During the past 50 years the way kids have been brought up and played has seen so many changes. From the classic outdoors war games simulation and football we have ended up in today’s computer based activities.
Whether the change has been for good or not is a question that only the future sociologists will manage to answer. Older generations who didn’t have the chance to be part of the games revolution are quite harsh about today’s kids main or sole activity with their main argument being that all those games do not stimulate nothing else than the brain as the body remains idle!
Looking at today’s kinds in terms of general knowledge one could argue that they know a lot more compared to the kids of previous generations mainly because of the vast amount of information available to them through the TV and the internet.
Creativity, great emotions and collaboration are cultivated by both types of play, the traditional one and the technological one alike. The game of ‘exploration’, probably unknown to today’s kids is a great example as it was one of the favourite boys’ games in the 70s and 80s. The idea was getting ‘lost’ into an abandoned warehouse or an inhabited mansion and try to discover as many weird and unusual things as possible.
One of the greatest memories I have from my childhood is the day we entered that abandoned massive warehouse which used to belong to a electrical components supplier who went bankrupt. The amount of weird objects we had never seen before was incredible: from cable ties to circuit breakers, it was all stimulating our minds big time.
The equivalent of that game today would be one of those amazing adventure games where the main character has the freedom to enter any building, wonder around, collect objects etc. One could argue that the overall feeling and the amount of adrenaline produced is more or less the same. Being lucky enough to belong to that transitional generation where traditional and computer games were equally important I can confess that both types of games were giving me the same ‘high’. In conclusion, it is harsh to reject computer games are useless and they have nothing to offer just because they are not physical enough.
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