries past, they are vexed about how digital play is defiling childhood, causing neurological damage, ruining eyesight, creating an obesity epidemic, triggering depression, and keeping our kids indoors. Are our kids losing the ability to reflect and be

introspective? Does the speed and ease of digital communication prevent them from learning how to be good conversationalists? Are they learning to just log off rather than constructively resolving everyday conflicts? Will emoticons and 280-character tweets corrode literacy? Will easy, ready-at-hand access to constant interactive stimulation hinder the next generation’s ability to cultivate critical thinking skills?

The simple answer to all these questions is no. These concerns are predictable and clichéd. But still, I understand why some grown-ups worry. The entire encyclopedia, the arcade, the movie theater, and the telephone have all been smooshed down and crammed into a handheld device that kids can carry around in their pockets, and adults feel helpless. They see that learning, playing, entertainment, and dating have all changed, and they blame the technology. But the truth is that there is no need for blame. Childhood is just reconfiguring itself and adapting to new contexts.

The only problem is that grown-ups don’t know how to make sense of it, and therefore don’t know how to guide their children.

They have found themselves at a crossroads—worse, a multidirectional, nonlinear intersection. There is no road map, little precedent, and the traffic patterns are unfamiliar. Busy, overburdened parents and teachers end up navigating in all the wrong directions.

I get it. As a parent, I am constantly nervous. I recognize that changes in technology represent even larger cultural, economic, and political changes. But deep down, I also know that my kids will be just fine. In fact, without any help from me, they are already unconsciously preparing themselves for a very different world. They come home from school in the afternoons and the first thing they do is grab their laptops. They adore these machines with the same sense of pride that I once felt for my dirt bike and my Nike Air Jordan sneakers. And who can blame them? Computers are doorways that open up into a magical, limitless, connected world. My boys plop themselves down on opposite sides of the kitchen table, laptops between them. They log on to multiplayer online games like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite. Then their afternoon adventures begin. Soon I overhear them planning the next few hours of their lives: “Do you want to do a role-play?” “Can’t we just play Hunger Games?” “Let’s call Dylan and Orion.” I hear familiar musical chimes as soon as Skype boots up. And in less than a minute, there are six or seven high-pitched preteen voices blasting through underpowered laptop speakers. My children are not outside goofing off with the neighbors’ children. They are not around the corner hitting a ball across

the local sandlot. Instead, they are with their closest friends, inside the bezels of their devices, playing on virtual playgrounds.

This shift away from skateboards and scooters toward keyboards and touchscreens provokes anxiety. But for my children’s sake, I need to set aside my own knee-jerk fear of change and disruption. I need to recognize that most of us parents, teachers, caregivers—even politicians—are thinking about it all wrong. Despite being perfectly aware that every generation can and should play in unique ways, grown-ups are easily seduced by the nostalgic fantasy of a childhood that mirrors the one we remember. From our kids, we had hoped to see our own youth reflected back. As evidence, just think about the ongoing success of Star Wars, Super Mario Brothers, and every one of the Disney princesses. Entertainment companies know that we want our children to adore the same things we once loved, so successful legacy brands like LEGO and Nintendo thrive by updating products to make them feel fresh enough for a new generation, without losing the nostalgic familiarity that will stir the emotions of the grown-ups who carry credit cards. Lucasfilm and Disney both profit enormously from licensed toys, clothing, and video games that appeal to every adult’s desire for a second chance—a desire to provide our children with the coveted objects and experiences that we missed out on.

But some gifts can be curses in disguise. As the great Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung once said, “The greatest

burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” He recognized one of the eternal truths of child-rearing: in every generation, grown-ups unconsciously pressure children to live a life that mimics their own past but rectifies any and all shortcomings. When you consider Jung’s statement, thinking about how many of our parenting practices are more about the grown-ups’ egos than they are about kids’ well-being, it is hardly surprising that we get so worked up about new digital technologies. Laptops, tablets, and video games seem to seduce our impressionable children with mediocre replacements for what we considered to be the true golden artifacts of youthful joy.

How could today’s kids prefer JeromeASF’s Minecraft YouTube videos to Ren & Stimpy’s animated adventures? How could they choose video games like Madden, NBA Live, and FIFA over bubble-gum trading cards or tabletop foosball?

Are you ready for the hard-to-swallow truth? The new toys are more engaging because they involve a different way of interacting with the world, a different way of thinking, a different way of living, learning, and loving. They

are preparing kids for a connected world. Believe me, I know that most grown-ups don’t want to accept it. We would

rather resist the new childhood, defending and protecting our precious memories. Embracing the childhood of the present can seem like a betrayal, as if we are turning our backs on the childhood of the past. If you are anything like me, you probably feel caught between an unconscious desire to safeguard your own imaginary inner tweenager (the memory of your own wounded prepubescent self) and a deep yearning to safely propel your real, present-day, flesh-and-blood offspring into the future. Moreover, you want to bond with your children, but the generational chasm between their interests and your own seems wider than ever.

This tension and confusion manifests as paranoia and fear about new media and technology.

It is an understandable and ordinary reaction. But if you let that anxiety consume you, soon you will hear yourself saying things you swore you would never say: “When are you going to grow up and stop staring at screens all day?” You will discover that you have become a lame killjoy, the old guard, a troll beneath the footbridge. Just like the grown-ups who always seemed to block your youthful ways, you will find you’ve taken up the antagonist’s role in the cyclical drama of youthful heroes battling ogre-kings.

Sons against fathers, daughters versus mothers, Jedi Knights slaying Sith Lords.

Just like Socrates, your words will end up bringing on the very thing you set out to prevent. You will become a limiting factor in your own children’s heroic lives.

Please don’t let that happen. I know parenting is hard. Especially when you don’t really understand the

game. There is no rule book describing what it is supposed to look like in the twenty-first century because digital play—like all the other transformative technological shifts that came before—is changing the very nature of child- rearing.

Parents, teachers, and caregivers all need to think critically and intentionally about how they can and should adjust their habits, expectations, and customs accordingly.

This book can help.

CHAPTER 3

THE NEW SANDBOX

TODAY’S GROWN-UPS WORRY that kids don’t play outside as much as they did in past generations. But their concern is not really about the well-being of young children. Instead, I suspect that they are unconsciously nervous about the well-being of cultural customs that have become well established and comfortable. Intuitively, adults understand that most ritualized child’s play was used throughout the twentieth century to cultivate kids into adult selves that fit snugly—like cogs—into the economic, social, and political machines.

Nowadays, the old children’s games are threatened by digital alternatives. In addition to the public parks and sandboxes that grew out of Froebel’s Kindergarten Movement, we have virtual playgrounds that exist only in an online world. That’s disconcerting to parents, teachers, and caregivers because they do not yet know how to make sense of the kind of play that happens here. Governments do not yet know how to regulate it. Consumer advocates do not yet know how to evaluate it. Neither religious nor secular cultural institutions can figure out how to interpret, direct, or control the meaning-making that happens in the digital sandbox.

Most of us do not even know what goes on inside the bezels of our own children’s digital devices.

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

A 2015 Pew survey asked grown-ups about video games. They found that a quarter of adults in the United States “think most video games are a waste of time.” But almost the same number “think most games are not a waste of time.” Another third “think some games are a waste of time while others are not.” And the remaining adults are “unsure what to think about this issue.” They all sound very confused. Asked if video games “help develop good problem solving and strategic thinking skills,” the results are even more mixed: “17% think this is

true of most games, while 16% think this is not true of most games.” The largest group (47%) “think this is true of some games but not others.” The rest (20%) are just not sure.

