The first thing I do when talking to a kid about “bad” media like potentially addictive gaming? I talk about something else entirely.
In my case, I like to talk about food. Specifically, Fritos. Why Fritos?
Because I love Fritos. And when I talk about reframing video games or screens as neutral, people will often say “but other things aren’t designed to addict us”
Except yes, they are. Almost everything we consume is actually designed that way. That’s capitalism, baby.
Take my beloved Fritos. Countless hours have gone into designing their shape, size, bend, crunch, salt level, etc. And they’ve been engineered to taste and feel the way they do so that people will override their hunger cues, eat more, and then buy more Fritos.
This isn’t unique to snack food; cotton candy grapes or Cosmic Crisp apples, most parts of our lives are engineered this way.
If we aren’t able to step back from the stigma of “Gaming” we may miss the fact that the issue isn’t gaming or app design in isolation, the issue is predatory design and we can cut through the appeal of that design by educating our kids on how these types of design work throughout their lives.
We don’t want kids to think THEY are the reason they can’t stop eating Fritos, or why it’s hard to stop reading a book when they get to a cliffhanger, or why they can’t stop playing a game that’s constantly taunting them with the promise of rewards.
Kids are going to grow up to be adults with access to a casino, a movie theater (including an X rated one), a video game console, an encyclopedia, and oh yeah, a phone, all in their pocket all the time. If we speak only about “video games” as being potentially predatory, we’re siloing the conversation and actually making it harder for kids (or future adults) to see how these mechanisms work across media types. Naming it and explaining it neutrally doesn’t give addictive or predatory games a pass, it makes it easier to spot these mechanics wherever they show up.
