NEWS USA TODAY ❚ MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2020❚ 7A
OPINION
STEVE SACK/THE MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE/POLITICALCARTOONS.COMAs COVID-19 keeps schools shut-
tered worldwide, millions of parents
are discovering a newfound apprecia-
tion for their kids’ poorly paid teachers.
Stuck inside with restless children,
unclear missions and dodgy digital
tools, many quarantined parents have
answered the home-schooling call of
duty with ... well, “Call of Duty,” loos-
ening household rules around video
games. In Italy last month, young peo-
ple staged what Bloomberg News called
“a Fortnite marathon,” contributing to a
more than 70% rise in internet traffic.
If you are feeling guilty about your
kids’ gaming habits, I have a one-word
suggestion: Don’t. With few excep-
tions, the hours your kids spend gam-
ing are hours well spent.
Do everything you can to keep their
learning on track. But this is an unprec-
edented time, and your kids can use a
break from the bad news and chaos. In-
stead of adding to your stress, think
about what your kids get from gaming,
what it means to them and how it can
actually bring your family together.
Research on the cognitive benefits of
games now finds that they help develop
visual acuity, emotional regulation and
decision-making. Many games are
simply beautiful storytelling tools.
Well-crafted video games satisfy kids’
desires for seven key things that life,
especially school, often fails to provide.
Channeling George Carlin, a teacher
friend calls them “Seven F-Words You
Can Use in School”:
❚Failure.A game isn’t fun in spite of
its difficulty but because of it. “I dislike
failing in games,” the theorist Jesper
Juul writes, “but I dislike not failing
even more.” Games actually stand
apart from ordinary life, Juul says, be-
cause we’re not disappointed if we find
it easy to learn to drive a car. But we’re
disappointed if a game is too easy.
❚Feedback.In school, it is mostly
delayed, mostly summative. Rewards
or punishments arrive long after the
work is done, with little opportunity to
earn a better result. Games offer exactly
the opposite: a nonstop stream of just-
in-time feedback that helps players
face the next challenge.
❚Fairness.Young people intuitively
see games as reliable systems that, for
all their difficulty, reward hard work de-
spite a player’s initial ability or skill lev-
el. It’s why there’s no Fortnite gap be-
tween low-income and wealthy players
(though wealthy parents still push to
give their kids an edge).
❚Flow.When was the last time your
kids got lost in what they were doing in
school? Video games offer this reliably,
affordably and without fuss, perfectly
aligning players’ skills and the work at
hand. The result, writes psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is an “opti-
mal experience” that’s powerful: “The
ego falls away. Time flies.”❚Fantasy.Games invite young peo-
ple to step into the shoes of aspirational
characters: heroes, villains and even
everyday adults. The typical high
school actually does this well — but to
benefit, students must stick around
until after the last bell rings. After-
school activities such as drama, de-
bate, sports and the school newspaper
offer these aspirational roles.
❚Freedom. “Civilization” game de-
signer Sid Meier once called games “a
series of interesting decisions.” Free-
dom of choice makes play appealing,
starting with the first choice: whether
to play or not.
❚Fellowship.Games are social. Do-
ing something hard with your friends,
then reflecting on the results, is satis-
fying and powerful. Yet it’s seldom a
feature of most classes.
All of which is to say: Take this op-
portunity to play with your kids. Close
your laptop and try their games. You’ll
be lousy at first, but this is part of the
delight they’ll feel. Ask them what they
like. You’ll be amazed at the answers.
And if this isn’t a satisfying argu-
ment, consider that as your confine-
ment endures, games can help get a bit
of school-facing work done. You can
role-play as Henry David Thoreau at
Walden Pond or as an attorney defend-
ing the Constitution. You can learn
about databases or logic, topology or
inequality, photosynthesis or atomic
structure, the water cycle, the carbon
cycle and the nitrogen cycle, and histo-
ry from the Dust Bowl to the Iranian
revolution. Not topical enough? Games
will teach about social distancing, im-
mune systems, antibiotic resistance,
bacterial and viral spread, and, yes,
pandemics.
If all else fails, you can always help
save the world from COVID-19 by play-
ing a crowdsourced protein-folding
game that might actually find a cure.
Time well spent indeed.Greg Toppo, a former education
writer for USA TODAY who teaches
journalism at Northwestern University
in Qatar, is author of “The Game Be-
lieves in You.”Home-schooling?
Bond over video games.
They teach 7 F-words
you want kids to learn
Greg ToppoYOUR SAY
The CARES Act, which provides re-
lief for economic losses due to the coro-
navirus, will give all Americans who
meet income requirements $1,200, un-
less they’re delinquent on child sup-
port. As someone who has practiced
family law, I can tell you that fathers
who are late with child support are usu-
ally broke, sometimes even homeless.
The purpose of the relief legislation is
to help those whose income has been
reduced or eliminated. Child support is
a bill like any other: It must be paid, but
people with little or no money have to
make difficult decisions to survive.
Furthermore, no matter how dire our
national emergency is, or how obvious
a father’s hardship is, child support is
never adjusted automatically. It re-
quires a court order, which can take
months, and cannot even occur now
because many courts are closed.
Reducing the relief payment, in-
tended to be a lifeline, to collect child
support is unfair, counterproductive,
and it’s a policy that must be changed
in the next round of relief legislation.
