Maybe your child (using your credit card) was one of the 20 million or so customers who pre-ordered Call of Duty - 6, Modern Warfare 2, and then waited anxiously for its release on a Tuesday night (aka a school night) last November. There are few of us parents who don't feel at least a little ambivalent about allowing our kids to play a first person shooter game, especially one that has blood (as in, lots of it), and victory can be claimed by detonating a nuclear bomb, which ironically enough, appears to explode within a mile or so of the 'winning' team. Then, there's Call of Duty 'Live' for X-Box 360 in which your child is talking live with God knows who, from who knows where while shooting people and trying to 'nuke' the other team. Have we all gone mad?
So, as a clinical psychologist whose sons play this game on far more than a casual basis, let me offer some musings on the pros and cons of this game as I understand it.
The positives of this game:
1. It really is more about mastery, competence and teamwork than it is about killing and maiming. As a child of the 1960s and 1970s myself, the concern then was about watching too much television. Most of us had seen well more than 100,000 people getting killed over the course of our TV watching 'careers' prior to the age of 18. Parents were sure that we would become mass murderers or at the very least, grind the world to a stop because we had turned our brains to mush in front of the 'boob tube.' Playing Call of Duty is not going to cause people to turn into serial killers or else we would have had a catastrophic rise in the number of them over the last few years.
2. Call of Duty is about strategy, learning from one's mistakes, communicating with other people, and getting better at something through sustained focus and repetition.
3. Then there's the fascinating element to the game called 'Prestige.' This comes when you voluntarily give back all you have accomplished and basically say, "it wasn't good enough. I want to start all over again." This is something like telling your child to re-do their major paper because it wasn't good enough. Kids choose prestige, sometimes multiple times. Of course there's certain badges of recognition for doing this, but it requires a lot of persistence, humility and determination. These are not bad aspects of a game for use in real life.
4. There's the teamwork involved in playing the game 'live.' Listening to my kids' animated chat with other people on the game is way more activity than when I sat on the couch as a child watching Tom and Jerry hit each other with sledge hammers and steel anvils, always without injury.
When the game becomes unhealthy:
There are certainly times when the game is not healthy for kids. Here are some telltale signs:
1. They won't get off of the game when you tell them to. Kids then stay up too late, and avoid other more important activities such as homework, general studying, exercise, or getting together with friends face-to-face and doing something besides, well, Call of Duty.
2. Siblings argue and / or get into physical altercations about whose turn it is to play the game. Time, I say, to give the video game a time out.
3. Meeting someone on line and then agreeing to meet them in person without telling you about it. Obviously, this is a problem and time to disable the internet connection to the game.
4. You are using the game as a convenient babysitter so you can get things done, but in the process, spend less time with your kids.
Most of the problems surrounding this game can be negotiated with your kids by regular dialogue. The best ways to have obedient kids include spending time with them, consistency of discipline and rules in general, and taking time out of the general busyness of life for more focused time with your kids. If you're having trouble accomplishing these, and your child is seeming to get more and more hooked on 'screens' then contact a reputable mental health professional. In the Chicagoland areas, consider one of the mental health providers at Heritage Professional Associates.
