The Boy Who Runs With Wolves

“Okay so our main character experienced the genocide of his entire culture and is constantly running from the pain of it, and he’s traveling with two siblings still grieving the loss of their mother, who was killed during a colonial raid.”

“Sure…but how do we convey that the Big Bad antagonist is Evil for our 9-15 year old audience demographic?

“I know! We’ll have him horrifically burn off half the face of his young son for telling him that he should not kill child soldiers.”

“And how do we raise the stakes from that later in the show?”

“He’ll um…attempt mass ethnic genocide again while he psychologically torments his other young child to the point of insanity?”

Me: In what year?

Aunt: What?

Me: What year did you get your first apartment?

Aunt: 1973?

Me: Hmmm. Looks like that would be $1755 in 2021 money.

Aunt: *seems to go through seven emotions at once*

Me: What year did you start college?

Uncle: 1968?

Me: So if you scale up $1.60 to 2021 dollars that would be $11.94 and the current federal minimum wage is $7.25

Uncle: Bu-

Me: And it seems like from a quick google search the median rent in 1970 was $108 and today that would be $722 but this same chart tells me that the actual median rent in 2020 was $1,100.

Example: I downloaded Friday the 13th because it’s free on psn. I dunno how to play, so I just enter quick play and I’m matched with 3-4 kids on mic. Immediately on mic they’re shitty and disparaging to each other. They laugh at each others deaths, they actively work against team mates and self sabotage, they call each other “fags”, etc. From the sounds of the voices they cannot be older than 13-14.

I put on my mic and just decide I ain’t havin it. I am nice. I thank them for barricading doors or leaving me items. When they break free from Jason’s grasp I say “good job!” or I try to help them. One kid survived for most of the match by himself. When he dies, I tell him he did a fantastic job.

The mood shift is practically INSTANT. These kids almost immediately stop being dick heads. They start encouraging each other and being kind. After the match all of them try to friend request me. Which should tell you a couple of things:

A) kids want to be kind, and they want to have a nice time playing games. But encounters with adults like me or so rare that they’ve trained themselves to instantly put on a toxic, shitty, defensive veneer when encountering any new person online. It’s literally just THAT EASY to not groom a horrible gaming community, it’s just that NO ONE does it.

B) the speed of which they all tried to friend me was cute, but paints for me such a sad picture? Like these kids are SO desperate to find people to play with who aren’t crappy jerks. They played with me for 10 minutes TOPS and all instantly tried to reach out to me.

Now here’s the thing. Most of these boys, my brother included, have ADD/ADHD. About a week into the project all they had in their shared world was chaos. Somebody filled the place with tnt and lit it up. Holes everywhere. Whenever one would attempt to try and build something (mostly wood huts and not the actual project) it would be destroyed within minutes as the boys began to insult each other heavily and complain that the design was ugly.

I brought my own ipad with me and decided to sit with the boys while they continued their reign of terror. I joined the world and built a hallway out of brick at the very center of this war zone. Immediately one of them tried to destroy it under the impression that “it looks bad”.

“Well, what should I make it out of?”

“Diamond.”

The ten year old mind is a mystery to me…

Anyway, then I showed him some pictures similar to these:

I reasoned that it would be easier to sway this kid toward another pretty block than trying to get him to stick to the materials of the time, so I asked him if he would like to help me replace my brick design with quartz (eh, it’s white).

Bam! One of the ten year old anarchists is dutifully building me a glittering gem hallway for our insanely rich monks.

The other three are off somewhere still yelling at each other and setting off explosives, but we have something built. Much to my surprise the kid asked if he could build the church next because he “wanted to build the most important part”.

Here’s where I learned something important. I don’t have ADD or ADHD but as I said before my brother does. When he gets fixated on something, he’s really gets into it. Once a few minutes had passed and this kid already had four walls up I decided to grid up the entire mission. One gets the church, one gets the farm, etc.

After playing the game with them for an hour, I had a pretty good idea of where each kid should go.

Church kid, I found, was very particular about materials and shape(hence his hangup over the brick). I gave him free reign over the outer walls of the mission and showed him the reference pictures to get him started.

My brother liked the farms most (he was building dirt domes over the cows don’t ask me how I made this connection it just worked, okay), so he was in charge of building pens for the animals.

Another kid was, at first glance, very loud and bossy when it came to decorating (constantly said we were making chairs wrong). Turns out he likes interior design, like putting benches and beds in the little rooms, so his bossiness was just frustration with my brother’s artistic sense I guess.

Another was very good with placing trees and plants around the exterior (I guessed this because he covered the place in a ridiculous amount of trees and I asked him if he would like to know where they are supposed to go). He got to make a vineyard for us and organized how the crops should go.

So how did it turn out?

Actually very nice!!

So what did we learn? Kids actually like to play games and be praised for their creativity and intuition. If I had just told them to stop messing around rather than direct their attention to areas within their interests, they never would have gotten anything done.

After an hour of gaming they:

Mirrored my language; “thank you!”, “which part are you working on?”, “I like this block.”

Realized each other’s strengths; “hey [kid name] can you help me with the roof?” “How do you make the big trees [kid name]?”

Were able to articulate exactly what they did or didn’t like without using force; “that looks good!”, “how about we put it there?”, “I don’t like that block, how about this one?”