Hotel Spaß*

When you feel the fast moving tempo of today’s world is leaving you behind there is nothing like overhearing a conversation of under 14 year olds to make you realise that, yes, the world has left you behind and you will never catch up:

 “..and each day lasts 3 seconds”

“but you can change the time to how you like”

“I put an arcade and a gym in at the same time once, and they all went to the gym. They didn’t go and visit half -half. They’re crazy.”

“Yeah, they stay in the laundry room for two years sometimes. Mad.”

“And when they go into the computer room they just bang their hands up and down, bang bang on the keyboards.”

“But it’s crazy, you open something up, say an arcade, and they all go in.”

“Are they complaining now, this minute?”

“No, they’re happy now”

“But then they say, “I want a gym, I want a gym, I want a gym! You go and build a gym and they don’t even use it!”

“Yeah, they are really stupid like that.”

“How long does two years last?”

“About 10 minutes.”

“Look at that maid. We fired her and she keeps on cleaning up. Thank you very much for doing that. Look at her - she’s still cleaning.”

“But, you know, when you open something up, they all just go straight in, it is crazy the way they do that.”

 “And have you seen the disco? In the disco they stick their hands up in the air like this.”

“……………… and they keep on doing it for years and years, right?”

“But there is only one in there right now”

“Yeah but he’s been there for ages-“

“I’ve built 49 floors now.”

“Expand, expand, click on expand!”

 “Damn,  I just built a floor over a lift, room, room, room.”

“Knock it down then”

“ I can’t because that will cost even more money”

“ But you know what. You open something up and they all just go straight in. It’s really crazy they all just go straight in.”

“You’ve said that four times now”

*Spaß, pronounced "shpahss" means “fun” in German and Hotel Spaß is an online game that you can play on Spielaffe.de.**  The English original is called Theme Hotel. It is a “construction and management simulation game in which your goal is to build a five-star hotel”, which is just about the very definition of ‘fun’ isn’t it? Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that game already?! What planet are you living on anyway?

**Spielaffe translates rather inelegantly as “game-ape”, and is a German platform for free computer games “for all the family***”, with plenty of ads of course.

***Warning: Don’t try playing this game on your computer at home in front of your kids. It will only end in humiliation and shame as you fail to get even one of the five stars in the game. My advice, leave it to the kids but enjoy the game's Muzak.**** 

**** The term Muzak is so like 1934! Now its called Mood Music. You didn’t know that? Really. Where have you been for the last 4 years? In Bielefeld, a smallish and often overlooked***** town in northern Germany? Oh no, sorry that’s me.

 *****I think the makers of this game may have made a few oversights. Why not up the “fun” stakes by introducing a few eccentric millionaires into the mix. In this case your guest wouldn’t just be griping about not having a gym. He might be more concerned that his peas be arranged in a certain order. Or perhaps the ghost of a recently deceased guest of the Ritz that threatens to scare your guests away? Or a few room-wrecking rock stars hurling furniture out of the window? And last, but not least, what about a mass walkout by staff because of the frequent on the spot sackings?

SkypeMe!

I am going to a meeting tonight of the Trailing Spouses' Art Group where the theme is "Sacrifice and Gains" in reference to career sacrifices , which are often a necessity when relocating one's life according to another person's career trajectory. Cheryl, who is leading the meeting, asked us to make a word cloud using sourced material on this theme.

As my husband has just had to go to America for work reasons, for three months leaving me and the two boys behind in Germany, there are obvious sacrifices that we are all having to make. As we are relying on Skype to communicate as a family I decided to source my word cloud from instructions on Skype from the internet (see above). I can identify some of the sacrifices and gains in communication that Skype offers us in words like "mishaps", "private/public", "support", "clearly" that appear in the cloud.

The first attempt to Skype with my husband newly arrived in Washington DC was a disaster. I could see my husband but I couldn't hear anything. It was so frustrating. So I was holding up this sign, which said :

My husband's face was pixelated and kept on freezing. The freezing thing when your Skyping bugs me. You can be rambling on thinking the other person's lack of movement means they are being extremely attentive but in reality the screen has just got stuck and it will be only a couple of mins before the connection is lost altogether. It still can give you the feeling that their digital alter ego is being rather rude by ignoring you.

