Mother Insists Her Child Was Adversely Affected by Zelda
Posted on June 21 2012 by Legacy Staff
Courtesy of Patch comes a very interesting piece chronicling a mother’s struggle to rescue the imagination of her eight year-old child after he had been introduced to video games.
The story opens up with the boy’s mother lamenting that having entered the second grade, her “son’s brain is already fried.” It goes on to say how it is not the Wii or the GameCube that have consumed her child, but specifically Ocarina of Time, to the point of having had to ban gaming-related conversation at the dinner table.
More after the jump.
She spends the remainder of the piece citing the good of outdoor activity and the imagination-boosting potential of unstructured play, later citing the presence of “a couple of ethereal characters that seem sexual in an indefinable way” within the game. To her credit though, she manages to redeem herself by the end of the piece by crediting the franchise with sparking her son’s imagination, citing play with a toy sword and shield in her backyard.
Let me start off by saying that, though too much video-gaming–especially at that age–can be harmful to the development of a child, one should let their kids enjoy themselves as they please, after all, they only have so much time to do so. Personally, I was always more of an indoor than outdoor child, especially after being introduced to video games with the Nintendo 64; however, I didn’t loose all imagination, and my brain did not become a quarter-pounder with cheese. On the contrary, I spent my nights and days obsessed with Zelda–yes, I myself had an unhealthy obsession with the franchise as a child–role-playing as Link and battling against Ganondorf; in fact, I distinctly remember putting on a backpack at one point and pretending to vacuum up ghosts as in Luigi’s Mansion. The point is, video games didn’t ruin my life, they only provided an outlet for my imagination to run rampant. To be fair, the mother did end up redeeming herself by the end, recognizing the value in channeling one’s imagination, even if consumed by a video game.
So, what are your thoughts? Did the mother jump the gun in addressing video games as mindless distractions? Or was her criticism justified after all? Chime in on the comments below.
Source: Patch
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