Defeating Monsters

A friend was recently talking about how her child is often scared while watching movies, and it got me to thinking about Orion's development and history in relation to this subject. He also used to be fearful at any hint of a scary character or plot development. He would cry and scream at us to turn the TV off if a character looked the least bit shady or a situation seemed to be heading toward fearful.

Enter Super Paper Mario. We started playing that with him around the same time we were getting into the unschooling philosophy and decided to pretty much let him play it as much as he wanted. We had alot of fun working through it, and he was particularly delighted with all the pixels. On the other hand, he was quite afraid of several of the bigger monsters and the ones that were drawn with mean faces. As the game went on, however, he realized more and more that there was usually an easy way to get around them. Sometimes it was as easy as flipping the character into 3D and walking right past them. Other times, there was a pixel you could use to easily make them disappear or sneak by.

After playing for awhile, he was more and more able to solve difficult situations on his own, sometimes in very creative ways. Scenes he wouldn't even try at first became favorite pasttimes to work through. I soon noticed he wasn't afraid of scary characters in most shows anymore. He is sometimes still afraid of imaginary monsters, especially when he is having a stressful day, but I think having the video game frame of reference has made it easier to also pretend to have magical weapons to send them away. I really believe playing this game gave him a sense of empowerment and increased his problem solving skills. Not to mention he learned to read several words! This is just another perfect example of pushing past the negative stereotypes of video games to see the learning and positive influences that are there if you look closely enough and with an open mind.