Not having a smart phone or ipad hasn't stopped me going to greater lengths to integrate Skype into our normal family life. I lugged my 19 inch computer to the dining table the other day so that we could all have dinner together, sort of.

Kids don't interact in the same way as adults so we have to be creative in getting them to sit in front of a screen. My son draws during our conversations and then shows his pictures to my husband while we talk.

In terms of the theme of the TS meeting "sacrifice and gains", while getting used to the new situation of being a temporary single mum, I am not really focusing on thinking about a career.  It is hard to imagine or plan one when we don't know where will be living in one year. And as for my husband, he has obviously had to sacrifice a lot to continue along his path in academia by not seeing his family.  Unfortunately the academic world is highly competitive. You have to take the chances you are given, or else you are out of it.  Being an academic today, as my friend once pointed out, is a bit like being a Diplomat (i.e. highly mobile) but without any of the perks!

 We can only hope that our present sacrifice is serving our future gain.

Level Headed

Hungry Horace by William Tang ca. 1982

My 7 year old son has just got into computer games. It is a little scary how quickly it has turned into an obsession. But I can remember quite clearly my own fascination with computer games, so should I or can I really stop him?

I was older than him when I started getting into computers. It was the early 80s, and I was given a ZX Spectrum for my twelfth birthday in 1982. I used to buy computer magazines with pages of code on them, comprising of numbers, dots and dashes. I would spend hours typing these into my computer, even though the result would be a stick figure moving across the screen. After 4 hours of imputing, the computer might show up an error, which meant I had made a tiny mistake somewhere. Then I would have to scour through what I had done once more to find the mistake. Sometimes I never found it and had to give up.

Games were on tape cassettes. You would have to put them into a cassette recorder which was plugged into the computer. The screen would flash red to blue to the sound of a wavering high pitched frequency until, after about ten minutes or so, the game might load, if you were lucky.

A few weeks ago I showed my son an online computer game after he entreated me for weeks to play. Not long after this he was able to type in the website by himself and go to the game he wanted. Then on Saturday, I got up in the morning to see him and my 3 year old in front of the computer playing "The Hobbit", a computer game tied in with the Lego website. It is quite violent. Gandolf, the main character clubs everything in his path to the last inches of their pixels and I wonder if I have made the right decision. I see my son animatedly thrashing the keyboard. How quickly he has mastered this game, I think, and how natural it has come to him to play computer games.  What is happening now in his brain, I wonder? As he pulverises goblins, is the thrill in hitting the target no more harmful that hitting a target in archery, say, bringing with it a sense of achievement or satisfaction? Or is there there danger that being the master of this digitalised kingdom may give him a sense of power that he is unable to achieve in the real world, and thus make him feel safer sitting in front of a computer screen.

The scary thing is that in a few minutes I am as deeply enthralled by the game as he is. You cannot pause the game, and there are three levels to play. The soundtrack to the game comes back to me at other times of the day. I even find myself humming it as I go down the street. If you ever hear the music to the Hobbit game on the lego site, then you will find the idea of a 42 year old singing this in public hilarious.

The games that I played as a child come flooding back to me as I watch my son playing his. My favourite game, which looks so primitive now by today's standards was  Horace goes skiing. A friendly hooded character wants to go skiing. But first he has to cross a busy motorway to get to the ski slope and not get run over and taken away in an ambulance. Then he gets to ski down a slalom track. Not violent, but not exactly green cross code either. I don't know how this game affected me. I didn't feel the compulsion to run across busy roads after having played it, or else I wouldn't be here today. I don't believe that what is enacted on the screen desensitises children from rash behaviour or violence for that matter.

I do think though that those hours of playing computer games did perhaps have a negative affect on me, though I cannot be sure. The computer game used up quite a lot of my time where I could have been doing more creative hands-on activities. It created a routine and boundaries that existed within the game, and not which I could learn to develop myself. I had the feeling that I was doing a lot, whereas I was just sitting in front of the screen.

Today it is impossible to think games, computing and the digital world away. I just hope that I can help my son strike a balance between these two, very real, worlds.

What is your experience of your kids computer playing habits?

My first computer, ZX Spectrum from 1982