How do we talk about current events with our children? What are they old enough to comprehend? Video games can help you contextualize the conversation.

My seven year old has been reading a series of graphic novels. It is some sort of fantasy adventure. He loves it. When he had made it about ninety percent of the way through book six, he turned to me. “Dad, there’s no people with dark skin in this book.” I was proud of him for noticing.

“Yeah,” I said, “not in most of your video games either, or the cartoons that you watch. Imagine what it must feel like to be someone with dark skin and never feel like you’re considered normal.”

He looked at me pensively. I searched the internet for some pictures of Ferguson. I had trouble explaining the situation. I didn’t have answers for all of his questions about why these things happen, but I tried my best.

Children are smarter and more sophisticated than you think. Stop trying to shelter them. You can and should talk to them about most things. You must adjust your language so that they can understand, you need to contextualize it, but you needn’t avoid hard concepts. Racism, war, death, and violence are not dirty words. They are just the scary facts of being human that never get less scary. You’re never old enough to be comfortable with these things and you’re never too young to start trying to comprehend them. Your kids need your help. Plus, it is part of your responsibility to the rest of society.

I tried to explain to my kids about the crisis in the Ukraine. My sons are seven and nine years old and they overheard me complaining to my girlfriend about how the media in the U.S. is presenting the Crimea crisis as an isolated event. They overheard me wondering why there’s not more worry about the Ukraine being expressed in my Facebook feed. They asked me to explain what’s going on. They asked me to explain why it is a big deal.

It turns out it is hard to get children to understand geopolitics. I heard myself using phrases like “land grab.” They didn’t understand. I realized how little I know about Russia and the Ukraine when I couldn’t really answer all of their questions. I tried to do my best to explain the Helsinki Accords of 1974 and that the outcome in the Crimean peninsula has the potential to shift the way the entire world thinks about borders.

My kids nodded. I think they understood. I explained that I was upset because we all spend hours immersed in social media, eyeballs glued to our smartphones, and yet our overall knowledge of current events in the wider world seems just as limited as ever. In a globalized and hyper-connected world folks remain disconnected and disengaged from global issues. Apparently, we prefer to distract ourselves.

My nine year old thought for a moment and then he asked, “Dad, why don’t you write about it on Forbes or Twitter and tell people?”

I smiled. “That’s exactly what I try to do. And lots of other people try too, but it takes a lot of voices to break through the mainstream noise.”

“Should I start posting about it on Minecraft discussion boards?” He asked.

“Yes. In fact, why don’t you build a server that’s based on the Crimean Peninsula. I mean, instead of playing Minecraft Hunger Games or something. You could pretend you’re Vladimir Putin or Petro Poroshenko.” He’s thinking about it, and I hope it happens.

Certainly I don’t expect that a bunch of Generation Blockhead tweens fighting Zombies and building shelters in a pixelated version of Crimea are going to solve the world's problems. But I do wonder what the future could look like if the kids who will be tomorrow’s professionals, policy makers, and educators played today with more awareness of world issues.

Through play, children experiment and iterate. They learn to make sense of the world through imaginative exploration. Play is always educational. Toys and video games always teach kids something. They teach kids how to participate in the culture in which they live. These days, they seem to teach children how to operate computers and tablets for personal gain. Either that or they teach children how to distract themselves from reality.

But it doesn’t have to work that way. We could very easily use these same tools to raise a generation that’s not so easily distracted. Some people get it. Some game developers understand.

Check out Trip Hawkins’ new tablet game If You Can. The founder of EA turned his attention to using games to teach social emotional intelligence (I’ll be writing about the game soon). Over at E-line Media Alan Gershenfeld--the former Activision executive responsible for video game classics like Pitfall--sees how games can be an opportunity for multi-cultural storytelling.

Check out the trailer for Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) at the end of this post. The a game was developed in partnership between E-Line Media and the Alaskan native Cook Inlet Tribal Council. It should make us all wonder what can happen if we simply rethink the typical Hero narrative. Use your imagination. Envision the possibilities for the future.

Minecraft has become a web-connected giant sandbox where children can begin to create the world of the future. The thing is, adults really need to guide them. To do so, we need to play along with them. Have you tried to understand what your kids are doing in the Minecraft world? Have you listened to their stories? Have you seen the things they’re trying to build? You need to understand their frame of reference if you want to be able to guide them.

It is time for us to take the world of child’s play back from the big toy companies and typical game studios. The way our kids play is not about profit or commerce, it is about teaching them to make the world in the best way we can imagine it.

