Monday 5 October 2015

Getting My Kids in to Gaming!

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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