Video games can have an effect on the way people think. I’ve seen this first-hand with my kid, who just turned four. He sees in a way that I don’t. Things I take for granted as harmless or meaningless can affect him for days, or even weeks. If he sees nothing but men in a few episodes of his favorite superhero shows (which happens more than I realized), he might start to talk about how women aren’t real superheroes. If he watches a show where a hero like Batman takes sadistic pleasure in hurting another person, he might talk about how sometimes it’s fun for the good guys to hurt people.
Thankfully, his mind is just as open to corrective suggestion as it is to corruptive influence. It only takes the viewing of a couple of Marvel Rising shorts to remind him that both men and women can be superheroes, and a couple of empathy expanding talks to remind him that hurting other people for the sake of it is never OK.
So far, the Guacamelee One-Two Punch Collection on Switch has been equally wholesome family fun. Both top-rated games feature clean, expressive art that’s easy for a kid to try to copy, drop-in co-op featuring equally heroic men and women, and plenty of chicken-on-skeleton violence that has no real-world equivalents. Playing these games for 22 minutes a day with my son has offered all the pros of watching the old ’90s Batman cartoon with none of the need for “But it’s not actually OK to hit strangers in the face with boomerangs, son” post-show coaching.
Source: Destructoid Guacamelee One-Two-Punch boxed edition is helping me raise my child