Some Fathers take their sons hunting or fishing. Some do golf. Our family is a bit less “traditional”. Father/Son bonding for us is spent navigating hellscapes of violence where damn near everything tries to kill you a lot if you don’t kill it a lot first.
Are we part-time mercenaries?
No.
For a couple of years now, my son and I link up on Xbox every Saturday morning and play cooperatively. This practice started when he was living in Texas and it was a good way to catch up on a weekly basis via the Xbox chat functionality. Most of our shared mayhem has been spent bashing our way through Borderlands 2 and 3 with their varied and near endless content variations. When you beat Borderlands 3, you can choose to play again on 10 levels of Mayhem (increased difficulty). We chose level 10 and our statistics have become legendary to a point where the challenge was waning. If only there was a new game to be released in late March that would provide new challenges with the excellent content and gameplay of Borderlands.
As you may have guessed, there was. Last week we started playing the new Borderlands spin-off, “Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands”, which is set in a medieval-themed world with dragons, magic, swords and of course, lots of guns. (It’s from the creators of Borderlands after all.) It has the same irreverent dialogue that made the other games fun to play and pokes fun at a lot of real-world stuff. The storyline and gameplay are excellent and though there are still six main player character choices, this time around they added a fairly full-featured character customization process. Instead of a fixed gender for each character type, you can now choose from “This One” or “That One” (those are the actual choices) for each of the character types. The gameplay is so similar to Borderlands that there was no tedious learning curve with a lot of dying until you get the hang of the controls and get the bad guys to do a lot of the dying. Fun stuff. Or is it…?
Is indulging in hours of playing violent video games having any adverse psychological influence on us? I have to admit that since we started spending Saturday mornings mowing down those who would cause us harm, I would have no hesitation about doing harm to anyone who entered my home with the intent to do my family harm. Actually, I felt that way long before I started playing video games and since my son is a pastor, I guess we fit into the result set of the many studies that say, no… there isn’t a correlation between games and reality. Or is there….?
There is. The correlation between the game worlds and reality is that in both you can find a way to stay connected to family and have fun together. That’s a good thing.