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I Let My 10-Year-Old Daughter Play Left 4 Dead 2, and It Was One of the Best Decisions I've Ever Made
My oldest child, Ava, has always had a problem with nightmares. It was almost a nightly occurrence: she'd wake up, sometimes she would scream, others she would walk around the house in a half-asleep panic over ghosts or monsters or some other fearful thing. Sometimes she would quietly stay huddled in bed, still terrified that whatever it was would find her if she made a sound. It was very disruptive to her sleep pattern, resulting in a cranky, sleep-deprived kid.
As a Christian family, we would try to pray for her every night, pray for her again when she would get scared, and comfort her when that didn't seem to be enough. We'd try giving her melatonin, we tried leaving lights on, we tried playing music, we even tried letting her sleep together with her sister when she came along. But no matter what we tried she still had the nightmares.
Ava also has problems with her confidence. She almost constantly tells us (and herself) that she can't do things that seem hard. Of course, as parents, we try to be encouraging. We tell her she can do those hard things, we tell her that she's extremely capable of doing great things. Sometimes she believes us, but self-doubt occasionally keeps creeping in on her, and she either talk herself out of doing something the slightest bit difficult or whine the entire time she's doing it.
The most recent thing has been her gymnastics, where she recently advanced to level 3. She had kept up with it and practiced as best she could, but after a few weeks of doing quite well at it, her confidence began to slide. Her skill level was there, her teacher was pushing her to get better, but her confidence in performing her skills was lacking. Her self doubt won out, and she convinced herself in her mind that she wasn't ready, that she wasn't good enough. She told us she wanted to go back down to level 2.
Something needed to change.
Then about a week ago I got an idea that she was getting old enough that she could stay up a little bit later than her siblings, as previously they all had a bedtime of 8:00pm. Well, approximately anyway. She has her tenth birthday coming up next month, and I thought it might be time to see if we could push bedtime back until 9:00pm. I discussed the idea with my wife and Ava, and my wife agreed.
So, the first night came around where I would let her stay up, and the moment her siblings were in bed she told me she wanted to play a video game with me. I thought that was cool. I like playing games with my kids, and to think she wanted to use that extra hour of awake time to play with me instead of watching a show or playing nonsense on her Kindle for an hour felt kind of nice.
I offered up the usual (sort of) age appropriate suspects: Minecraft, Goat Simulator, and a couple of other silly, at least somewhat kid-friendly games. I even tried a few more kid-friendly-yet-challenging games such as Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time and Portal 2 multiplayer. But those options got shot down.
She wanted to play something she couldn't play while her siblings were awake. So I looked through my library, thinking maybe something like a milder shooter would be okay, like Halo (she's played the campaign of that with me up until the points where the flood come into play before, but not often), or things like some of the older Star Wars Battlefront games. But she said no to those as well.
Ava wanted to play something scary.
I was kind of stumped on what to let her play at that point. I mean, it wasn't like there were a ton of games out there that were scary but appropriate for an almost 10-year-old girl. It wasn't like there weren't a ton of options though: as an avid gamer I had games in my library that even freak me out a little as a grown adult, but many of those were extremely violent and had a ton of extreme language, and I didn't know if I wanted to expose her to that just yet.
But then, upon browsing my library I came across a pair of games that I hadn't played in a while that made me stop. Something was telling me that I should let her play a Left 4 Dead game. Specifically Left 4 Dead 2.
For those of you who know the game, you know exactly why as a loving parent I might actually want to avoid exposing a young kid to that. But for those of you who are not avid gamers such as myself, you'd probably be fairly horrified as to the content of this game: zombies. I don't mean those somewhat cute zombies like in Plants vs Zombies, either.
We're talking bloody, half-decayed zombies that usually end up being shot, smashed and blown up in all sorts of ways, as well as some special zombies (known in-game as 'special infected') that puke, spit acid, explode, cry like little girls but are freakishly fast and have massively long claws when disturbed, zombies that grab you with elongated tongues, grab onto you and drag you off before pummeling you into the floor or cover your eyes and beat you in the face while you run around like an idiot, or giant hulk-like zombies that pick up and throw cars and chunks of concrete and can annihilate your team if you're not careful.
That's not to mention the environments: set mostly post-Katrina Louisiana (some of which features New Orleans) with a liberal sprinkling of bloody streaks leading into closed rooms, bodies littered about, and bleak, depressing graffiti written on the walls of the safe rooms of people trying to contact their separated loved ones in a zombie apocalypse.
FYI: this is also one of those games that was banned in several countries during it's initial release, like Germany and Australia, for graphic violence. (Heavily censored versions are available in those countries now, apparently.)
This is an M-rated shooter. Not really that kid friendly and totally not appropriate for the majority of children. If I heard of someone just letting their kids play this at Ava's age I would probably be raising an eyebrow and questioning their parenting skills at the very least.
But as I flipped through my game library something told me that is what I should let her play. Maybe I was a little crazy to pop in the disk and boot up that blood-soaked, zombie-dismembering game from 2009 (side note: this, interestingly enough, was the year Ava was born.) I think my wife was a little skeptical that she could handle it, and even I had my reservations. But I made a deal with Ava: if she didn't like it, if she felt scared, or if she couldn't handle it anymore, we were going to turn if off and play something else.
She agreed.