With so much confusion, it is hardly surprising that many people are paranoid about digital play. It leads noisy curmudgeons to scapegoat the game world. They see it as a site of unhealthy passive consumption. They describe it as if it were an immoral temptation. But digital sandboxes are playful, experiential, and creative; they feature all the ingredients that more than a century’s worth of educational research tells us make for quality learning. They provide the opportunities for identity exploration that are an essential part of developing a healthy sense of self.

Of course, the idea of a “healthy sense of self” is complicated. If identity is always, to some degree, a product of one’s historical and cultural context, then the notion of something being “healthy” is thorny. It means that standards of good health are partially the result of cultural bias. The standards represent our collective definitions of “normal” and therefore they often include inadvertent social and political agendas, inherently biased ideals that are tied to a particular set of technologies.

I hope that doesn’t sound like some sort of conspiracy theory; I really don’t mean it that way. Certainly, a lot of what we mean when we say “good health” has to do with objective measures of biological longevity and sustainability. But oftentimes, when we use the term “healthy,” we are actually concerned with whether or not our bodies are fit enough to function within the economic, social, and technological realities of the time and place in which we live.

Mental agility and focus are markers of good health during the postindustrial information age—an era in which the best jobs require long periods of intense engagement with the analytic data on a computer screen. But in agrarian times, when farming skills led to prosperity, physical strength and endurance would have been considered the pinnacle of good health. In the Spartan era of ancient Greece, where warriors held all the power, “health” was associated with traits that modern humans would consider socio- or psychopathic: wielding bronze weapons and engaging in merciless competitions to the death.

Take a moment to think about all those times you’ve wondered why we’ve suddenly seen so many instances of psychological and emotional disorders that were relatively rare in the past. It has nothing to do with the evils of modern technology; it is a result of these ever-changing notions of health.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for example, is probably

no more prevalent now than it was fifty years ago. And it is certainly not caused by too much screen time. In fact, most of the research suggests that ADHD leads to excessive screen use, not that excessive screen use leads to ADHD. The reason attention disorders seem to be more common is because they are diagnosed and identified more often. Why? Because of simple infrastructural changes that have happened over the past few decades. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), for example, public schools in the United States are now required to identify and evaluate students who may have disabilities. Also, some economists suggest that financial factors have played a part in the increase: an ADHD diagnosis can make a family eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits.

I suspect, however, that the most substantial reason ADHD seems more prevalent has to do with our changing definitions of the healthy self. We want more children and adults to be able to focus for longer periods of time. We recognize that things are changing and that the economic and social marketplace of the future will demand a different skill set. Tomorrow’s jobs require a different kind of worker. And therefore, our collective prosperity is dependent on our ability to prepare a generation of kids who feel happy, healthy, and fulfilled while working in new ways.

Could it be that in the same way sandboxes and kindergartens cultivated “health” in the twentieth century’s industrial era, digital sandboxes—in which our children already prefer to spend their time—will cultivate a different kind of “health,” one that’s better suited to the twenty-first century’s connected economy? I think so. And if that’s the case, then adults need to start seeing the digital world not as a scary space into which kids escape, but rather as a primary location in which children receive lessons in living together. Only then can we do the work of child-rearing in the most effective and responsible way possible. Only then can we have a thoughtful discussion about how digital play impacts our children. Only then will we start to notice the significant positive and negative ways that the virtual playground differs from the play spaces of the past.

The Tools of the Time

Consider the megahit video game Minecraft. It belongs to what is called the “sandbox” or “open world” game genre. In games like these, players can roam freely through a virtual world. There are plenty of other sandbox games besides

Minecraft. Fortnite belongs to this genre, as well as most of the LEGO and Zelda games. But few are as popular as Minecraft; as of January 2018, the game had sold more than 144 million copies.

Minecraft is an open-ended creative sandbox featuring virtual pickaxes. In it, players can dig, build, and explore. The game generates a world—made up of different elements and resources—as players move through it. The possibilities are literally infinite; it will just keep generating new virtual terrain for as long as players are willing to continue exploring. On popular servers like Mineplex, there can sometimes be more than twenty thousand players connected simultaneously.

In my house, almost every day after school, my kids call their friends on Skype and they play on Realms together. A Realm is a Minecraft world that is hosted on a web server. It is a semipublic virtual space in which a group of players can meet up, create, and play together. When I watch my kids and their friends interacting in these networked block Realms, I see the same sort of role- playing and make-believe that my friends and I engaged in when we were kids.

Growing up in Center City Philadelphia, I remember how back alleys and empty lots were transformed into battlegrounds, medieval castles, and secret spy lairs. In epic games of freeze tag, we used our neighbors’ steps as safe zones. Hiding behind Dumpsters, we experimented with both positive and negative behaviors. But most important, we all learned to cooperate creatively as we were forced to navigate social dynamics among headstrong friends. We designed rules, created customs, and organized worlds. We practiced and honed our self- regulation and executive function skills while we did whatever we could to maintain an atmosphere of fun among friends.

Nowadays, in a world where children are no longer permitted the freedom to wander along urban sidewalks the way I did, I think it is encouraging to see that they have used the tools of the times to expand the space in which they can practice their social interactions. Immersed in Minecraft’s block world and connected to their friends on Skype, my kids go on grand adventures. They build schoolhouses and courtrooms, dungeons, labyrinths, and pirate ships. Then they act out fantastic all-consuming scenarios in these networked virtual realities. They participate in everyday rites of passage similar to the ones dramatized in classic movies like Stand by Me and books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Their Minecraft sociodramatic play looks just like a digital version of mine.

Nevertheless, it’s frustrating that my kids often seem detached from the life world. I sometimes struggle to convince them to look up from their laptop

screens. They are wrapped in a cocoon of single-minded focus. They won’t stop gaming long enough to make eye contact with the people immediately around them. They don’t say hello when others walk into the physical room. They forget conversations we had just a few minutes ago, making me feel like I offered dinner to a couple of zombies. When the game is on, they seem completely isolated and disengaged from physical reality. And it makes me worry about whether I am effectively promoting a sense of etiquette and social decorum.

But I also recognize that they’d behave the same way no matter what was capturing their attention. Construction paper, toy cars, Dungeons and Dragons, and LEGO bricks can also tempt them to ignore me. Age-appropriate obsessiveness is not unique to the digital world. Moreover, we ought not equate being single-minded with being antisocial. My kids are focused, not isolated. In fact, most of the time, when they are staring at screens, they are connected to a community. They’re not ignoring everybody—just the grown-ups with whom they share physical space.

As a parent, I need to be patient and empathetic. Today’s kids are struggling to learn how to use social and emotional skills in two different worlds simultaneously. It can’t be easy. The physical world and the digital world are separate arenas with different rules, customs, and habits.

When you were a child, your parents probably spent a great deal of time teaching you subtle behaviors. You may not have noticed it, but each time they told you to stand up when an adult came into the room, to shake their hands and make eye contact, they were preparing you to navigate the social customs of the adult world. Likewise, they taught you appropriate manners for using the technologies of the time.

I remember when my brothers and I started to answer the phone. At first, we just said, “Hello.” But once we discovered how much fun “reverse prank calling” could be, things quickly got out of hand. Grandma would call and she’d be very confused when we answered the phone, “Shapiro’s Funeral Home and Bakery, a crematory for your dead and your bread. How can I help you?” Needless to say, my parents were embarrassed when important calls came in. They taught us to say, “Hello, Shapiro residence. Can I ask who’s calling?” We all learned an important lesson about proper ways to mediate social interactions through the networking technology of the time.

