Whatever Happened to Imagination?

You must be an 'old fart' like me! I think the same way about the 'music' they listen to...

Easy to fix, just get the kids to load a "Real world experience" App onto their iPhones.

Lucky you - my sister & I were barely allowed out of the house* and then only together and with the dog (I loved that dog) and we weren't allowed near the stream or the overgrown ex-railway line. We didn't have computer games, but I read voraciously and designed things from games for my sister and cousins, to butterfly rearing enclosures, to show jumping circuits for the dogs. And building bridges for my train sets using blocks and sticklebricks™ and plastic Meccano™...

These days my boss acknowledges that I'm the "natural" in our department at designing processes and protocols...

*This is till true when I go to visit....

I exchange e-mails with a friend that lives in the house I grew up in when I was a kid. A small town in MA about 20 miles from Boston. She takes care of the grandchildren for her two daughters during the day. And she can't let the kids out to play because of today's perverts that roam the streets. Wow, that comment surprised me because of the remote nature of the area. When I lived in this town there was never a problem with crime. My parents never told me to watch out for strangers. So maybe playing on the computer is the best thing for kids these days. Scary, huh?

I grew up an army brat mostly on army bases around the world.

Once of our favorite games was "see who could die the best"!! We would have one kid with a pretend rifle behind a tree or fallen log. One at a time, the other kids would charge the "bunker" and the kid in the bunker would aim and yell BANG. The idea was to perform the most realistic fall and die improvisation.

The kid in the bunker would rate each "death", declare the best, and that kid would become the next shooter.

Of course, we all watched the WWII movies coming out of Hollywood for inspiration.

Hooker

Video games and movies are robbing us of our imagination. We're letting electronis devices do the imagining for us.

I hope I never lose my cynicism about cynics.

I'm all-too-rapidly getting to be an old fart myself, but the only problem I see with modern youth culture is the failure to get outside. Humans will always need to remain aware of the physical world, because we, you know, live there. The imagination and creativity is still present in our kids, it's just directed more inward toward ephemeral things.

Everything else is just the same old, same old. Old farts complain about the crap kids listen to, about the way they dress, about how stupid they act. They do this as if they're the first ones to do it, or as if they didn't hear the same words from their parents and grandparents.

I guess it's hard to find original ways to complain.

I would have to disagree with the OP here. My "growing up" phase almost perfectly spans the wooden stick guns to hi-tech computer game age. (Born in 56) I have played with both. I would agree that the computer age is depriving us all, not just the youth, of much needed excercise and fresh air but it is not costing us our imagination. I tend to hear that complaint from those who don't play computer games today. We are not talking pac-mac or even Mario and Luigi anymore. Personally, when not involved with RL (real life in the gamers jargon), I am a sedate Hobbit growing taters and such in the Shire. While it requires a great amount of imagination to maintain the persona it also takes some serious brain power to track the constantly fluctuating market place in order to sell my products for a profit. If the quiet rural life gets to boring I'll switch characters and log onto my axe weilding dwarf and set out to do battle with the minions of Sauron in Mirkwood or Kazadum. Again the imagination will be fully engaged and I can't begin to describe the concentration and other skills required to do battle in a full "fellowship" (6 players) where my job as the "tank" to get keep all the bad guys beating on me instead of my more vulnerable companions.

So as I said the physical workout is missing but the mental calastetics involved are huge. The Wii system could be the next step, if I had to actually stand and just go through the motions of swinging that axe and block the opponents with my sheild? I'm sure I'd be wearing slimmer pants in no time at all.

There is also the added advantage of interacting with people from all over the world and chating with them during the quieter moments in the game. How many different nationalities did we meet every day while playing with those good old wooden guns? How many did we pretend to kill?

We don't stop playing games when we get old, we get old when we stop playing games.

"We don't stop playing games when we get old, we get old when we stop playing games." I like that . I grew up with Tinkertoy Sets, Erector Sets, Gilbert Chemistry Sets, Weeden Toy Steam Engines a few 3-Speed Raleigh bicycles that took me everywhere. Would often receive the same thing the following year because I wore stuff out. Some of the junior level sets became senior sets; kinda like going from junior engineer to senior engineer. Those toys provided me hours and hours of stimulation and some imagination. Liability litigation put an end to the big chemistry sets and probably impacted some of the toy steam engine manufacturers. I was never the brightest kid on the block, but I sure enjoyed myself and I still do. I'm in the process of laying out a circuit board for the power supply section (left side) of the tube audio amplifier (right side) I circuit boarded last year. The similarity of what I do today and did in the mid-1950's is called "hands-on," let's call it hands-on imagination. Think I'm having fun, you're damn right I am!

The impulse to play is built into whatever we please ourselves to call "higher animals". The force that fuels all art is rooted in "borrowing" - as a cursory read of Tolkien, for instance, will show. Our children have a vastly richer trove from which to borrow - and if one is on a 'vampire schedule' because his buddies are awake in Australia then, I won't criticise, on the grounds that it's an opportunity that wasn't available to me.

I don't like the emphasis on "shoot-em-up" - and never did. But as I understand it from "number two son", multiple gamers are often acting cooperatively and facilitating one anothers' achievement of whatever goals they have in common. Role playing games may be teaching mutually beneficial behaviors, lessons of cheating, fairness and reward, optimal organization and communication, much more quickly & efficiently than simply being knocked about by "RL" will do. Too often, in the "real world", people lose too much in the way of lifetime and resources to be able to begin again, with any hope of achievement.

There's the worry about "escapism", but there always has been, hasn't there, whatever your drug of choice. In fact, imagination itself is escapism - what else would it be? I'm counting on the "dress-rehearsals" not being a substitute for living. In fact, one does have to feed, clothe and shelter their own flesh and blood, and no virtual being is a substitute for another real, warm one (however funny they may smell sometimes). I'm counting on not having wasted my effort raising children who live some of their lives in computer enhanced virtual worlds.

I have to agree. Imagination seems to have atrophied due to lack of use. TV and to a lesser extent video games spoon feed you entertainment leaving little for the imagination to do.

When I was very young I used to listen to Jean Shepard on WOR radio late at night under the covers with a flashlight. What a master storyteller he was! With just his voice he could get my imagination to create an intricately detailed and often hilarious little world that seemed completely real, if only for a couple hours, in my little enclave. The mind has some awesome graphics capability. What I found to be so entertaining then most younger people today would dismiss as boring. Sad really.

I have to disagree that one's visual imagination atrophies by seeing what other people imagine. In its most basic appearance, we're always imagining our various worlds (re: The Vision Revolution; Mark Changizi). Sometimes other people's visual representations of characters and scenes from books I've read, can be a little jarring - on the other hand, sometimes quite enlightening. A gifted actor can show you facets of a character of which you may otherwise have been unaware.

The human imagination isn't limitless. It's very good at putting things together in new ways, but it has to have the materials in the first place. For example, the magnificent word music of the Kalevala, recounts heroic endeavor in the images of farm life and wild Finland - that's what they knew about. Not having been to Finland, I tend to imagine it similarly to farms and lands I know.

Living as we do in this growing world of miracles, born of interrelated visions that inspire one another, it's a curious notion that imagination has atrophied. In fact, I think that the presently expanding range of ways of seeing and things to see enriches imagination immeasurably.