for the love of the game

mae's entry:

Aiden's fine motor skills have improved recently, thanks to his love for gaming.

I don't mean using the game console (although I'm sure that has helped) but his writing and drawing skills.

Aiden is in full-day kindy now, and doesn't get a peep of gaming in school, but they do channel his interest in Playstation/Wii/PSP games into "offline" activities that are, shall we say, healthier (I'm not going to go into the benefits or hazards of gaming). The daily arts and crafts sessions in school are normally a free-for-all, where kids are allowed to create anything they like, and so Aiden has begun to 'write' his own game-inspired stories in little hand-bound pages that form a 'book'.

Until recently, the stories that he's been 'writing' in school have been pages of rainbow-coloured squiggles. But lately, perhaps in the last couple of weeks, he's been coming home with more legible titles/words.

It started out amusingly enough with brand names, like Sony (our client will be proud), PSP, PS3, XBox, Wii. I joked to Andy, 'What ever happened to regular words in a kid's vocabulary, like "cat", "dog" or "cow"?'

From brand names, it progressed to "Loco Roco Part 2" (side note: there was a non-gaming drawing for me that he titled "Lipstik" that melted my heart.)

And just last week, he had written "Katamari" as one of the titles of his books and despite the naysayers that pooh-pooh gaming, I'm really proud that he can spell and write such a long word.

I'm not sure if it's because of the industry we work in, or that we love gaming ourselves, but we were more amused than disdainful when Aiden announced this evening that he wants to be a "Katamari-roller" when he grows up. (About a month ago, Aiden said he wanted to be "a game designer, like Daddy." Cue stirring music with rising crescendo in the background, with the proud father beaming.)

Next step: To have the boys move up from playing "Cooking Mama" (cooking simulation game) to actually cooking us some meals.