When I think about my own children, it’s clear that an enormous amount of their adult social interactions will be mediated through a specific set of

networked technologies. They will grow up and work in a world full of emails, text messages, video chats, and instant messages. How will they learn appropriate behaviors and skills for a life lived through digital tools? How will they become literate in the habits and customs of a digital world?

They will do so in precisely the same ways children always have: through play.

A Global Playdate

Minecraft provides my children with a digital sandbox in which they can cultivate appropriate behaviors that are tailored to a globally connected world. That’s clear. But let’s take a moment to consider what it means that G. Stanley Hall’s sand piles were local, while Minecraft is global. The significance of this distinction became clear to me while I was visiting classrooms in Northern Ireland. There, all of the schools use Minecraft as a teaching tool. They recognize that twenty-first-century education requires learning through digital play.

I visited classrooms in Derry/Londonderry where students were using Minecraft to re-create the country’s landmarks. The setting was almost too perfect. Driving from school to school across the emerald countryside, I noticed that the physical terrain of Ireland resembles the greenery of Minecraft’s block world. At the famous Giant’s Causeway, bizarrely perfect hexagonal rock formations sprawl out geometrically into the sea as if they were spawned by an algorithmic game engine.

In the classroom, students were discussing history, geography, and culture. I sat down beside a ten-year-old girl in a crisp blue school uniform and asked her what she was building in her Minecraft sandbox. She clearly articulated the goals of the assignment, described her objectives, and told me how she was meeting them. I was impressed.

“Do you also play Minecraft at home?” I asked. She smiled. “Yes. I do, all the time. More than my mum would like.” “On which servers?” “Hunger Games. Mineplex. Some others,” she answered without hesitation. Back in Philadelphia, if I were to ask my boys that question, they would

answer in the same way. Here I was, across the Atlantic Ocean, interacting with one of my children’s potential playmates. Of course, there is nothing particularly profound in realizing just how easily the internet allows us to connect with

people around the globe. But when you think of Minecraft as a limitless giant international sandbox, things get interesting.

In that physical sandbox near Boston, G. Stanley Hall discovered a community of boys who were, in effect, practicing local civics. They were applying and experimenting with the sorts of cognitive, social, and emotional skills that we teach in schools. They were cultivating perfectly configured identities, a sense of self necessary to succeed in the industrial economy of the twentieth century. What’s more, they were using academic content and hands-on skills to practice how to be meaningful contributors to a local democratic society. I suspect that those children eventually grew up to live in a community that was just as regional as the sand pile. Today’s kids, alternatively, are growing up in a world that demands they participate in a global economy mediated through microchips and fiber-optic cable. Our twenty-first-century children’s civic responsibility, their ability to contribute, and their capacity to collaborate and regulate their behavior and emotions among a diverse group of people requires the kind of learning that can happen only in a globally networked digital sandbox like Minecraft.

The only problem right now is that because grown-ups are so afraid of an unfamiliar future, our children are playing without responsible mentorship. They are playing without guidance, without coaching. They are figuring out how to navigate a new world on their own. Generations of recorded best practices around living and thriving—human wisdom transmitted from one era to the next through oral, written, and now video game storytelling—is being ignored. Meanwhile, children are internalizing their parents’ misplaced guilt around screen time and they will eventually recognize it for what it actually is: an entire generation’s disdain for a future they don’t understand.

Our resistance to digital play is just like Socrates’s resistance to writing. It is futile. Your kids need your help. And it’s easy to provide. Parents, children, and families just need to start playing in the digital world together.

Takeaways

Everyone needs a sense of self, and kids develop it through social play.

The way kids learn to think about what it means to be a person is about a lot more than just biology. It depends on culture. Social settings provide context, defining the possible ways that one can conceive of the self.

To participate and thrive in any particular era requires having a sense of self that’s aligned with the current economic and technological trends. For example, if you can’t imagine yourself as an entrepreneur, you can’t be one—and if you had been raised in a feudal economy, you’d never even consider the possibility of founding a start-up. Likewise, for anyone raised during the industrial era, it would be almost impossible to imagine working as a Vestal Virgin, always tending to the everlasting flame in the ancient Roman temple. This means that a “healthy” sense of self is not absolute or objective; it’s a product of one’s historical and cultural context. It always represents our collective definitions of “normal” and includes biases that often are tied to a certain tool set. Good health is just like a good technology: the definition never stays the same; it changes over time.

Children need to develop a sense of self appropriate for the present era. And they’ll do this through games, routines, and customs that mimic and reinforce the conventions of the society in which they live. Unfortunately, grown-ups often get in the way because they’re seduced by nostalgia. They try to push their own childhood experiences onto their kids. Of course, we all have fond memories of the quintessential moments that shaped our lives—camp, school dances, Little League games, science fairs, ballet recitals, first dates—and our kids will have similar occasions. But their transformative memories won’t necessarily happen under the same circumstances (unless parents pressure kids to make meaning in exactly the same ways they do).

So, grown-ups should be more open-minded to new and diverse kinds of play. It’s important to let kids discover their own experiences, so they learn to situate a sense of self within the social and cultural era in which they live.

Embrace the toys of the time.

Sandboxes helped cultivate healthy child development during the twentieth century’s industrial era. Digital sandboxes will cultivate a different kind of healthy child development, one that’s better suited to a connected world.

Each time a group of kids logs on to a game server, they’re engaged in the same sort of role-playing that their parents remember. It may start in the sandbox, but eventually it transitions to more complex settings like parks, playgrounds, diners, and dance halls.

Likewise, the way kids play make-believe changes in accordance with the large social and cultural shifts happening around them. That’s why coming-of-

age stories are always a product of the times, shifting to reflect the new narratives that kids use to make sense of their lives. You can see this clearly in literature. For example, in Little Women, Jo March is an outspoken tomboy navigating the rigid gender expectations of nineteenth-century New England. A couple of decades later, Tom Sawyer took Huck Finn to search for stolen gold in McDougal’s Cave. In 1951, Holden Caulfield gets fed up with the “phonies” at the Pencey Preparatory School and takes the train to New York City. By the end of the twentieth century, Stand by Me tells the story of Gordie Lachance and his friends wandering alone through suburban outskirts to find a dead body. These stories all follow a similar psychological and narrative structure, but the contexts are very different. Why? Because coming-of-age stories are about the way that children grow into adult members of society—the way kids integrate context into a sense of self.

Therefore, I suspect that today’s kids will find their stories of transformation in video games. It’s through digital play that they’ll make the transition into a connected adult world. Don’t think of your kids’ gaming habit as an escape, but rather as a site for the healthy exploration of self and other.

Being single-minded is not the same as being antisocial.

Today’s kids are usually focused, not isolated. They’re almost always connected to a community, a play group that’s immersed in sociodramatic play together. They act out fantastic all-consuming scenarios in networked virtual playgrounds. They participate in everyday rites of passage.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this digital play. When they’re online, your kids are actively—albeit unconsciously—preparing themselves for an adult life full of emails, text messages, video chats, and Slack discussions. Therefore, they need safe opportunities to experiment with these types of interactions. How else will they learn the appropriate behaviors, habits, and customs? Every online game represents a chance to try out new ways of being with digital tools. That’s a good thing, because the future is already here. We’re all living in a connected world. And today’s kids will need to be prepared to participate in a global economy that mediates transactions and communications through microchips and fiber-optic cable.

Cultivating our children’s ability to contribute to society, and developing their capacity to collaborate with a diverse group of people, requires the kind of learning that can only happen in a globally networked digital sandbox. It’s

actually a matter of civic responsibility. Parents need to let their kids play online.

