It’s sad that toxic game culture is so prevalent cuz like. As someone who has ended up in random matches with kids before, I can attest to how fucking easy it is to reverse and un-teach shitty attitudes in kids.
Example: I downloaded Friday the 13th because it’s free on psn. I dunno how to play, so I just enter quick play and I’m matched with 3-4 kids on mic. Immediately on mic they’re shitty and disparaging to each other. They laugh at each others deaths, they actively work against team mates and self sabotage, they call each other “fags”, etc. From the sounds of the voices they cannot be older than 13-14.
I put on my mic and just decide I ain’t havin it. I am nice. I thank them for barricading doors or leaving me items. When they break free from Jason’s grasp I say “good job!” or I try to help them. One kid survived for most of the match by himself. When he dies, I tell him he did a fantastic job.
The mood shift is practically INSTANT. These kids almost immediately stop being dick heads. They start encouraging each other and being kind. After the match all of them try to friend request me. Which should tell you a couple of things:
A) kids want to be kind, and they want to have a nice time playing games. But encounters with adults like me or so rare that they’ve trained themselves to instantly put on a toxic, shitty, defensive veneer when encountering any new person online. It’s literally just THAT EASY to not groom a horrible gaming community, it’s just that NO ONE does it.
B) the speed of which they all tried to friend me was cute, but paints for me such a sad picture? Like these kids are SO desperate to find people to play with who aren’t crappy jerks. They played with me for 10 minutes TOPS and all instantly tried to reach out to me.
tl;dr: The kids are alright. Adults are shit heads.
I cant agree with this post more
I witnessed something similar with my younger brother (this was when he was In fifth grade so bear with me here) and his friends. The teacher assigned for them to build a somewhat accurate spanish mission in Minecraft because their school had gotten some iPads and she needed to assign them something other than a PowerPoint.
Now here’s the thing. Most of these boys, my brother included, have ADD/ADHD. About a week into the project all they had in their shared world was chaos. Somebody filled the place with tnt and lit it up. Holes everywhere. Whenever one would attempt to try and build something (mostly wood huts and not the actual project) it would be destroyed within minutes as the boys began to insult each other heavily and complain that the design was ugly.
I brought my own ipad with me and decided to sit with the boys while they continued their reign of terror. I joined the world and built a hallway out of brick at the very center of this war zone. Immediately one of them tried to destroy it under the impression that “it looks bad”.
“Well, what should I make it out of?”
“Diamond.”
The ten year old mind is a mystery to me…
Anyway, then I showed him some pictures similar to these:
I reasoned that it would be easier to sway this kid toward another pretty block than trying to get him to stick to the materials of the time, so I asked him if he would like to help me replace my brick design with quartz (eh, it’s white).
Bam! One of the ten year old anarchists is dutifully building me a glittering gem hallway for our insanely rich monks.
The other three are off somewhere still yelling at each other and setting off explosives, but we have something built. Much to my surprise the kid asked if he could build the church next because he “wanted to build the most important part”.
Here’s where I learned something important. I don’t have ADD or ADHD but as I said before my brother does. When he gets fixated on something, he’s really gets into it. Once a few minutes had passed and this kid already had four walls up I decided to grid up the entire mission. One gets the church, one gets the farm, etc.
After playing the game with them for an hour, I had a pretty good idea of where each kid should go.
Church kid, I found, was very particular about materials and shape(hence his hangup over the brick). I gave him free reign over the outer walls of the mission and showed him the reference pictures to get him started.
My brother liked the farms most (he was building dirt domes over the cows don’t ask me how I made this connection it just worked, okay), so he was in charge of building pens for the animals.
Another kid was, at first glance, very loud and bossy when it came to decorating (constantly said we were making chairs wrong). Turns out he likes interior design, like putting benches and beds in the little rooms, so his bossiness was just frustration with my brother’s artistic sense I guess.
Another was very good with placing trees and plants around the exterior (I guessed this because he covered the place in a ridiculous amount of trees and I asked him if he would like to know where they are supposed to go). He got to make a vineyard for us and organized how the crops should go.
So how did it turn out?
Actually very nice!!
So what did we learn? Kids actually like to play games and be praised for their creativity and intuition. If I had just told them to stop messing around rather than direct their attention to areas within their interests, they never would have gotten anything done.
After an hour of gaming they:
Mirrored my language; “thank you!”, “which part are you working on?”, “I like this block.”
Realized each other’s strengths; “hey [kid name] can you help me with the roof?” “How do you make the big trees [kid name]?”
Were able to articulate exactly what they did or didn’t like without using force; “that looks good!”, “how about we put it there?”, “I don’t like that block, how about this one?”
On the plus side, since we moved the game file to my device for safekeeping, I now have a cute little souvenir of the time I played Minecraft with four ten year olds.
This is a really long post, but it’s super important. In games like Fortnite where you’ll find lots of kids, it’s important (if you can) to steer them away from toxicity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into kids who talk like toxic adults and the act of just being nice to them completely turns them around.
My 5yo likes to tell herself stories before she falls asleep and she just came out to me in tears because she accidentally killed off a character.
“The story got sad all by itself Mum!” I know baby. I know.
