Ah that most elusive of goals, the holy grail of any gaming
parent, how to get your children into gaming. However I must clarify that the
goal is to introduce them to the wonder, majesty and sheer outright fun of the
hobby rather than cajoling in them in to playing because you want a gaming
buddy on tap!
Anyway this has been one of my holy grail’s since
my wife and I’s personal world was blessed both 4 & 6 years ago with the
two bundles of joy that are our children (Eli & Noah!). As we’ve watched
them grow we’ve also been constantly thinking about how we can educate them and
make them decent human beings, helping them to understand the notion of right
and wrong, being kind, assertive and generally fair to others.
Therefore I’ve decided to teach them all this through the
medium of games that involve blowing up other spaceships – that’s right I’ve
started playing X-Wing! I know this sounds a little like teaching them to
respect life by squashing bugs however I’m working on the basis that they can
begin to understand the tricky concepts of right wrong and being fair to others whilst competive in the safe confines of a board game!
And what a crazy, simple game it is too. I’m not going to do
a write up of the game as that’s been done to death, however I am going to talk
about how well my 6 year old (Noah) is picking it up.
Luckily Noah is a Lego fanatic and can easily while away whole
hours building things from his imagination. Now, we have pretty much left him to
his own devices in this and usually he builds things that move (cars, planes,
trucks, trains) and has very little desire to build or play with “fighty”
things. Then both he his brother were given a Lego Star Wars DVD by their
grandparents and the rest (as they say) is history. This was the perfect opportunity
for me to introduce some form of gaming that would not age (we’ve played Thomas
Tracks and Rails, Trouble, Ludo etc.) and could be repeat played whilst they
both age.
During his first game Noah was instantly hooked by the models,
pre-painted is great as he instantly understood the scale and what they were
supposed to represent. Weirdly one of the things that he enjoyed most was
setting up the ships, that is putting them on the stands, getting the cards
ready and laying out the black playing surface.
He picked up the mechanism of play very quickly, I chose not
to use the option of actions after movement as I wanted him to get a feel for
the game and see if he enjoyed it first. So far we’ve played 4 games with the
largest being two Ties, and an Interceptor versus two X-Wings and a Y-Wing, the
results being two wins each and he appears to be enjoying it and thoroughly enjoys handing out "Bang Cards!"
Now here’s the tricky part, how do I teach kids my that it’s
fun to play as well as fun to win? And that’s the part that I’m working on, Noah has the desire to play because the game looks cool and he gets to play with
Daddy, but I don’t want him to be too disappointed if he loses. But I’m also a
realist and want him to have the desire to win, to aim for “success” without
being a bad sport. It’s a fine line between making your child either apathetic
about winning and thus doesn’t challenge themselves to aim high or they aim to succeed at all costs because that’s the only payback. I also recently picked up a copy of Mantic’s Dreadball with
the same intention as this has a direct comparison with real world sports so I’ll let you all know how it goes!
As this whole parenting things is a work in progress, I’d be
interested to hear from anyone else that’s having or had a similar experience.
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