CHAPTER 4

THE NEW FAMILY

I COOK FOR my children every evening, then I call them to the table. “Dinner’s ready!”

They don’t move. They just keep staring at the Xbox, the iPad, or their laptop. I’ve tried everything: screaming, counting to ten, threatening with ultimatums. Nothing changes.

I understand why; I can even empathize. Video games feel like a job to kids. They are preoccupied with mastering the skills involved, focused on leveling up. They are experimenting, exploring, iterating strategies. Just like adults who become absorbed in their own work, my boys don’t want to stop right when they’re on the brink of achieving their goals. Would you want to be interrupted in the middle of a task after investing hours of your time? I wouldn’t.

The problem is that when I’ve been cooking, I don’t care what is going on in my kids’ minds. The temperamental chef in me operates on a purely emotional level. I have been working hard in the kitchen and I want them to appreciate the meal while it is still hot. Plus, I feel a lot of pressure. Television sitcoms and parenting books have made it unequivocally clear that perfect families always have perfect dinners.

“Come on. Don’t make me repeat myself!” I call them again. “Dad! Just let me finish this life. Please.” “What?” I am shocked that my son thinks this is a reasonable response. “I’ll stop as soon as I die.” “But isn’t the goal of the game not to die?” I ask. “You’re basically saying

you want to take as long as you possibly can.” He doesn’t respond. I don’t even know if he hears me. He bangs the space bar a few times, then shrugs.

“You distracted me. Thanks a lot.” Slamming down his laptop screen, he mopes toward the dining room table.

Soon his brother also takes a seat. This is how our routine begins; this is the pattern. Like so many folks around the world, we almost always eat family

dinner together. It is a tradition I inherited from my mother, and one she likely inherited from hers.

In a way, the family dinner is sort of like a video game, especially if you understand video games the way I have been describing them: as instances of procedural rhetoric through which we become literate in cultural attitudes and values, forming a sense of self. Dinner may not always be playful, but combine prescribed behaviors and actions with rules and limitations—do it within a designated space—and you’ve got the recipe for a gamelike ritual.

My family’s dinnertime ritual has lots of rules. They are not especially strict. We don’t say grace. We don’t dress up in our best clothes. But there are clear physical limitations nonetheless. I regularly remind my kids to sit up straight, plant their bottoms on the seat, keep their elbows off the table, and chew with their mouths closed. There are also intellectual expectations. Every day it’s the same routine. I ask, “How was school?”

They both shrug. “Fine.” They push the food around on their plates or shovel it mindlessly into their

mouths. It takes a while before I can get them talking. But after ten minutes or so, we connect the ideas they are learning to the games they play and the movies they watch. The other night, my older son compared his social studies lesson about Nazi Germany and fascism to The Hunger Games and the Wolfenstein video game franchise. I immediately launched into a mini-lecture about Orwell’s 1984, the Trials of Socrates, and a brief history of dystopian literature: “Utopia means ‘no place,’ it comes from Thomas More…”

I am sure they will forget most of what I said. Both boys rolled their eyes and barely listened. That’s okay. The important thing is that we went through the motions. I modeled a habit of drawing intellectual connections. We practiced polite dinner table conversation. After a while, it all eroded into pretend shooting anyway. Index fingers were pointed across the table. Spit flew from my sons’ lips as they made explosion sounds. BANG! PICHOO! POW!

I put a stop to that immediately. Some types of play are not acceptable at my dining room table.

#DeviceFreeDinner

During the 2016 Summer Olympics, NBC aired a public service announcement promoting #DeviceFreeDinner. The TV spot featured athletes using smartphones and tablets during key moments of competition. A gymnast answers the phone in

the middle of his ring routine. A soccer player reads text messages when he should be blocking an opponent’s free kick. A swimmer is distracted by a video on her tablet during the starting moments of the 50-meter backstroke.

Cue the sound of a woman’s voice. She is cheerful, articulate, and well- spoken. Presumably, she is meant to signify the perfect middle-class mother.

“There are some places where devices just don’t belong,” she says. Apparently, the family dinner is chief among them. The commercial was produced by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit

organization that has been helping grown-ups navigate issues related to digital media since 2003. In their mission statement, they describe a commitment to empowering “parents, teachers, and policymakers by providing unbiased information, trusted advice, and innovative tools to help them harness the power of media and technology as a positive force in all kids’ lives.” Founded and led by Jim Steyer—a civil rights lawyer, children’s advocate, and Stanford University professor—the organization has funded and published an impressive amount of research on how digital technology impacts kids and families. I rely on many of their studies to support the ideas in this book.

In 2016, they polled U.S. families with children between the ages of two and seventeen for a report entitled The Common Sense Census: Plugged-in Parents of Teens and Tweens. In that survey, almost half (47 percent) of parents said, “they or a family member used a mobile device at dinner in the last week.” Just over a third reported leaving the television on during meals. Thirty-five percent said that “mobile devices at dinner caused an argument.”

Findings like these are meant to shock you. They were released to support the #DeviceFreeDinner campaign. The statistics communicate a narrative that warns us that the traditional family dinner is under attack. The villain in this story is digital devices. They encroach on sacred space. Their touchscreens are blasphemous. Their interactive games are an affront on the well-ordered bliss of a perfect meal, and therefore, the perfect family. Common Sense Media wants grown-ups to “commit to putting devices away” and make the “healthy” choice instead.

The irony is that the perfect dinner they are trying to protect—in which kin come together at the end of a hard day at work or at school, carve a golden- brown bird, and pass green peas and creamy mashed potatoes—went mainstream just as mass media was laying its earliest foundations. Dinner’s origins are linked to the origins of the devices themselves. Established in the early 1800s, dinner came into fashion along with factories and office buildings. It rode into

rural life with the steam engine, plowing right through old agrarian customs. The meal became a part of everyday life because it ritualized a sense of stability in a world of rapidly accelerating travel and ubiquitous telecommunication. Just like Froebel’s kindergarten, it introduced and reinforced conventions for a new model of childhood, a new model of parenthood, a new model of family, and a sandbox sense of self.

Nowadays, dinner feels like the cornerstone of family values and an iconic part of a healthy childhood experience. But the notion that perfect families have perfect dinners was, from the very beginning, more about Industrial Age social conditioning than it was about health.

There was a time, not too long ago, when humans didn’t eat dinner at all. “The poor ate whatever and whenever they could,” writes historian John Gillis. “Even the middle classes, which could afford an adequate diet, had no notion of the ‘meal’ as we have come to know it. Meals arrived in the early 1800s, dividing the day into clearly defined sections. It was the dawn of the Victorian era, and for the first time, people stuck to a schedule—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each was to be eaten at a specific time, and anything out of order was considered sinful.

Today, in the twenty-first century, almost all the parents I know constantly make sure their children have enough to eat, even between meals. On school days, I pack extra snacks in my kids’ lunch boxes—dried fruit, cheese crackers, or peanut butter pretzels. On moderately long drives, I take along granola bars, grapes, and juice boxes. One of the only times my kids ever stop playing video games of their own volition is when they want a snack. But my family would look dysfunctional to parents from the Victorian era. In their time, snacking was considered a sign of weakness. It demonstrated a lack of restraint and a propensity for overindulgence. Those were bad personality traits. Morality was associated with order and moderation; things weren’t to cross categorical boundaries. Good people resisted and repressed all their urges. And well- behaved children always ate on schedule and never spoiled their appetites. They never gave in to temptation.

