Why Kids Love Video Games as Explained by a Real Kid

We can’t help children manage their screen time unless we understand what makes it attractive to them. So I decided to interview a real kid—my articulate 11-year-old grandson, Kaylor. Over the Thanksgiving holiday I questioned him about what makes video games so fascinating. The answers I got make a lot of sense. No wonder young people spend hours at a time playing them. They give them a world that we may not provide in real life.
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As we sat on the couch—me stuffed with turkey and Kaylor stuffed with bacon as promised by his father—I ask him to tell me why he loved to play his favorite games. The words are his own. I only grouped them into categories that made sense to me. We talked a lot about Destiny which he said was currently very popular with millions of online users. As I understand it Destiny involves flying space ships and fighting alien robots from different planets. He said that the “whole point is to get people off the map to get points.”

It seemed to me that his answers can be grouped into categories as follows:

1) Imagination/Creativity: you can design your own character; choose his armor, his colors and his weapons; change your guy to look cooler and improve your stats; you can fly space ships which you can’t do in real life; you can shoot other people; save your world by destroying robots; you can eat the souls of other species and turn them into minions of darkness; you can’t do this with humans because they are too complex.

2)Heroism: Sense of Accomplishment—you have expanding options so that you can keep improving your skills; everybody thinks each other is awesome; you get better each time you play; you are not attacking but defending your planet.
3) Socialization/Friends: you play with others in ways that you can’t in real life; you can play without having friends; you meet new people.

4) Competition/Aggression: you react instantly; the games are an alternative to getting mad; you can kill people but they aren’t really dead; death does not take place.

5) Relieving Stress: you can take out anger in video games; if you are mad at your teacher you can imagine that she is the “final boss.”
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6) Meaning/Immortality: You are saving your planet from destruction; you cannot die; if you die you come back to life.

Kaylor understands that this is a substitute world. He is social, creative, compassionate and generous. He was just elected president of his school after a rousing campaign. He has the lead in Oklahoma. He understands that some video games are inappropriate such as those games that portray criminal activities as acceptable. He realizes that video games limit the imagination and that his own imagination is endless. He knows that it was more helpful to talk to his mom about his angry feelings than to play it out in a game.

Still it is important for Kaylor’s parents to limit his screen time and it is not always easy for them to do that. It is going to be a lot harder for a child whose imagination is limited for some reason; who doesn’t feel a sense of accomplishment elsewhere; who finds it difficult to make friends; who doesn’t have other appropriate outlets for anger or stress or who doesn’t find meaning in his or her life in the real world. Managing screen time for a young person means that parents must search out what it is providing for that youngster that he or she is not finding in reality.