When I was little (between 5 and 10 years old) I grew up in the early-sixties, post second world war era London of bombsites and grey realities.

Like most boys my age at that time, I watched an endless succession of Brits Vs Germans war films at the saturday cinema club, on (the newly acquired) TV and bought things like the Commando Comic – which was every bit as gruesome as anything you’ll find today in Call of Duty :

 

 

 

I used to have endless cap gun fights with my friends in the streets. I used to take the bus to Southend so I could walk down to the pier and play a very early version of an electronic video game involving a real periscope and a U-Boat on screen. I used to spend hours and all my pocket money on that infernal machine torpedoing things from freighters to enemy gunboats. I can’t say it scarred me for life or affected my cognitive development – it was all pretend and excellent fun.

REALITY vs FANTASY

I haven’t forgotten the thrill it gave me as a child but I wasn’t naive enough to think that all I consumed was anything other than fantasy. The realities of the Vietnam war and other adult intrusions into my life were more than evident and I can still remember the bowel freezing moments of sirens on police stations being tested in London leading up to the nuclear confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So when I read about the supposed dangers of gaming and the numerous negative references to their application to education I remember my own history in this area with a wry smile. When the ZX Spectrum came out twenty years later I bought one immediately and played a fair few of the games at the time. By that time I was teaching and I started to learn Basic and brought the machine into class so I could program animations for pupils and start to teach them how to code.

Five years ago, when Second Life came out, I was an early adopter – I’m still in there working out smart ways of using the immersive environment to teach and learn effectively. Anyone who knows me, knows I am not really into reminiscence or nostalgia for times gone by – I prefer to live in the present but where relevant, the past can give an insight or long view into events going on today so long as we learn from our mistakes…

BACKLASH AGAINST GAMING AND MORAL PANICS

The sudden backlash against online Gaming and the arising of concerns about possible changes in brain activity in Teens and  “unethical” lack of responsibility makes me wonder. And I had, to be honest, one of those WTF moments (if you don’t know what that means cover your synapses I won’t provide you with a link).

You see they are only pretend – ask any teenager if they consider the war games they play to be real…The whole process bound up in gaming is, strangely, a ludic one – this may be news to some people-  it doesn’t have to have real life repercussions. Just as the imaginary number of people I shot dead when a child never turned me into a rampaging serial killer – it isn’t real. But then nobody was giving me brain scans at the time – it’s probably too late now…

ONLINE GAMING HAS A LONG HISTORY

More than 30 years ago, in 1978,