At the time, doctors, scientists, specialists, and experts were just beginning to get involved in the business of child-rearing. Psychoanalysts and pediatricians reframed morality and obedience as “health.” According to historian Abigail Carroll, they insisted that “failure, by snacking, to ‘observe all family regulations’ revealed a character weakness that might, if not corrected, translate to a future social liability of a more serious nature.” Today, we may be relaxed

when it comes to snacking, but sanctimonious remnants of that Victorian commitment to dinnertime morality are still everywhere you look—especially when it comes to digital devices.

Today’s parents are nervous because their children find devices as irresistible as chocolate cake. Like the Victorians who worried about overindulgence, twenty-first-century grown-ups fret about the instant gratification kids experience while playing video games. Does the on-demand pleasure of YouTube or Netflix prevent kids from developing the restraint necessary to deal with boredom? Will kids come to always expect the constant stimulation that video games can provide?

Parents have hundreds of questions. They fear the internet will spoil their children, leaving them ill-prepared for an adult life that demands moderation, prudence, and temperance. They frame it as an issue of biological health, using words like “addiction.” They tell me stories about trying to get their kids to come to the dinner table. They complain that smartphones and tablets are keeping an entire generation of children from experiencing real human connection. And unfortunately, it is easy for them to find research that purports to validate their fears.

Sherry Turkle, for example, is an MIT professor who wrote a best-selling book called Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. She studied what happens when people have smartphones beside them during a meal. She found that it “changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel.” I’m sure that’s true—it is obvious, even. The smartphone exists so that it can transform the way we engage with the world around us. That is the purpose of all technology. That’s what tools do.

Turkle, however, sees the new tools as evil temptations. In her mind, their mere presence is an affront to the accepted social order. Along with many like- minded grown-ups, she seems to forget that change, by itself, is neither good nor bad; but it is inevitable. Worried that we’re moving away from well-established communication habits, she writes, “Even a silent phone disconnects us.” She seems completely unaware that what we currently consider to be a healthy form of positive interpersonal dinnertime connection is just a longstanding fad that did not come into fashion until a few hundred years ago.

It was the mid-1800s when family members began to face one another during mealtime. Before then, they ate side by side, quickly and quietly. “Food was fuel,” according to Abigail Carroll, “socializing was secondary—if it happened at all.” Dinnertime conversation did not become “a standard expectation and

eventually a carefully cultivated and highly prized art” until the nineteenth century. Our current way of talking may feel like it is just the way things are, but the truth is that habits of communication are always changing. Think about Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English, and how it can be difficult to understand. Even dialogue from early-twentieth-century movies can feel unfamiliar. That is because the ways we talk to one another are connected to current cultural values, attitudes, technologies, and social norms. Interpersonal communication is always tied up with etiquette, customs, and habits that shift and transform over time.

It is a fear of change that lies at the heart of Turkle’s work and Steyer’s #DeviceFreeDinner campaign. They both want to keep things the way they are now—maybe they even want to go back to the good old days; they want to make dinner great again.

Certainly, there is strong scientific evidence that the family dinner, and the conversations that happen at the table, have a positive impact on child development. It has been linked to a lifetime of healthier eating habits, better grades in school, fewer behavioral issues, and a lower risk of substance abuse. I cannot dispute the accuracy of these claims. But could it be that modern scientists have only empirically proven what the Victorian moralists already knew? Dinner is great for teaching children how to fit into society. It shows them how to be civil and polite. In a ritualized way, it exposes them to common vocabulary and teaches them current conventions around conversation and communication. It builds lifelong habits, such as eating three meals a day, that grown-ups still associate with healthy adjustment.

We talk about “well-adjusted” children all the time. It is a concept that became popular after G. Stanley Hall (yes, the sandbox guy) wrote a two-volume book on adolescence in 1904. But “adjustment” is just a fancy way for psychologists and medical practitioners to discuss whether children abide by current social conventions. Adjustment is all about conforming to established patterns, structures, and expectations. Yes, dinner gives kids a chance to practice following the rules. But which rules? The dinnertime rules with which we are so familiar—the forms of interpersonal communication to which Sherry Turkle and the #DeviceFreeDinner campaign are so strongly committed—were designed at a precise moment in history. They exist to help children become well-adjusted to living within a specific economic, technological, and social paradigm.

That paradigm has already changed. So, shouldn’t our customs change along with it? I think so. But before we can figure out exactly how they should change, we need to understand how the perfect family dinner came to be.

The Home/Work Split

It was the beginning of the Industrial Age, and middle-class men—specifically those who were living in parts of the world that rapidly embraced factory manufacturing, the office building, and new kinds of work—suddenly spent most of their day away from the places where they slept. Businesses moved to cities, where telegraph lines could easily transmit data to and from faraway places. The farms on which every member of the household worked to maintain economic viability were vanishing, and the residential communities that would eventually become “the suburbs” began to pop up in their stead. People redefined men’s and women’s roles in ways that responded to the current technologies and customs. A new distinction between “home” and “work” took hold.

For the first time ever, work was considered a place: the location to which men commuted by train to earn a living. The term “commute” literally refers to the discounted railroad fares men were charged when traveling between cities and suburbs in the 1840s. Commuting is a concept that did not exist before the locomotive appeared. Likewise, the Oxford English Dictionary reports that the first written example of the word “work” as used to describe “one’s employer or place of employment” did not appear until 1966! Certainly, before that, it was normal to name early industrial factories “works.” Think of London’s famous Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company. But it was not until the train and the telegraph jump-started a commuter economy that people started “going to work.” Work life and home life became separate realms.

It was also around the mid-nineteenth century when the family dinner ritual became popular. Why? Because it emphasized Industrial Age divisions, such as the split between home and work. Dinner happened at home. And home was no longer the primary location in which all of life was lived by all members of the household—as it had been in the age of the family dairy, neighborhood blacksmith, or local tailor. Home was a specific place now managed by Mom. Home became women’s territory: the bosom to which men returned after a hard day of earning wages, the nest to which children returned after studying in school. As such, it took on new significance. Home became a sanctuary in which families were protected from the machinery, efficiency, profit, and immorality of the industrial world.

Historian Stephanie Coontz explains, “Emotion and compassion could be disregarded in the political and economic realms” precisely because these traits

were celebrated and ritualized in the home. The separation worked because “the cult of the Self-Made Man required the cult of the True Woman.” The True Woman, or the perfect mother, was representative not only of a place called “home,” but also of a whole slew of nurturing, caring behaviors that had been intentionally excluded from urban factories and industrial office buildings.

In the same way that experts and specialists defined Victorian expectations around children’s behavior as “healthy,” Industrial Age gender roles were now considered to be “natural” and “biological.” All the sentimental, emotional, and empathetic qualities that make home comfortable, safe, and nurturing became associated with the women who managed the households. And the family dinner was established as a nightly celebration of this new perspective on gender and industry. Like all rituals, the meal served to remind people—every night— exactly what they believed in. Families became literate in the procedural rhetoric of the home/work split.

Dinner has functioned in this way ever since, and people still do not take it lightly. A 2017 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report included the family dinner among their measures of children’s well-being. They said that eating dinner as a family can improve students’ academic achievement, boosting test scores by “at least 12 score points in science.” Relatedly, a 2013 Gallup poll found that the majority of U.S. families with young children (53 percent) report eating dinner together an average of 5.1 times per week. But historian John Gillis says that every time researchers actually observe families, the results tend to be strikingly different. Only a third eat together every night. Which, he explains, means that “As in so many things having to do with family, people tend to report more togetherness than is actually the case.” Why? Probably because they feel pressure, shame, and guilt. Most likely, they have seen the sitcoms I’ve watched and read the magazine articles I’ve seen. They are familiar with the idea that perfect families eat perfect dinners together. And they feel anxious to conform. Even in private, they need to demonstrate to themselves that their children are well-adjusted. They want to perform the nightly ritual correctly because, according to a 2010 Pew Survey, 76 percent of adults in the United States say that family “is the single most important element in their lives.”

