First Interaction With Insomniac Spider-Man
I have had the honor of being an uncle to a 3-year-old ung boy over these past couple of years. On top of this, I am lucky enough to get to play with him 3 times a week. This past week he was playing with a Spider-Man LEGO figure and wanted me to be Venom.
I asked him, “Hay, do you want to go downstairs and play a Spider-Man video game?”
He looked at me and said “Yeah “ with a tad slack-jawed look on his face, not knowing what to expect.
We would descend down into the basement, I held his hand with one hand, and had the game disk with the other hand. And I turned on the system I knew that we would need to download the game again, and that would take about… 30 minutes. …. And for the patients of a toddler…. That is …. FOREVER!!!
So, I decided to make it as exciting as possible. We continued to play with his LEGO figurines, and I would play as Venom in his imaginative world. Every time the download made progress I would excitedly shout it from the rooftops!
“The download has… 16 MINUTES!!!!”
Spiderman would gather all of his friends to come see Venom and find out how much time the download had left, as if they were going to see the village cryer to get the good news
“Venom, how much time is left”?
“The download has ( hold for dramatic pause) 12 MINUTES LEFT “!!!
With this, time passed faster than any of us realized, and we were ready to start the game.
His hands were too small to hold the controller like a normal adult would. But… he didn’t care. He didn’t have his mind on what he couldn’t do. He found he was able to shoot Spider-Man’s web by pressing X, and was able to use that in his own way to scale a tall structure. It wasn’t the intended method of doing it, but it was what worked for him.
I would ask him if he wanted me to get on top of a building for him, and he would respond with
“Do myself”
The words “do myself” were some of the first words I spoke personally as a toddler, and now I’m on the receiving end of this experience. When I was growing up, my aunt brought over a PS1, and I played Spyro the Dragon. I didn’t understand objectives or how the game worked; I just found eternal joy by standing in one spot and pressing one button over and over again. Now, as I’m older , I’m seeing my nephew with that same experience, as he rapidly presses the X button to make Spider-Man swing. Not wondering or worrying about mission objectives, just having fun with what he can do.
As we continued to play, he found it difficult to share and would throw a fuss when the controller wasn’t in his hands. He is only three and is still learning about controlling his emotions. But I found myself in the contrasting feeling of looking back and thinking, was this what mom and dad felt like when I was growing up?
A lot of my family has allowed me to be the one to introduce him to video games and a lot of stuff involving the internet. My parents raised us back when that stuff was first introduced, and it was new not just to us, but to all of society. Now, 15 plus years later, I have all the knowledge and experience to where my co-workers come to me for computer advice.
And at moments when my boy is unable to control his emotions yet, because of a video game, I can find myself in the same position that my dad was all those years ago, staring down a road of uncertainty, having read all the books. In my dad’s case, I read all the parenting books; in my case, I know everything there is to know about computers and healthy habits with them. And yet, we both find ourselves equally as lost as we look at the road ahead.