Some grandparents get sad that their grandchildren are glued to a screen playing in virtual realities, meanwhile paying the grandparents scant attention. The forgotten grandparents are ageing and contemplating their decline. What to do?
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There’s not much virtue in getting grandkids to understand you’ll be dead sooner than them, all things going according to plan. Minecraft is far more attractive than such moral gush.
You’ve got to watch what they do during their screen time. My eldest grandkid gobbles up a new game until he has sufficient credibility, as a member of the online community, to be able to usefully communicate as an expert user.
This is a life skill equal to marbles or football or being CEO. Commenting about his achievements, grounds our conversations. I appreciate the amount of social capital he has invested in these activities and he reciprocates by his meta-account of the play.
He’s seven and I’m going on 70. We talk about the ontologies involved and the epistemologies and the psychologies. We converse at length about the experiential differences between this game and that game and the real world.
He wants to know why this particular game is called Newton. Who was Newton? What is gravity about? There goes an hour. We talk about the theme of the Minions movie. He says it’s about the search for a master. I comment that maybe it is also about the absurd nature of such a quest because all in life that one might achieve is mastery: there are no gurus; no masters. As a consequence, the Minions project is doomed to failure. He retreats to the level of plot. He like this Minion more than the others. Enough Buddhism for one day.
Then it’s time for porridge and an online pause till the kids in Japan wake up and he will build with them a village or two.