That statistic shouldn’t surprise anyone. We are living during an era in which the nuclear family is very important and our commitment to spouses, children, and siblings is considered a moral imperative. But that wasn’t always the case. Before home and work split, it would have been shameful for family to play

such a primary role in people’s lives. Our current dedication to family would have seemed bizarre to our ancestors. Why? Two reasons. Historically, child mortality has been the norm rather than the exception, so it would have been foolish to get attached to offspring who were likely to die. Also, traditional religious doctrine instructs people not to put much stock in ties to biological kin. Just think of Genesis: God literally asks Abraham to demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham is expected to prove his commitment to the divine. In the early days of the Judeo-Christian West, God was considered the only legitimate father, and heaven the only real home. Contrary to popular belief, the earthly family, as we imagine it, has very little to do with traditional religious values. Instead, it owes its existence to the modern rise of secularism, technological innovation, gender divisions, the suburbs, and the split between home and work.

Likewise, most of the familiar activities we do with our kids are only a few centuries old. Like the sandbox and kindergarten, they exist to reinforce the individualistic sense of self that powered the Industrial Age. The family traditions that we take for granted exist to cultivate children into well-adjusted adults who can easily participate in a specific kind of society. These customs are neither sacred nor essential to the human experience. It’s all just fashion; and fashion changes with the times.

Times have already changed. But my family still eats dinner together every night. Like a Victorian patriarch, I demand that my kids put down their devices and come to the table quickly. I expect them to behave respectfully while they are eating. However, I also acknowledge that in a rapidly changing world, the etiquette of the family dinner might not serve the same purpose that it once did. It may need to be transformed, supplemented, or replaced with new traditions that are better suited to the cultural and technological shifts that are now well under way.

The dominant labor, economic, and gender paradigms are all in transition, yet most of our everyday family rituals—which were established to reinforce the worldview of a bygone technological era—remain the same. Ultimately, it is unrealistic to expect one realm of our lives to change without completely disrupting the others. Home life must catch up with work life. Twenty-first- century grown-ups need new ways to interact with our kids. We need to establish opportunities to model positive behaviors for living an always-connected life. We need to create rituals—other than dinner—that inherently promote good values for a constantly networked world. We need to reimagine our family lives

with intention. And we need to do it at a magnitude that mirrors the size of the shifts that have already irrevocably changed the rest of our lives.

In my home, dinner remains device-free. But it is not the center of our family life. We all spend much more of our time in front of screens, sometimes with game controllers in hand.

Family Screen Time

On afternoons when I have custody of my boys, the three of us sit near one another in the living room. They focus on their laptops—gaming, watching YouTube videos, writing stories. I sit at my desk, in front of my computer, answering email and tying up the day’s loose ends.

If the sanctimommies walked in, they would cringe. They would see three individuals sucked into three different screens. They would complain about what appears to be a lack of interpersonal communication. Why aren’t we playing together? Why do we seem so disconnected? Why are we all focused on our individual devices?

Ours may not look like the kind of family time to which most of us are accustomed. But it does resemble something that experts call “parallel play.” The term comes from a 1929 study by sociologist Mildred Parten Newhall. “Parallel play” refers to an early stage of child development during which toddlers play independently, right alongside their peers. Walk into any preschool and you will see it. Two-to-five-year-olds sit together at tables or on the floor. They engage in the same activities but pay very little attention to one another. Whether finger painting, digging in the sandbox, or building with LEGO bricks, it seems as if they have no interest in friends.

In fact, for almost half a century, psychologists watched parallel play and saw it as evidence that toddlers lacked the capacity to have real social experiences. They theorized that young children saw one another as objects rather than people —that kids had encounters rather than interactions. But these experts may have been biased. They wanted to see kids play in a way that resembled the polite face-to-face exchanges that the Victorians had perfected for the dinner table. They understood that the patterns of play—cemented in childhood—eventually become skills and behaviors for the grown-up world. So, they framed their ideas about child development to mirror the common narrative of cultural progress. They described “healthy adjustment” so that it moves in the same direction as polite dinner table etiquette: from “primitive” side-by-side to “civilized” face-to-

face. It wasn’t until the end of the twentieth century that scientists realized what

any preschool teacher already knew: try to separate the kids and you invite temper tantrums. Parallel play is not as sequestered as it looks. Babies as young as two months are already intensely focused on their peers. Even when immersed in parallel play, they are interacting with one another through imitation and other subtle means of communication.

Likewise, in the afternoon, my kids and I may be focused on separate digital tasks—we look disconnected—but we are very much together. Like an old married couple reading the paper over Sunday morning coffee, we call out interesting tidbits to one another. Notifications ding from our devices as we instant-message web links, sharing the memes that make us laugh. We tell stories and boast about our online accomplishments. We’re not abiding by the etiquette and customs of the dinner table, the Victorian parlor, or even afternoon teatime. But nevertheless, we’re communicating and interacting. I’m modeling behaviors, introducing vocabulary, and thereby encouraging them to think about the world in which they live.

Sometimes, after a while, my older son moves into his bedroom. He wants to be alone at his desk. Without fail, the younger one always ends up there, too. He curls up on the corner of his older brother’s bed and focuses on something separately. They both swipe away at their respective screens. It is a peaceful sight—true affection among siblings. Both boys prefer to be in each other’s company even if they are not directly interacting. They choose parallel play because they know that coordinated fun is often fragile. In Jack Shonkoff’s words, “A brief distraction, someone bumbling into your play area, a few miscues, and the pattern is broken.” He is describing toddlers, but all parents know that, among siblings, play is tenuous at any age. It can last only for a limited amount of time before dissolving into chaos. Debates, arguments, and sometimes even physical brawls happen because keeping playtime stable is hard work. It requires awareness and focus.

Cooperative play certainly looks more like face-to-face communication— which is why we tend to privilege it—but it is hard work for kids. It involves complicated emotional multitasking. It tests a person’s ability to concentrate on the game at hand while simultaneously managing interpersonal relationships. To play with his brother, my son must read social cues and practice empathy. Sometimes, to keep the peace, he is even forced to sacrifice his own playful desires. He also needs to stay fixated on following the rules of the game. It’s not

easy. Video games, board games, and action figures can all lead to conflict. And that’s okay, because when cooperative play collapses, kids are still learning. In fact, they are honing essential self-regulation and executive function skills that they will continue to use in their adult lives. Likewise, mastering the ability to shift between solitary, parallel, and coordinated play is an underappreciated competency that directly translates to the workplace.

Grown-ups, in any job, need to know how to be productive when alone, how to accomplish their work while sitting parallel to someone else, and how to deal with a team on a project that demands cooperation. Mature grown-ups assess every situation and then identify the appropriate type of interaction. Whether kids play on screens or with physical toys, they’re gaining opportunities to practice these skills. And as telecommuting becomes more common, as massive co-working spaces replace offices and cubicles, and as cooperative work is increasingly done on networks rather than at conference tables, the ability to shift between styles of interaction becomes more important.

