AT Computers

On the eve of a two-week vacation, John Davison reveals his video game secret for keeping his 6 year-old and 5 year-old boys entertained on a long flight. Their system of choice is not longer the DS…it’s something else.

John Davison is the EVP, content of GamePro Media

I’m not ashamed to admit it, but I’m completely useless at organizing any aspects of my life outside of work. I can juggle websites, social media strategies, print schedules, content redesigns, and coverage plans, but ask me to tell you where the checkbook lives, and I have absolutely no clue. My problem is that I just don’t have the patience or the focus for things like paying the cable bill. I’ll happily complain about Comcast’s woefully inadequate service and monopolized grip on our neighborhood’s broadband connections, but I couldn’t tell you how much we’re paying them. Whatever it is, based on the service the best I could tell you is “too much.”

More significantly at this time of year, my vacation-planning skills are simply non-existent. Fortunately, Mrs. D is infinitely more organized at such things than I, and as a result we are jumping on a plane this weekend to go somewhere hot. I’m not entirely sure where, because I wasn’t really paying attention when all of the planning was going on, but I’m assured that there are beaches.

Which leads, in a roundabout fashion, to the subject of this week’s editorial. For the past few years, whenever we’ve planned any kind of journey, whether it’s the 11 hour flight home to England to visit family or the 6 hour flight to wherever it is we’re going this weekend, the subject of keeping the kids entertained has been of paramount importance. Now, while I’m hopeless at booking hotels and ensuring that tickets are procured, one thing I can do is keep the kids amused. Dad has a fairly cool job, remember. And, more importantly, boys are fundamentally pretty easy to keep entertained. It’s as true when they’re 5 years-old as when they’re 35 years-old. Boys like toys. Electronic ones preferably. Mom may think it’s terribly productive to have pencils and books and carrot sticks and word jumbles that are distributed on a carefully-orchestrated time-release system over the course of the journey, but dad knows different. Dad has a secret weapon that works every time, or at least he did until recently; the Nintendo DS.

As soon as my two boys discovered Lego Star Wars (or Batman, or Indiana Jones, they’re not too fussy) and Mario Kart on the DS, long journeys were much easier to manage. If the DS was charged, and we had a portable DVD player as back up, we could keep them entertained for as long as necessary while still being able to encourage periods of “looking out the window” to satisfy both mom and dad’s feelings of guilt. All was well with the world. Journeys had become fairly predictable, and the kids were always reasonably civilized and well-behaved as a result.

This has all changed now, and it changed at a very specific moment; the afternoon of April 3, 2010. How can I pin it to such a specific date? Because that’s the day the iPad was released.

What follows will hopefully serve as validation for any tech-savvy parent desperate to justify the purchase of an iPad for anything other than selfish reasons. In short, it’s the ultimate family travel companion. From a purely practical standpoint it’s very robust, it’s difficult for the kids to damage (particularly if it’s in a case) and the battery life is insanely good. On top of this, it’s capable of satisfying just about any need that a bored, irritable kid on a long journey could have. You can load it with movies, with TV shows, and most importantly; games.

I have to admit that I was extremely reluctant to relinquish control of the iPad to anyone at first. This was dad’s toy. Just about everything else in the house had been fully democratized, but this one was supposed to be different. Mine, mine, mine.

This was a ridiculous attitude to adopt though, as it’s contrary to one of the core strengths of the thing. The design of the iPad makes it a perfect slab of real-world social entertainment. You pass it back and forth on the couch to share videos or websites, and you can easily sit and play a game together thanks to the screen being so large.

Anyway, I digress. In that weird way that kids’ tastes evolve, my boys’ love of the iPad was initially born out of something incredibly male; guns. My oldest has a friend in first grade that is inexplicably obsessed with the army. He has absolutely no family ties to the armed forces that I’m aware of, but he is apparently a freakish walking encyclopedia of all things military. As is the way with 6 year-olds, you put two of them together for longer than 45 seconds, and the tastes of one rub off on the other. Consequently my boy is now similarly obsessed, and his new tastes are rubbing off on his little brother.

This, of course, led to the question “dad, do we have any video games about the army?” Not wanting to boot up, say, Call of Duty for fear of scarring them for life, the best I could come up with on such short notice was Fieldrunners.

Boom.

Talk about a life-altering event. The combination of soldiers, guns, a simple touch-based interface, the big screen, and the indescribable magic of being allowed to play a game on dad’s special gizmo hooked the boys instantly. As a result, I don’t think either of them has played a game on any device since.

Fieldrunners led to Angry Birds, and Angry Birds led to Plants vs. Zombies. Every time they’re allowed to play games, they immediately request the iPad. No question. In the past, when playing on Wii, PS3, or Xbox 360 they’ve exhibited that pathological disdain for each other that all brothers seem to have. They’d never play against each other, and they’d never, ever, ever play co-op. With the iPad though, they sit quietly together and give each other advice, calmly making bird twanging suggestions, or discussing plant-placement strategies. It has an unnerving calming effect on them both. We don’t understand it, but we also don’t question it… because it casts some kind of magical spell that just works. And as any parent will tell you, if you stumble on something like this, don’t f**k with it.

So for this year’s summer vacation, we don’t need to root through game boxes and drop DS carts into a ziploc bag that we’ll inevitably lose at some point, because the guys seem to have no interest at all any more. My five year-old described it as “lame” the other day. Not sure where he picked that up. Instead, we just need one toy. Yeah, Dad’s toy. The boys even want to sit next to each other on the plane so they can share the iPad, play games together, and watch episodes of Phineas and Ferb once they’ve (presumably) cleared that last wave in PvZ.

So where does that leave dad and his need for technology? I guess there’s a DS free now.

John Davison is the EVP, content of GamePro Media. As you’ve probably gathered by now, he’s about to go on vacation for a couple of weeks.