Context is key

The “how much screen time?” question I’ve heard across his childhood comes from a panicked assumption that screen time is bad. All screen time isn’t equal. Doomscrolling through algorithmic sludge is not the same as playing a multiplayer co-op game with your friends or family: communicating, planning, laughing, failing, and trying again.

Indeed, one of the common arguments against gaming is that it affects social skills. All this tells me is that those arguing have never played a multiplayer game. Fortnite isn’t isolating, it’s a masterclass in communication and collaboration.

Our family trio is constantly negotiating where to land, when to W key (aggressively push another team), who’s carrying heals, when to run. And we fail… a lot. Often unfairly, sometimes because one of us (me) panicked and did something stupid.

But that failure loop is a gift. Videogames teach us to lose, often publicly, to reset, and go again, without it becoming a personal crisis. They teach emotional resilience. And I get to see how my son reacts under pressure. I can literally hear it on comms. That’s far more intel than I generally get from the standard response of “fine” to my question “how was school?”.

Because gaming is full of spoken language. Commentary. Explanation. Hypothesis. Emotion. It’s language in use, all the time. If you swapped the delivery format and called it immersive narrative learning, people would lap it up and start marching on Whitehall to get it on the curriculum.

But because it arrives via a console rather than a book, we discount it. Even if it might be the perfect training for your forthcoming university viva.

And gaming content is dense with text. Menus, maps, instructions, objectives, upgrades, subtitles and chat. The brain is decoding text constantly. That’s literacy.

Gaming didn’t replace reading in our house. It broadened it.

Out now!

This August, American neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath published The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Children’s Learning – and How to Help Them Thrive Again. Well, OK, but there’s always something, isn’t there? Classroom technology. Rock ’n’ roll. Video nasties. Rave culture.

Fifty years ago Action comic (The sensational paper for boys. Every Monday. 7p.) was withdrawn from sale in British newsagents because the media thought it was damaging to children’s morals.

Two hundred years earlier, a piece in the Monthly Mirror had declared that reading novels was a contemporary cause of “female depravity”.

And two millennia before, Socrates wondered if reading anything – the very invention of writing itself – was doing damage to human memory.

The media panics are arriving at increasing speed, like summer heatwaves and prime ministers, but they’ve always been there.

I think we mistake the unfamiliar for the unhealthy, comparing now with then, and declaring the present as broken, just because it doesn’t match what we remember. Personally, I’m backing the next generation against the evils of gaming, AI, emojis and screens. Even if they all end up with square eyes.

Michael Tubb

From square eyes to screen time ▶︎

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