The Wonder Years

My children are apparently born game-players—perhaps because children are born problem-solvers.

Not five minutes ago, my three-year-old son Ian proudly came to me with a packet of fruit snacks he’d retrieved from a nearly six-foot-high cupboard by stacking a stool on top of a chair and climbing up to it. (Gonna have to introduce Vagrant Story to this one someday.)

He couldn’t figure out how to open the packet, though.

Of course I opened it. Of course I did, with an admonishment that stacking stools on chairs to get fruit snacks is dangerous, and that if he did it again he couldn’t have any more. “I didn’t fall!” he rebutted. Of course.

My daughter June started playing games and fiddling with controllers early. She managed to buy the family an Xbox Live membership with a couple button-presses (thanks to some not-fully-thought-out ad placement on Microsoft’s part) at little more than a year old. She exhaustively completed a Dora the Explorer game on a DSi XL I’d ceded to her. She’s a wiz at Bejeweled (the video game and the board game—best $5 Toys ‘R Us clearance purchase I ever made, that one) and Peggle (she completed the whole thing herself at four or five years old).

Kids strive to overcome obstacles. That’s how they learn. It’s a wonder to behold, truly. They have a persistence for defeating challenges that I can no longer match, but I can still remember what it was like when I was young (and even not so young) and had the time and patience to do the same.

Since having kids I don’t play games like I used to—I have not nearly enough time or energy for whatever I can’t save or put down immediately. I play enough Hearthstone to get the free pack from Tavern Brawl every week; I’ve never passed Rank 19. I could never in a million years play through a Souls game.

I started playing Dragon Age: Origins while my daughter was still on the way. I named my rogue heroine “June,” after the name we’d already picked for her. I got all the way to the Deep Roads, which I saved for last, before she arrived. Over six years later, I still haven’t finished with dwarf country.

We moved two summers ago to be closer to family and look for work, and Ian, not even two at the time, soon found Plants vs. Zombies on his grandmother’s iPod and became utterly obsessed with it. He’s equally satisfied to either play it himself or to watch me do it.