My kids and I practice these transitions every day. We have learned, through trial and error, that we each need some alone time at the end of the day. Solitary play is the way we ease into being at home together. And parallel play is how we adjust to one another’s company. It is our strategy for managing the stress of shifting from one part of the day to the next. But after an hour or so, I usually decide that family time should also include some direct coordinated play. I power up the Xbox or the Nintendo. That grabs my kids’ attention. They close their devices and join me almost immediately. I don’t even need to ask. They start hooting and hollering. “Dad, go over there! Get that guy! Jump! Now!”

We first started gaming together when my wife and I separated. The boys were four and six years old, and they used the Nintendo Wii as a kind of security blanket. It provided a sense of stability in their newly chaotic and confusing lives. Games aren’t like divorce; they have consistent rules. They are made up of dependable systems. They are predictable and steady.

At the time, I hadn’t played a video game in twenty years. I knew very little about them; and what I knew, I didn’t like. I thought games were a time-suck, something that less productive people did in the evenings when they could be reading or writing, something for lonely slackers and lazy people. But I wanted to spend time with my boys. I wanted to help them through this difficult patch in their lives, and they wanted to play video games. If I’d told them to stop, put down the controller, come outside to hike through the woods with me, they

would have perceived it as punishment. Instead, I plopped down on the sofa next to them and before I knew it, we

were all spending hours each day playing New Super Mario Brothers together. Whenever I picked them up from their mother’s house, they would immediately start screaming from the back seat of the car, “Can we play Mario when we get to your house?” We argued over who gets the best magic mushroom. We high- fived when we leveled-up. We laughed. We hugged. It was a great bonding experience.

However, I knew that just because my kids enjoyed it didn’t necessarily mean it was good for them. They would also be happy if I gave them gummy bears for breakfast and let them stay up all night watching zombie movies. My conscience nagged at me. I wondered if I had become the stereotypical overly permissive bachelor-dad. To ease my anxiety, I picked up some books about video games, about cognitive development, about play theory. I learned that my kids were, indeed, escaping into the game world. But that was not necessarily a bad thing, especially if I was playing with them.

I learned that when I got involved, it showed my kids that I took their imaginative play seriously. It subtly sent the message that I acknowledged the strategies they were using to cope. It told them that I appreciated the things that mattered most to them. And it offered a fun and safe space in which I could help them cultivate sophisticated social and emotional skills.

When we played together, I took on the role of father, mentor, teammate, and therapist. I asked, “What emotions go with jumping high enough onto the flagpole that you get a free life?” “How do you feel when you lose?” “Don’t you think it’s interesting that you get better at winning by losing over and over again?” I pointed out how difficult some adversaries seemed to be. I observed how crazy the game’s graphics were. Together, we guessed what future levels would look like. Then, after we put down our controllers, we headed to the dinner table. There, the game world provided the analogies I used to ask them about difficult situations. “How would you describe the game world solution to a playground fight? To a hard math problem? To a conflict with a classmate? To feeling alienated from your friends?” This line of questioning gave them the benefit of a bird’s-eye view. The comparisons made it easier for them to experience the emotional roller coaster of their school-day social interactions separate and compartmentalized from the melancholy pall that my divorce had cast over their lives. It gave them the distance they needed to find a new perspective on their life-world problems. Most important, it helped them

reimagine everyday scenarios in ways that felt empowering. It put the metaphorical game controller in their hands.

Unbeknown to them, I was conducting a simplified version of play therapy.

Digital Play Therapy

The famous psychoanalyst Melanie Klein was one of the first advocates of play therapy. She derived her theories about kids from discoveries Sigmund Freud made while working with adults’ dreams. Klein observed that, during play, children act out the unconscious narrative dramas that shape their everyday lives.

When your children are on the floor making cars, dolls, action figures, and trains talk to one another, they are performing scenarios that could correlate to deep anxieties and intense desires. If you pay close attention, there is a lot you can learn from listening. That is why Klein and her followers practiced something that would eventually come to be called nondirective psychodynamic therapy. It is nondirective in the sense that the doctor doesn’t tell the client how or what to explore; the client just plays. It is psychodynamic in the sense that it helps a client familiarize herself with the way feelings, thoughts, and emotions move through her mind. Today, when you walk into most child psychologists’ offices, you’ll still see a menagerie of figurines somewhere in the room. They are used to facilitate nondirective psychodynamic play therapy.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed a similar practice called active imagination. Jung asked individuals (both children and adults) to engage with the images, characters, and stories that inhabit the unconscious. It is only by taking seriously what is ordinarily dismissed as superficial fantasy that one can become “individuated.” That is Jung’s term for a version of healthy adjustment that is not defined by one’s ability to conform to social pressures.

His research suggested that people needed help learning how to give equal airtime to a bunch of conflicting internal voices. He imagined the psyche like a sandbox in which a cast of unconscious characters struggle to play nicely together. If you were his patient, Jung might ask you to close your eyes and return to the world of your dreams. Then, he’d suggest ways to modify your in- dream behavior, and you would tell him how the outcomes of the fantasy changed when you made alternative decisions. What if you interacted differently with those internal playmates? What happens if you don’t run away from that monster? What if you’re only falling because you haven’t tried flying yet? Can you just ignore the fact that you’re only wearing underwear and finish presenting

that book report anyway? Active imagination is like playing a video game based on your dreams: play it enough and you not only become literate in the language of your psyche, you may also become the author of your own internal dramas.

Of course, video games are not internal dramas. They do not arise from my children’s unconscious. They are about as far from being nondirective as play can possibly be. Most games are big-budget interactive media productions created by huge teams of artists, writers, and programmers. The scripts are set, and playing usually involves solving puzzles or performing feats that simply unlock the next chapter in a prescribed story. Games are fixed rituals, with procedural rhetoric. Still, that doesn’t negate their psychotherapeutic potential. Stories can be powerful even if you are not the author; we’ve known that since ancient times. Plato’s student Aristotle coined the term “catharsis” to explain the phenomenon. He was writing about theater, the most popular form of entertainment in ancient Greece, but the concept is relevant to any medium. When you cry during a tragic dramatic movie, belly-laugh at a television sitcom, jump out of your seat to celebrate beating a game’s final boss level, you are experiencing what Aristotle called catharsis.

The term literally has to do with cleansing or purging. It describes the positive sensation that comes from any sort of emotional release. It applies equally to moments when tears flow uncontrollably as to when the corners of your mouth give way to even the slightest smile. When your best friend pats you on the back and consoles you—“It’s okay, let it out”—she’s taking Aristotle’s lead. He gave us the idea that an emotional purge is therapeutic, and the concept has been widely accepted ever since.

In 1975, Bruno Bettelheim published an influential book titled The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. In it, he explained why some stories are more cathartic—more emotionally therapeutic—than others. Specifically, he was interested in classic bedtime stories. How have folk tales, such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm, remained relevant to small kids for so many generations? Why don’t they feel dated? They somehow continue to entertain and enlighten even as customs, habits, and experiences change.

“Jack and the Beanstalk,” for example, has nothing to do with modern life. Few twenty-first-century children can relate to selling the family cow for just a few beans. Yet the story continues to be told. Why? Because, according to Bettelheim, it offers an opportunity for children and their parents to symbolically address serious inner conflicts together.

It works like this: All kids know that sometimes, when you disappoint a parent, an angry giant seems to awaken—fee, fi, fo, fum. Parental rage can arise from even the smallest of seeds. And for a child, that provokes anxiety. It is excruciatingly hard to be comfortable with the idea that Mom and Dad can sometimes be frightening. To feel safe, you need to know that the giant can be conquered and put to rest. But the giant you fear is also the same person who protects you and makes you feel safe. Talk about tension!

