Newbie

So I spent a night last week trying to hunt down some Webkinz. They’re all the rage right now (this year’s “Tickle Me Elmo,” I understand), and my daughter Nellie had to have one for her birthday. (If you’re a Webkinz newbie, you can learn about them here.

Happily, success was ultimately mine – after visiting more than a few stores, I finally found a couple of the coveted little toys. The neat thing about Webkinz is that they’re really cute plush dolls that kids can snuggle with at bedtime. And even more importantly, having one (and the secret code that comes with it) allows kids to visit an online world that’s a cuddly version of The Sims. Once you’re there, you take care of a virtual version of your little Webkinz pet: you feed it and you keep it entertained.

So last night Nellie (seen to the right in her “wii” incarnation) punched her Webkinz code into our iBook and off she went. She’s only seven years old, but like everyone else’s seven-year-old, she’s the smartest one ever! Still, I usually stick around as backup help anytime she goes on the computer.

When Nellie plays one of my games, she generally seems happy to have me around. She wants me nearby… and she expresses this feeling by sitting in my lap. The same thing happens when she surfs the web. These are activities that we just always do together.

But last night was different.

Nellie seemed happy to get rid of me. Now it was her thing, especially because she knew I had absolutely no experience at all with Webkinz. This was her thing now.

Of course, being a doting (and sometimes doddering…) father, I did stick around. But Nellie didn’t really need me. Not much, anyway. She was able to get all of the pet “adoption” papers processed, and she was soon ready to play with her new doggie friend in the Webkinz world.

Now where’s all this leading?

Well, there are a couple of things here.

The first one is that ownership is a huge factor in motivating kids to learn. This was Nellie’s pet and it was her game. So she wanted a chair all to herself. She didn’t need my stinking lap anymore! Also, the Webkinz people are very smart about building players’ engagement. They give kids lots of chances to personalize their characters. And this, of course, makes Nellie identify with her doggie friend and want to play with it that much more, both in the real world (her little plush doll) and in the virtual one (its avatar).

The other thing here is that sometimes you think you know something, but you don’t know anything. Let me rephrase that. Sometimes I think I know something, but I don’t know anything! I’ve always known on some level that we learn best by making our own mistakes. But I haven’t really known it, because I haven’t been acting it out. Maybe Nellie needed to climb out of my lap for the light bulb to go off over my head.

As I sat watching her last night, I really saw her figuring stuff out. And I very consciously tried to stay quiet – I didn’t point at anything on the screen or give her any hints (proof that I’m educable too, I suppose). Nellie did make some mistakes (and when that happened, she was smart enough to ask for help). But for the most part, she moved forward by getting lost and then figuring out how to find her own way… by herself.

And I sat by, grateful (for now…) that any mistakes she could make as a seven-year old playing Webkinz were tiny compared to the ones she’ll have the power to make in a few years.

Being OK with losing is a running battle for me (and a big theme of this blog). I don’t know if it’s because of my age. Or maybe it’s just my personality. Actually, I think it’s my personality.

I was never OK with losing even when I was a kid.

So I was more than a little intrigued when I saw an article at Gamasutra called “Losing for the Win: Defeat and Failure in Gaming” by game designer Ben Schneider.

Ben writes that at his first job designers “were strictly forbidden to create scenarios with anything even vaguely resembling defeat or loss in the story-lines.” Since then, Ben writes, things have changed. Lots of games incorporate setbacks into their stories, as per this scene from “Half Life 2”:

That guy getting his butt kicked is the player’s avatar. Ben writes that most players find this fellow’s “setback” (and it does look like quite a setback…) to be an acceptable part of the game. And, in fact, he writes, setbacks can actually make a game more powerful, since they work to “make the subsequent victory that much more glorious.”

It is really interesting stuff and probably much easier to digest for those of you with more gaming experience than I have.

And it got me to think once again about winning and losing.

I have two daughters: Nell is six and Grace is nine. And they have very different attitudes toward playing games.

Nell is almost always up for playing a game – Dominoes, Operation, Don’t Break the Ice – you name it and she’ll play it. She used to cry a lot when she’d lose at a game, but now she does a much better job of accepting that she won’t win every time. Nellie seems to really enjoy game play and the social interaction that comes with it.

Grace, on the other hand, is more like me. She doesn’t want to lose.

While the rest of the family is playing games, Grace is likely to be a bystander or to take on a non-competitive role (like “banker” or something). Grace is less expressive than her sister in some ways, but I’ve no doubt that she feels things just as deeply (and in this way, she’s like me, too). I think it really hurts her when she loses. And I think it really hurts her when she thinks she’s done something wrong. And that is a feeling that many, many of us share.

What’s the upshot of all this?

Well, whether we’re game designers or schoolteachers or parents, we need to remind kids that, as Ben wrote, the setbacks will indeed “make the subsequent victory that much more glorious.” And we need to remind them that sometimes a “victory” can be had not by winning, but merely by playing the game.