Morphine and "App of the Week"

I was meeting a earnest young college student about local politics last week at a nearby Starbucks.  He had some ideas he wanted to discuss, so he called me and we had arranged to meet.  As we were leaving Starbucks, we passed the display where they have their App of the Week cards.  I almost always pick one or two up.  This week was an app called "Polymer," a game where the screen turns into a grid filled with colorful shapes.  The goal is to move and connect the small shapes into a large one and score points.  I offered one to the earnest young man.

"These are fun," I said.  "Take one."

"No, thanks," said the earnest young man.

"They are free," I said picking one up and handing it to him.

"No," he said, not taking the card.

"Do you have a cell phone?"  I asked.

"Yeah..." he said.

"Here," I said and shoved the card in his hand.  "It will be fun."  He looked mildly repulsed, as if I were handing him a pack of cigarettes or offering him a shot of whiskey.  I should have accepted his first no, but here I was the grown-up.  Perhaps I was offering him the app card that I never would have offered my own kids.  Perhaps I thought the serious young man needed some fun in his life.  While I fully appreciate and respect his ideas, he is a college student.  College is supposed to be fun.  He needs some fun.  There is plenty of time to save the world later.

All of this is ironic as my husband and I are not big fans of mindless screen time.  One of my husband's colleagues did a TEDxRainier Talk on the dangers of fast paced screen time for young children.

We were fortunate that my daughter's brain is wired so that she really isn't interested in television.  To quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up.  When she was a toddler, I would tell my friends that my daughter had little to no interest in television.  They thought I was being an intellectual snob until the television went on and my daughter wandered into another room.

My son, on the other hand, has the potential to be an addict if we don't manage the substance.  When he was little, his eyes would fix on the screen.  Anything that came between him and the box would set him off.  When the show was over, it was like watching a heroin addict go through withdrawal, or so I imagine.  He would scream and fuss and generally storm.  The cost of letting him watch thirty minutes of television--even some bland PBS fare--was not worth cooking dinner without interruption.

Computer and video games pose a similar problem for the boy.  A neighbor of mine, an internist, told me that video games give the user a boost of serotonin.  When the serotonin stops, the user feels bad and wants more, and then an addictive cycle can begin.  My son gets more than cranky when games go off.  We set time limits and limit access as I don't want to spend my free time dealing with an angry child.

Many people can turn off a video game and go about their lives.  Some cannot.  I've heard of a student who flunked out of college because of excessive video game playing.  I've heard of a mother who neglected her child to play "World of Warcraft" while her husband worked.  He returned one day to see his two year old walking down the street while the mother was inside on the computer.  She played about twelve hours a day.  My husband told me about a new study showed playing video games was as effective as morphine as a pain killer for treating burn victims.  I can't decide if I am amazed or terrified on that one.

Now after all of that, I am not a total Puritan.  I enjoy slaying pigs in Angry Birds.  When my daughter was a baby and had her bouts of colic, I played a fair share of Minesweeper to calm myself down while she cried herself to sleep.  Twenty minutes of clearing a minefield was better than taking morphine or taking my frustration out on a child.  She was not neglected, not left alone in her crib all day, hungry and with an unchanged diaper.

I didn't think much about giving the earnest young man the app card until the other night.  My husband also had an app card for Polymer, and he played it for forty-five minutes in one sitting.  He made one giant blob worth 500,000 points.  Later than evening, it took him twenty minutes to make another blob, this one worth 700,000 points.  He was making blobs.  Blobs.  This has zero productive value.  And I love the game, too.

I felt terrible that I had shoved the app card into the earnest young man's hand.  Here he was, trying to make the world a better place, and I was giving him a game, an opiate.  I was saying, "Don't worry, little boy.  Unfurrow that brow.  Take a hit."  Ugh.

All I can hope for is that game is like red wine.  It is great some of the time, like sharing a glass with friends over dinner.  Red wine, however, is not so great for breakfast.  Just like people need to drink responsibly, they need to play responsibly, too.  What better time to learn that than in college?