Nintendo, Gameboy, and the like, and was protected by idealistic parents from at least
some of the damage of television.
I remember spending hours in my room with my stuffed animals, rock collection,
and other toys, weaving elaborate stories about them. To each I would assign a
personality; each would become a character in an imaginary world existing either solely
in my own head or among siblings and playmates.
Today, this creative function of imagining worlds and the characters in them has
been taken over by faraway adults in television studios and software development
companies who provide children with the ready-made worlds and personalities of TV
shows and video games.
A capacity of the human mind has been stripped from the individual for profit’s sake. And what shoddy substitutes these commercially motivated worlds are for the spontaneous creations of the child’s mind! Most of them are worlds of dichotomous good and evil where problems are solved by violence, that are devoid of nuance and detail, and that are disconnected from the rest of the world. Worse yet, they are (unlike the mind of a child) finite, limited by the medium of the story. They therefore constrain the freedom of the child’s mind to develop and play out various elements of the unconscious. If childhood play is practice for life, then our television raises children to be passive consumers of it. As for video games, they condition us to the mindless acquisition of meaningless rewards (points), to the destruction of generic enemies, and to accepting choices defined by remote others, the programmers of our lives. The kind of adult that results from a childhood bereft of the opportunity for spontaneous self-directed world-making is someone who will continue to be vulnerable to stories created by others. Not only will he always be in the market for entertainment, but he will be easily manipulable by politicians and advertisers seeking to profit from the acceptance of a certain story. Such adults will be compliant subjects rather than active citizens, for they will have had no practice in creating a world for themselves. While we speak of children “playing” with their video games, these are not so much the objects of play as they are substitutes for play, and they are merely one small aspect of the disappearance of play from our culture. Play is properly a creative activity: Give a child some blocks and they become trucks, a city, a forest, a zoo. Put a few children together and they create worlds of the imagination that incorporate whatever materials are available, both physical and cultural. The play worlds that children create, that together constitute the Kingdom of Childhood, are practice for the creative work of the empowered adult fashioning a good life and contributing to a beautiful world. We are meant to be creative beings, not just to live out the lives that are handed to us. As Joseph Chilton Pearce puts it, “As a child, reality is whatever one makes of it.” This is potentially true for adults as well, but unlikely if we have never experienced it as children.