Friday, September 27, 2013

In Which Firstborn Chooses a New Video Game

So our oldest son has learned how to tie his own shoes. As a result of this, of course, we no longer have to tie them for him. (He's seven. It hadn't been a problem, up until we bought him shoes that actually used laces; he's been operating on a velcro-based system for the last five years.)

As a secondary result of this, he has earned a prize. Now, I want to take a moment and emphasize that this was not my idea. No, this deal was set up by the Beautiful Woman. The deal was that if he could manage to successfully tie his own shoes three times in a row (and thus demonstrate basic aptitude at the activity), he could go the Movie Trading Company and pick out a new video game for himself. Well, yesterday he managed the feat - so yesterday his mother took him to the store and let him pick out a game.

The difficulty with this sort of arrangement is that once you've told the child that he can pick out any game he likes, he will expect to be allowed to purchase any game he likes. He chose (wisely) something that would work on the PS2, so that wasn't a problem. (Xbox would have been a problem; the Xbox is currently buried in the storage unit, to puzzle and delight future archaeologists, I suspect.) I had to pick up a second controller for the PS2 (because guess what else is currently boxed up in the storage unit), but that wasn't a problem; I'd been meaning to do that anyway, and it was pretty cheap.

However, I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit which game he actually chose. It's... well.. it's Mortal Kombat: SuperDeathBloodSport. I think. Something like that, anyway.

This is embarrassing for two reasons:

1. People might judge me for letting my seven-year-old purchase a game with that much spurting blood in it.

2. He pretty much pounded me into the ground in Versus mode last night.

Still, he earned it and he's happy with it, so I can't complain too much - even though I'm pretty sure I'm going to get pounded on again after dinner tonight. You know what they say: "Sticks and stone may break my bones, but pixelated violence will never hurt me."

6 comments:

  1. (He's seven. It hadn't been a problem, up until we bought him shoes that actually used laces; he's been operating on a velcro-based system for the last five years.)

    Yeah, shoe-tying isn't all it's cracked up to be. People tend to use "my child can't tie their shoes!" as a way of saying "they can't even child, how are they ever supposed to adult", but it's really not a big deal. I should know: I was fifteen and a half when I learned. (My little brother--who had just learned it, the week before his eleventh birthday--taught me, and that time it clicked.)

    (And then when I did learn, I bought my next pair of shoes with laces, and I hated it. They came undone far too often (but then, almost any amount of undoing is too often if you haven't grown up with it). They were the only shoes I replaced having neither outgrown them nor worn them out, they were that bad. Went right back to velcro. Adult-sized velcro's a bit tricky to find (I can't think of any good reasons for why), but so worth it.)

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  2. I'm really torn. On the one hand, I'm a big fan of people knowing how to do low-tech (or no-tech) things, and tying knots turns out to be a big part of that. On the other hand, the technology exists, and in a lot of ways works better, so I'm inclined to think that we should, y'know, use it. And, honestly, the problem with his shoes so far hasn't ever been the velcro; it's the elastic. For a kid his age, it wears out too fast.

    But my current work shoes don't lace, so I don't see why anyone else should have to deal with knots if they don't want to.

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  3. I'm a big fan of people knowing how to do low-tech (or no-tech) things, and tying knots turns out to be a big part of that.

    Well, slip-ons are even more low-tech than laces. I wore those until I outgrew all the sizes they make them for: adult-sized velcro is tricky to find, but adult penny-loafers are impossible. (Again, makes no sense, and may not be true everywhere. (I hope it's not true everywhere.))

    Knot-tying is handy often enough to be worth learning*, just not handy enough to worry about if you have a lot of trouble getting it. (And even then you might want to poke at it every once in a while: I gave up around ten or eleven, but when my brother convinced me to give it another try at fifteen I got it right away.)

    *Hiking boots, ice skates, non-shoe strings you want to have un-tie when you pull them.

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  4. Well, slip-ons are even more low-tech than laces.

    Good point. The shoes I wear to work are slip-ons, and they work fine. I was thinking more generally about knots; I did, for example, a fair amount of rock climbing when I was younger.

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  5. My kids can tie their shoes by my middle daughter prefers to get lace locks. They're pretty nice for lace shoes if you don't want to ever have to tie or untie.

    Also, I had a Mortal Kombat game when I first got some Nintendo system as a gift from my mother-in-law one Christmas. But then she walked through the room while I was playing it and asked, "Does this game take place in Hell?"

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  6. I haven't seen anything infernal yet, but this one has an acid bath. Presumably that's where you go when you need to clean everything off of you.

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