In my spare time, I play a lot of video games, and so does my 14-year-old son, Connor. From a very young age, he would sit in my lap as I played some game, and I’d let him handle the controls as soon as he could handle them. I remember him watching as I played the Grand Theft Auto series—an open-world game in which you go anywhere and interact with the environment in any number of ways, but you advance the story mainly by directing your character to commit all kinds of violent crime. I let Connor play along with that one, too, but we had some very different rules. No stealing anything. No hurting anybody. No breaking the law. And we had a blast driving around cars we bought in-game, jumping motorcycles over ravines, running in races, and so on. The game as designed was not the game we played. In many ways, the game we played was better.
Over the years, I’ve kept a close eye on Connor. There is always the risk of kids diving too deep into video games and picking up some bad habits along the way, so as he shares his experiences with me, I try to give him course corrections as needed. Connor is a solid young man with a strong moral center, and he has no interest in playing games that model abhorrent behavior. He does, however, get a kick out of exploiting technicalities, so I’ve had to lay a few specific restrictions on him. No paying extra money to win the game. (If anything will destroy modern video games, it’ll be micro-transactions.) No cheating, whether it’s using cheat codes or hacking into the game or anything like that. And likewise, no taking advantage of a known flaw in the game to step around the game’s challenges as designed. There’s not much point to winning if you can’t do it cleanly.
