The Binder
To control how I played video games, my Christian fundamentalist parents created a tool even the devil would be envious of.
The Binder spent most of its life on a shelf.
Peer at it and you’ll see a white, plastic, three-ring Avery brand brick—the kind that squeaks and farts like a plastic toilet seat when you open it. The Binder sneers a mouth of metal teeth. It is a bureaucratic bear trap. The edges of the cover are as sharp as Pop Ice. They can’t cut skin, but they bear down on your palm as you cradle ’s behemoth weight from family meeting to shelf, from shelf to referendum on the previous family meeting.
The basic rules included “no video games if the lawn needs mowing,” “no video games if the sun is visible,” and “no video games if the temperature rises higher than 40 or sinks lower than 85.”
(Seriously.)
The Binder was a legal document, a complex aggregate of rules, an Office Max Ten Commandments. It contained forty-some-odd pages of spreadsheets, printed Word documents, and diagrams. My parents claimed that these papers would help govern every nuance of our video game experience.
Thinking back on it, I recall some other gems:
No more than two hours of “game time” a week
No more than one hour of “game time” a day
Watching your brother play counts as “game time”
“Game time” is non-transferable but can be deferred to the following week at a 50% loss
No video games if you haven’t finished your daily Bible reading (AKA: “quiet time.”)
Violating any rules will result in the loss of “game time” for six months.
Viewing these dictates with the wisdom of age, I see things more fully. My parents were strict Christian fundamentalists, and as such, The Binder was actually a concession on my parents’ part—a kind of no-man’s-land. Their true preference was that we boys might eschew video games entirely, preferring to go about like Benjamin Franklin in a perpetual state of puritanical self-betterment.
Mom and Dad pictured us reading classic books beneath oak trees in the summer heat, rising (of our own volition) before the days’ work had begun to run a few miles, and sinking, after the days’ work was through, into the diligent study of times tables, business plans, and scripture.
Video games were frivolous, and as such, they were a complete waste of time. Like dancing, or medication, or Ed, Edd n Eddy, video games weren’t “evil” but they were dangerous. Suspect. Toeing the threshold of The Devil’s Workshop. Loafing listlessly about his front window. Strutting our stuff before his Ring Doorbell.
Like all draconian legal systems, The Binder encouraged anti-social behavior, or what I prefer to call “feral gluttony.” I knew my parents could control every moment of my life at home, but they couldn’t control what I did at my friends’ houses, so when I slept over I’d do nothing but squat in front of the Sega, PlayStation, or PC, binging every spare second of “game time” I could gobble.
After 10 straight hours, my friends would beg to do something else: go outside, eat food, sleep, use the bathroom, but I was deaf to their cries. Eventually, this led to less invitations, which meant less “game time,” which meant an escalation of the “feral gluttony.”
At home, because it “cost time” to watch, I would play alone, sitting at the old white box of the computer, broadcasting the dern-DEERN!!! trumpet from Age of Empires to my salivating brothers down the hall. If this wasn’t bad enough, The Binder required that I place a white kitchen timer in front of the screen to tick-tick-tick away each precious second.
I still feel vaguely nauseous every time I play a video game. If my wife walks into the room and picks up a sock, I will leap out of my chair like a Jack-in-the-box to help her carry the sock to the laundry machine. I’m terrified that my wife (a grown adult woman) will tell me (a grown adult man) that I have used all of my “game time,” that I am “wasting” time, that I am a lazy good-for-nothing, that I will never make partner at the firm… or… something.
My parents were motivated to do what they did by their fundamentalism and its special American brand of the puritan ethic. But in puzzling over their motivations, I’ve come to believe that there was more to it than just that.
Mom and Dad are still ardent fundamentalists, but when I’ve asked them how they feel about The Binder now, they give me mixed reviews. Mom usually facepalms and says something like, “I guess you can’t get every decision right as a parent.” Dad, on the other hand, sticks to his very John Wayne-inspired guns and refuses to budge an inch lest he lose everything.
“The Binder was a legal document, a complex aggregate of rules, an Office Max Ten Commandments. It contained forty-some-odd pages of spreadsheets, printed Word documents, and diagrams. My parents claimed that these papers would help govern every nuance of our video game experience.”
Within his stoicism however, I occasionally catch a hint of softness: a sideways grin paired with a twitch in his eye. He is a man who sees everything as a binary battle, but the battle over The Binder is over and, in some ways, he lost. When I see him make that sideways grin, I can’t help thinking he’s a little baffled about why he fought so fiercely in the first place.
But I’m not baffled. Now that I’m thirty-one with two kids of my own, I understand better why he didn’t “get it”—because I no longer “get it.” Video games and technology in general has moved beyond me. I’m not at the nexus of “cool” anymore, I’m living somewhere on the outskirts of “not totally lame.” I steam with red-hot rage at the sight of my five-year-old daughter slouching for hours with the iPad clenched in taut fists. I despise the way her eyes drone through the sloughtrough of "YouTube Kids." I am confused by Roblox. Fortnite dances hurt my body (the kids do still do those right?) and even talking about “VR chat” makes me deeply seasick.
So I don’t “get” games the way I used to, but that doesn’t mean I need to fear their effects on my children. “Game time” is an abstract. You can’t touch or taste or hear it. And in an effort to combat anxiety, I’m trying to exchange the metaphor I was taught (“game time” = currency / currency = time) for one that feels more healthy (time = a disembodied spiritual force). By that logic, time cannot be “poorly spent” because time can’t be “spent” at all. To think that it can cheapens time. Time is limited, but not scarce. It can’t be saved. It goes away whether you’re using it or not. At some point, time runs out.
Instead of feeling that video games are “time poorly spent,” for myself or my kids, I’m trying to breathe deeply, re-center, and remember that time, like death—or a particularly difficult bowel movement—must be passed. I can’t hoard it because it isn’t mine. It’s a flock of geese gaggling overhead, moving up and away whether I want them to or not.
And while I have the time in this moment, I might as well pass some of it.
My daughter watched me play Helldivers II the other day, and after noticing the beautiful pixels sparking across the screen as I burned away the taint of bug juice with my FLAM-40, she said, “Good job, Dad! You’re getting all the spiders!”
After a silence, she got curious.
“Dad,” she said, “do they make games for five year olds?”
“Yes.”
Yes. They. Do.
Binders need not apply.
 | A guest post by
|
My parents were fundamental Christians about some things but not other things so I had a rather strange childhood. However, I was discouraged from playing video games merely because "it's for boys." My husband is the one who encouraged me to try (and maybe he regrets that a little as I have "borrowed" his handhelds for my use). I really appreciate your ruminations on time and the passage of time. I'll be keeping that close to my heart whenever I am discouraged that I failed to do a daily task. So glad I never had a Binder, though. Woof. My condolences.
Welcome back to video games, gamer.