Yeah, you know, I don’t want to be an old man telling kids to get off my lawn, but I do think we’re losing a little bit of something with video games. My son’s habit of playing for eight hours drives me a little bit batty. My wife and I argue about this a lot. He’s so brilliant. He’s the only person I’ve ever showed my work to who has the same sense of rhythm that I have. He can hear it. I know he can hear it.
And I know, because there’s a game on my phone that I play constantly, that’s pretty far from being able to create. It’s such an adrenaline rush in your head and you don’t need the creative stuff. And so when I’m doing that, I’m not creating. That can’t be good. I don’t think that’s good. You certainly can’t hear anything when you’re doing that. You know, I was talking about hearing the rhythm. You’re very far away from that. So that’s probably not a good thing. It can’t be healthy.
There’s a lot of parents that would go — to that. It drives me crazy when I see my son doing it because to me that’s a waste of a brain that is so alive and can do so many things. But it’s an attractive option for a kid. It’s a fun thing to do, you know? It’s a fun thing for me to do. If I had had all those things available to me that that age, maybe I would have done it.
You know, that’s an interesting point, because when I was a kid I had the 13 channels you did, what — half of them, seven channels. I had Mad Magazine. I had some Peanuts books, I’m running out. I was — I had no cable. I had nothing beyond those channels. And the result was I sat in my room and I wrote or I drew. So if I’m that kid now as I still am in some ways, I go on YouTube and fall down the rabbit hole and watch everything.
It just keeps – whatever you can think of you can watch, Dylan interviews or – I just keep – I mean there’s so many thing you can take in. That kid has a thousand channels. He has a limitless option on the internet. He has video games that are like you’re in the room playing it. That is a hard kid to reach. So I don’t know what the answer is. I think we’ve probably overdone it.
You need that quiet time for sure or you can’t hear anything, you know? Sometimes when I’m totally stuck, I’ll either go for a long drive or a long walk, you know? And then things quiet down and you can hear again.