She’s 6 now and having to share a room with her little sister. I said it’s okay if she shares the stories and she said “I can’t mum! They’re too violent for a 2 year old! People die in them all the time! It’s completely inappropriate!”
uhhhh no offense but think about what you say to kids because like… when I was a kid all I heard was my friends saying “no one wants to hear you sing shut up” until fifth grade I was singing under my breath “we will rock you” by KISS because I had one of those toothtunes toothbrushes that played it and my teacher stopped me and was like… do that again. And I thought I was in trouble because no one wanted to hear me sing so I didn’t at first but she kinda coaxed me into it and once I sang it she was like “that’s good! That’s actually really good, sorry, I’m a little surprised! Wow!” And it literally changed my whole life I immediately ran off to try and join the talent show (I was too late) and I did honor choir and joined choir in 6th grade and here I am now, doing a bachelors in music education with an emphasis in voice, and looking at doing my masters in musical theater performance. I owe literally everything to the fact that my 5th grade math/homeroom teacher stopped me and made me sing a little for her and took that time to tell me that I was good at it. That was a 2 minute interaction that I doubt she even remembers but it literally changed my entire life.
tl;dr: the things you say can have the most profound effect on a kids life. Think about what you’re saying the next time you tell a kid something. You never know if that 30 second interaction is going to affect their life forever, so why not make it a good one, huh?
story time: i taught my little cousin her first longer word when she was very young. i taught her to say “tax benefits”. and to this day my aunt still doesn’t know where she got it from, but it was a hilarious sight to see a little toddler waddling around the house, wearing a big diaper, all the while yelling “TAX BENEFITS!!!!”
My parents did this with me and “nuclear disarmament”.
I taught my little brother to say “micro-surgical vasectomy reversal” (saw it on a billboard) on a road trip, and he didn’t stop saying it for literal years.
My parents taught me to chant “Get your laws off our bodies!” for a pro-choice rally when I was like four and I went to preschool and taught all the other kids the chant and led them on a mini-parade around the playground and the teachers were like ?????????? ?????????? ????????????
whenever my brother threw a tantrum as a baby my parents would chant “live free or die” until he calmed down it was fuckin weird
when i was a kid whenever we got stuck in traffic my dad would say “what the fuck?!?” in a very comic voice and i would repeat it and then he would say it with a slightly different inflection and i would repeat that too and so forth and so basically my poor mother would be stuck in standstill traffic listening to her husband and 4 yr old daughter swearing at each other without end
i’m a preschool teacher and we like to joke around using radical vocabulary with the children, the other day i overheard one kid say ‘this is my truck’ and the other one said ‘no, this truck belongs to the collective’; they all say it now
A couple of weeks ago, we hosted a group of four-year olds from a local child care center in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania (the home of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies). The visit went so well, we’ll be hosting another group in July. My colleague Deborah Bishov, who arranged the visit, wrote up a short blog post on our library’s main blog, but I also wanted to say a bit more here about how the visit went.
We’ve hosted groups of children before, but they were older – 5th through 7th graders. The idea came from former colleagues of mine in the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington* : Lori Dekydtspotter, Head of Lilly Library Technical Services, and Cherry Williams, Manuscripts Curator in the Lilly. For many years Lori and Cherry have hosted groups of students from schools around Bloomington, a program that they have presented about at the ALA, and published about in books and journals. Shortly after I started at Penn, Lori and Cherry gifted me a box of goodies: quill pens, buckthorn berries, walnut hulls, oak galls, gum arabic, and a mussel shell with gold paint. To this I added a piece of cinnebar, lapis lazuli, saffron, and madder root. On visiting day I meant to bring along an egg and a bag of parsley, but of course I forgot.
Why these materials? Because they are the materials used by the girl Marguerite in the Getty-published Marguerite Makes a Book, which I loaned to the school about a month before their visit. They read it several times, and they were so excited to remind me of important plot points when needed:
Me: So, Marguerite has to help her father make the book!
One child: The horse stepped on his glasses so he couldn’t see!
Another child: He had to go home to bed!
Yet another child: His name was Papa Jacques!
We had a great time. We started by looking at the cover of the book, which was projected onto a screen.
I pointed to each item at they were able to identify every one! The parchment, the different color inks, the quills (we did have a brief conversation about the weight holding down the parchment). On a long table, I laid out all the materials from my box, plus a piece of parchment from the teaching collection. The children formed a line (more or less) and took turns touching everything – noting the different textures of the two sides of the parchment, the weight of the stones, the smooth shell, the pointy quill. At the end of the table we had set out two of our Books of Hours – very similar to the Book of Hours that Marguerite makes in the book. The kids weren’t able to touch those, but they leaned in nice and close!
Finally we had a question and answer period. We talked about where the books came from, who made them (“No, not Marguerite, she is pretend. But maybe someone like her!”), how they have survived so long, how they got here from England and France, what people did in the Middle Ages, why I am interested in medieval manuscripts, and we talked about how yes, sadly, the people who made these manuscripts are all dead. But their books survive, so a little bit of them survive, too!
This was so great, so much fun. I can’t wait for the next visit!
*I never worked in the Lilly – I worked in the Digital Library Program, which is now defunct, but I worked with the Lilly folks when I could and I still miss them very much!
Reblogging myself because I just spent 30 minutes with another group of preschoolers and I’m feeling very alive right now.
This is fantastic. We have a preschool group scheduled to visit in a couple of weeks, and these are great tips!