Of course, the fairy tale does not provide an explicit solution to the problem —there is no beanstalk to chop down in real life. But the storytelling experience, shared between parent and child, can be cathartic. By telling the story to our kids, Bettelheim explains, we “give them the most important reassurance of all: that we approve of their playing with the idea of getting the better of these giants.” When we read them these stories, we help our children release their feelings of anxiety. We give them a symbolic pat on the back.

Notice that Bettelheim does not say that the transformative power of fairy tales resides in the content of the narratives themselves. Kids don’t get the same benefits from reading alone. Parents and kids need to go through the ritual of storytelling together. It is all about the process. Likewise, when it comes to integrating digital play into the family experience, it is all about the process of kids and grown-ups playing together.

Most grown-ups recognize the benefit of reading to kids. They also play family board games, they build wooden Thomas the Tank Engine tracks with toddlers, and they toss balls around the backyard. Unfortunately, parents and caregivers are likely to leave kids alone with screens; they use screens as babysitters. Why? How can the screen-as-babysitter phenomenon be such a common practice if every grown-up I talk to seems to agree that it is a bad thing? Is it because adults are selfish? Do they value time for themselves more than healthy child development? I don’t think so. Instead, I suspect that grown-ups intuitively realize there is nothing inherently wrong with using the screen as babysitter. The issue has just been framed the wrong way. It has nothing to do with the screens or with how the kids engage with them. The real problem is that the screen is often used only as babysitter. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with solitary and/or parallel screen play—by all means, let your kids play on your smartphone while you make dinner! But don’t forget that for today’s kids to be well-adjusted, they also need coordinated family screen play.

“Joint media engagement” is the term experts use to describe the way kids and grown-ups engage in media together. Originally, researchers studied

television and wrote about “coviewing.” They discovered that when families watch television together, the potential that children will learn something from whatever it is they are watching increases. Those early studies focused on Sesame Street, so it was less about catharsis or managing internal emotional conflicts than it was about cultivating literacy and numeracy skills. But the same principles still apply. It was the late 1960s when Joan Ganz Cooney established the Children’s Television Workshop, and, according to the original press release, Sesame Street was going to “stimulate the intellectual and cultural growth of young children—particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.” The show was created around the time that President Lyndon B. Johnson was introducing his Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the equality-in-education component of his War on Poverty. Back then, preschool was considered elite, but Sesame Street aimed to provide all young children, regardless of their socioeconomic status, access to a basic early academic curriculum.

Test studies made it clear, however, that if this ambitious project were going to make a difference, young children and their caregivers would need to watch the show together. That is why Jim Henson’s Muppets were so perfect. Kermit, Grover, and Big Bird’s brightly colored silly faces appealed to small children, while their edgy parodies of mainstream media entertained parents. International celebrities also helped ensure that every episode of Sesame Street operated on multiple levels of content sophistication. The kids were learning phonics, while the parents enjoyed performances by Johnny Cash and James Taylor. Everything about the show was designed to keep toddlers and their parents sitting together in front of the television. And therefore, families who watched together developed a shared vocabulary—making it easier for caregivers to help their kids learn and grow.

Every time a grown-up reacted to one of Kermit’s jokes, it sent a message about what parents valued. Later in the day, when Mom mimicked the way Muppets sounded out spelling, it reinforced lessons in literacy. Coviewing was the perfect way to integrate the television into the whole picture of family life. But it has been more than forty years since the first episode of Sesame Street aired. The television is no longer the primary screen in our lives. So, in 2007, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop released a report entitled The New Coviewing: Designing for Learning through Joint Media Engagement. Led by a literacy expert, Dr. Michael H. Levine, the center updated the concept of coviewing to include screens other than the TV. The report addressed all the new types of interactive content that computers, smartphones, and tablets offered. But

more important, it acknowledged that parents, teachers, and caregivers needed a new model for child-rearing in the twenty-first century.

Family life had changed, but few people—parents, mentors, caregivers—felt comfortable engaging with the new technologies that threatened to dislocate the center of our homes.

Takeaways

Home life needs to catch up with work life.

Grown-ups need to acknowledge that most of our beloved everyday family traditions became commonplace only because they helped cultivate children into well-adjusted adults who were prepared to participate in an industrial economy. The split between home and work made it easier to live a meaningful life within a specific technological reality. But we no longer live in the Victorian era; the current world requires us to interact with a very different tool set. And while work life has changed many times to accommodate new technologies, home life remains stuck in the distant past.

Twenty-first-century grown-ups will need to figure out new ways to model positive behaviors for living an always-connected life. We need to create rituals —other than dinner—that inherently promote good values for a constantly networked world.

Embrace family activities that have technological components. Play with your kids!

• Legacy video-game franchises, like Pac-Man or Super Mario Brothers, are a great way to start. Parents will get the pleasure of nostalgia. Kids will just be happy to get their parents’ attention. When you’re ready for something newer, try a game like Shovel Knight; it’s one among a cohort of indie games that use old- fashioned platformer mechanics and 16-bit graphics. One of my family’s favorite games is Overcooked, a cooperative multiplayer simulation game that often keeps the three of us laughing for hours.

• Robotics kits can function like the new garage mechanics. There’s a whole slew of simple robot toys that combine with a smartphone

or tablet to teach coding skills. Check out Sphero or Dash and Dot. LEGO also makes a variety of different sets that combine tangible brick building with digital programming. These are perfect for kids and parents to use together. Then, as kids get older, a programmable quadcopter drone can be like a space-age alternative to flying a kite.

• If you check out the toy aisle, you’ll be surprised to discover a lot of products aimed at getting kids to understand how computers work. Think of these as the new build-your-own electric transistor radio or chemistry sets. littleBits is a collection of interactive modular electronic building blocks. The Kano Computer Kit is a build-your-own Raspberry Pi set. Neither of these requires any soldering, but you and your kids will learn all about how computers work while playing with them together.

Playing video games with your kids can have psychotherapeutic value.

Just like bedtime stories, digital play can facilitate catharsis. But it only works when parents and kids interact with media together. This is called joint media engagement. And if you approach it like traditional play therapy, playing together can help your kids develop confidence, self-esteem, and social- emotional wellbeing.

Ask your kids about the games they play and try to play along with them. This demonstrates that you take their sandbox rituals seriously. It tells them that you value the identity-forming experiences, and it encourages them to feel positive about their emerging sense of self.

It’s also good to use the metaphors of the game world to describe the life world. When parents and children have a shared vocabulary, it’s easier to have conversations about difficult topics. It provides families with a set of metaphors with which to bridge the gap between digital and real-life activities. When we can talk about both realms with our kids—transitioning seamlessly between online and offline ways of being—we’re all better prepared for living together and making sense of a connected world.

Start staring at your own screen.

All kids need to master the ability to shift between solitary, parallel, and coordinated modes of play. This is an underappreciated competency that directly translates to the workplace. As telecommuting becomes more common, as massive co-working spaces replace offices and cubicles, and cooperative work is increasingly done on networks rather than at conference tables, the ability to shift between styles of interaction will become even more essential.

Unfortunately, the conventions of the nineteenth century have taught us to privilege coordinated play above all else. But that’s only because it resembles the kind of face-to-face communication that happens at perfect family dinners. Parents shouldn’t get caught up in the inaccurate binary between social and isolated play. Don’t always expect your kids to be having fun with friends or siblings. Remember that there are also good things about solitary and parallel play styles. It’s the ability to participate in the appropriate style of play at the right place and right time that matters most.