Jeffery M. Leving
ChicagoAll Americans deserve stimulus relief
LETTERS
[email protected]WANT TO COMMENT? Have Your Say at
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address and phone number. Letters may be mailed
to 7950 Jones Branch Drive, McLean, VA, 22108.“How can you stand it?”
It’s a question I’ve been asked many
times as I sit through almost every sin-
gle one of President Donald Trump’s
news conferences on the COVID-19 cri-
sis, just as I have sat through or listened
to almost all of his public speeches and
rallies. A recent circus in the Rose Gar-
den was especially trying. It featured
Trump again losing his temper at PBS
reporter Yamiche Alcindor,
bragging about what a great job
he’s doing and claiming that he
knows more about South Korea
than anyone (he doesn’t).
He brought up a parade of
CEOs, including a cameo from
the MyPillow company owner
and indefatigable Trump cheer-
leader Mike Lindell, who turned
an admirable gesture by his company
into a creepy mini-sermon about how
God chose Trump and how we must put
God back in our schools.
We didn’t learn much, but then, we
rarely do from these spectacles.
It’s exhausting and enervating,
watching the leader of your country
rant, bluster and lie, putting what for-
mer GOP White House staffer Peter
Wehner has called Trump’s “disordered
personality” on full display regularly.
Why would I do it? Why would anyone?
There are two answers, and neither
of them involves being a masochist.
First, as a professional matter, I’m a po-
litical scientist, and Trump is the presi-
dent. When he speaks, I listen, as I have
with every chief executive. Even if I
don’t learn much about policy — be-
cause Trump really doesn’t have “pol-
icies” so much as he has random
thoughts and reactions — I still need to
know what my fellow citizens are
watching and what they’re being told.
The other is that Trump’s rambling
news conferences, South Lawn fan-
dangos and bellowing rallies are a real-
time laboratory in democratic decline,
and I think it’s important to be a consis-
tent witness to it all. Although I often
live-tweet his public events as a kind of
venting, I’m actually trying to figure out
their impact on my own society.
Break in American character
Comparisons to other nations and
other times don’t help very much. It’s
difficult even to place Trump’s un-
hinged performances within the Amer-
ican experience, because these past
three years feel, to me, like a unique
break in the American character.
We’ve been divided before, but
we’ve always maintained a certain
standard for ourselves, and especially
for our national leaders. We’ve de-
manded some sense that they are in
control — if not of events, at least of
themselves. We have, until now, been
critical of undisciplined breaches of
conduct by public officials, whether a
congressman yelling “you lie!” at Presi-
dent Barack Obama or another saying
President George W. Bush enjoyed see-
ing our soldiers killed overseas.
Sure, we had zingers, from “you’re
no Jack Kennedy” to “there you go
again,” but we had basic rules about not
threatening to lock each other up or
throwing around words like “treason.”
We never celebrated Trump’s brand of
crude ignorance, his vulgar taunts and
fusillade of lies.
And so I watch, because at some
point this will end and we will have to
repair the damage to our political sys-
tem and our constitutional order. And
we will need to remember how it hap-
pened and what it looked like.
There are only so many of Trump’s
public statements you can listen
to before you doubt your own
grip on reality. That is the point,
really: to cast everything into
doubt.
Watching these fiascos can
make you irritable (which is
mostly my natural condition
anyway), especially when a Fidel
Castro-length Trump rally in-
duces an actual headache. I have a cer-
tain amount of awe for reporters like
CNN’s Daniel Dale who fact-check
Trump in real time; I have my limits.Shaken faith in fellow citizensAnd, yes, watching a Trump news
conference shakes my faith in my fel-
low citizens. When a reporter from the
Trump-supporting One America News
network, whose journalistic model
seems to have been imported from
North Korea, throws Trump some inane
softball, I wonder how such a network
even exists, and how its reporters sleep
at night.
I hear Trump contradict his own
words, even as they’re being read to
him verbatim, and I wonder how Amer-
icans watching a president brazenly lie
end up angry not at Trump but at the
journalist who asked the question.
I watch sycophants like Lindell tell
us that God chose Trump and I wonder
how many millions of people think God
picks presidents (something alien to
my personal faith as a Christian) but
then reassure themselves that He
somehow didn’t pick Obama.
Mostly, I watch these days because
my family, like everyone else’s, is in
danger and I want answers and guid-
ance from the experts who must share
the podium with Trump. My brother is
in a veterans facility that just had a CO-
VID-19 outbreak. My wife dares not
touch her new granddaughter. Our gov-
ernor has imposed self-quarantine re-
strictions on visitors to our tiny state.
And so I watch, because I hold Presi-
dent Trump responsible for his han-
dling of this crisis, and I am paying at-
tention to every single word he says.
Finally, I watch because we all
should, to ensure that we can tell our
fellow citizens about it even if they re-
fuse to listen. When this is over, many
Americans will claim they didn’t know
what the president said, when he said it
or what responsibility he might bear for
any of this. I will not be one of them. I
will remember. And I will speak up
about it, for a long time to come.Tom Nichols is a member of USA TO-
DAY’s Board of Contributors and author
of “The Death of Expertise: The Cam-
paign Against Established Knowledge
and Why It Matters.”Why I watch the
daily Trump show
Bearing witness to coronavirus crisis
Tom Nichols
Tom
NicholsGannett Media Corp.
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