Just want to point readers in the direction of Accidents Will Happen, a mommyblog by a Midwestern grad student who is witty and wry, and won me over for life by using the phrase “cultural zoning” and quoting Milton Waddams in the same headline. (Also, her son turns out to have been born exactly the same day as mine.) Her site is definitely worth putting on your RSS feed if you’re that kind of person, and worth a daily visit if you’re not. I’ll be adding it to our blogroll, down on the right side of this page, in a moment, as soon as I figure out exactly how to do that.
When I Was Your Age, We Only Had Two Buttons!
Over at Kotaku.com, Stephen Totilo has identified an awesome new trend in video games — fatherhood:
Being a dad, however, is becoming nearly as popular in video games as health bars and shotguns and, to my playing sensibilities, nearly as successful. I believe we are now experiencing a period of video game history that high school text books will look back upon as The Daddening Of Video Games.
As a recovering video-game addict (15 years and still mostly sober), I’m sorely tempted to hop off the wagon by his round-up of fatherly themed time-wasters digital realms. In Bioshock 2 — which has a kick-ass trailer — you play a Big Daddy protecting a Little Sister. In Heavy Rain, he writes, you have “to choose which of your two sons you’re going to play with first in the backyard.” And in Silent Hill, you search for your daughter after a car crash:
You are in a dark and snowy city, with a flashlight to illuminate a small percentage of the blackness depicted on your TV screen. You walk slowly and run only slightly faster. And with a tap of your A button, you can call for your daughter. She won’t hear you. She wouldn’t show up, not so early in the game, hours before the story of what’s really happening unfolds. But I would like to meet the player who didn’t press the A button and then press it again, who didn’t get into the role-play of being a dad, hoping against hope to hear his daughter call back to him.
Damn, that sounds like a true-to-life feeling, and it’s one I’d love to explore virtually, if only I didn’t have to spend all my time feeding, changing and playing with the baby. (Is this how actual AA and NA survivors feel? Pushed toward the bottle/pill/pipe by the stress of parenting, but kept in check by a newfound sense of responsibility?) About the closest I get to playing a video game is letting Sasha goof around with EliasZoo on my iPhone.
Elsewhere, Tolito traces the history of fatherhood in video games, from Pac-Man and Pac-Man Jr. to Solid Snake’s Marcus Fenix (although he leaves out the hilariously condescending King of the Cosmos from Katamari Damacy), and tries to understand why games are getting daddened right now. Is it because gamers are aging? Or because fatherly caring is an interesting new character motivation in a genre where your motive is all too often BLOW SHIT UP!!!
My theory is slightly different: Protecting a child triggers in us fathers a deeply visceral response—an “I will kill anything that comes at my kid” mode that bypasses the frontal cortex and turns us into fast-twitch maniacs capable of inhuman feats of strength and skill. Usually, we employ it simply for catching the kid mid-air when she falls backward off the bed, or to haul child, stroller, and several bags of groceries up three flights of stairs. But it’s a pretty great reflex to break out when you’re sitting down the latest fully immersive first-person shooter.
Maybe when Sasha’s a little older, we can blow shit up together. Yeah, that’d be nice.
Where’s the Outrage?
I’ll tell you where the outrage is. It’s at Daddytypes, who fumes a little that the Consumer Product Safety gurus’ latest recall is for cribs that have been killin’ since 2002.
Would it be too libertarian of me to take some pleasure in yet another example of federal incompetence? After all, this is supposed to be the New and Improved Consumer Product Safety Commission, because it got a big budget increase and a host of new powers in response to the 2007 Chinese melamine pet poisonings and lead toy extravaganza.
Of course, Congress cocked it all up. Just one example: They held children’s books published before 1985 to strict lead standards, even though, as the (quite libertarian) City Journal pointed out, there was no evidence that any children were ever harmed by the books. But resellers and consignment stores still felt the threat of liability for having classic children’s lit on the shelves.
This is our federal government: years late addressing a known killer, way too quick to clamp down a dubious danger.
On a positive note, they recalled a Chinese-made SWAT toy gun set because the small orange tip that distinguished it from a real gun breaks off too easily. The Commission cited it as a choking hazard, but we all know they were also trying to protect kids from wielding realistic-looking guns in a country where federal agents occasionally shoot the hell out of a person.
The Accidental Convent
Last weekend, at the excellent birthday party of a certain 4-year-old, my 14-month-old daughter, Sasha, had a blast. She scribbled with purple Magic Markers, drizzled glue on things, and sucked with glee on a juice box. She was a dynamo.
But a comment from one of the fathers there surprised me: Apparently, according to him, I’ve been keeping poor Sasha sheltered. Yes, it’s true: This was her very first juice box, her first experiment with glue, her first artistic production with something other than chalk. I guess on the Upper West Side, kids start doing these things somewhere around six months, while their country cousins out here in Boerum Hill don’t get none of that fancy civilization till they’s oldern.
But really—sheltered? For more than a year now, I’ve been carelessly exposing her to TV, swearing up a storm, dragging her among the homeless on California city streets, and generally letting her see and do whatever her half-developed brain impels her to. And since she’s expressed no further desire for juice boxes, I’ll happily avoid buying them. Instead, when Sasha wants juice, we’ll pour some into a cup and give her a straw. Is that so weird? And what else should she have been exposed to by now? Chicken McNuggets? Elmo? Herpes?
One other interesting thing came out of this first contact: Sasha’s first bout of diarrhea, which she no doubt (okay, some doubt) picked up in the filthy wilds of Manhattan. Now, if keeping Sasha sheltered keeps her stools firm and regular, then I’ll happily lock her in her room till she’s 18.