I started up one of the campaigns (of which there are several) and let her pick her character (she picked the only playable girl in the original portion of the game, Rochelle) and I picked mine (I'm partial to Ellis). After a quick explanation of the controls, we started out into the zombie-infested city of New Orleans, looking for some way to escape the hordes.
There was a bit of a rocky start: we had some truly scary moments together. We encountered a witch (the crying female wolverine zombie) and a tank (hulk zombie) and managed to make it out of both encounters alive. Then there was the time when an angry horde was attracted to a car alarm started by a stray bullet. Then there were a few times where the friendly AI decided to do something stupid and shoot a witch we had almost managed to sneak past, almost wiping out the team in the process. Another time we got separated while I was searching for gas cans and I got attacked by a jockey on my own, but she pressed on like a champ and saved my butt.
Amidst the scary things there were moments of triumph: the time she managed to take out a charger solo, or when I came to pick her back up when the tank had smashed her with a car. Then, after our brief excursion into the horrifyingly bleak landscape of L4D2's version of a zombie apocalypse, we reached the first safe room and shut the door behind us. Sure, we all had our scraps and bruises, but we were all alive.
Then it was time for bed. There was no arguments there, and she got herself ready and I did my nightly routine for putting her to bed (praying for her and whatnot) and then prepared to comfort her should she wake up with the expected nightmare.
To my surprise it was a moment that didn't come.
The next morning I asked her how she slept, and she told me to my surprise that she slept fine. No problems. No nightmares. She slept like a rock, and then proceeded to say that she wanted to play Left 4 Dead again. Obviously I wouldn't let her play it when her brother and sisters were awake, so I told her she'd have to wait until they were in bed.
Bedtime rolled around again, and with a bit more confidence in her ability we started out once more this time into coming ashore to look for fuel near an abandoned sugar mill. First way made our way through a dilapidated neighborhood, passing through a diner and passing by a garage sale. It was pretty hectic until we actually got to the mill, where things ground to a halt: the place was chock full of witches.
At first we just tried to sneak past them all. The first one was pretty easy, the second we had to wait a minute or two until it wondered just enough out of our path to get by her. The third... well, I accidentally shot her with a stray bullet from across the map. So much for stealth. From there it was us trying to make our way through as best we could.
Eventually we made it up the sugar mill to the top floor, where we had to wait for the elevator to reach us while fighting the zombie horde (and a tank!) Then from there it was down the elevator and through the cane field, and after that we found ourselves on a two lane road facing our destination: a boarded-up gas station.
That provided us with the perfect stopping point for Ava to go to bed. She didn't even protest. She just went and got ready, climbed into bed and went to sleep. Like before, I was ready for nightmares. But they never came, and the next morning was just like the previous: Ava woke up chipper and ready for the day, no sign of nightmare-fueled sleep deprivation. Just... Ava.
A few more nights went by, and she was just as eager to join me on the hunt for a safe place through the zombie-filled alleys, a burning building, a mall, and even an amusement park. We even played through a few of the original campaigns from Left 4 Dead, through Mercy Hospital.
During that time I've learned a few things. She likes duel pistols, I like using melee weapons. I like moving quickly, she likes going slow and methodical. I'm usually going out of my way to take out special infected, she can't see a jockey without saying "Jockey! Jockey! Jockey!" We both think there's nothing quite as satisfying as the sound of a smacking a zombie with a frying pan or guitar.
But while I enjoy having a teammate to blast zombies with and she likes playing a game with her dad, there's an added benefit that I did not expect: she hasn't been as scared. She hasn't had as many nightmares. When she does have nightmares, she's managed them tons better.
In talking with my wife, Brie, Ava has said that the last bad dream she had she was was being chased by a ghost, but instead of her being scared, she turned around and punched the ghost in the face. She was able to face her fear.
Another thing I noticed the last few days is her confidence level has gone up as well. Throughout playing Left 4 Dead she has begun doing things that I hadn't seen her do before. Occasionally we'll run across a difficult area or a "crescendo" event: difficult areas where swarms of zombies come out of the wood work and can overwhelm even the best of players.
During those times even I get dragged off by some of the special infected, leaving her with the two (stupid) AI helpers while I get beat to death. I'll tell her to come help me, to save me. Even though it seems difficult, even though it's scary, even though she says "I can't" she does it. She CAN do it.
Perhaps something about playing a game where you are faced with near-endless flood of undead monsters and somehow being able to make it through okay has helped her cope with her own fears. Maybe seeing she can be able to punch/shoot/blow up things that are normally scary has helped her look at them as beatable, even when it seemed difficult. Even when we failed to manage to gas up a stock car in a mall, her confidence was built to a point where she wanted to try again.
I could see a change in her attitude the first time she managed to down a special infected: a charger. The fast-moving, muscle-bound monstrosity charged at her and missed, and she was able to take it out with her duel pistols all on her own. After that point, she realized that she was capable of more than just cowering behind her meat-shield father. She had at least some power to deal with scary things, and that was a lesson that was translating into her very real life problems.
Would this be something I would recommend to just any kid? No way. Not every kid out there is ready to delve into a world filled with zombies with a hankering for human flesh.
But as it turned out for one kid, one child that suffered near constant nightmares... a potentially huge parenting fail on my part turned into one of my proudest moments. Left 4 Dead is not something I would recommend anyone play to combat nightmares or self confidence issues, but for my 10-year-old little girl, it has become almost like a video game therapy miracle.
Are there still games out there that I wouldn't let her play at this point? Heck yes there is. There are tons out there that I would consider far worse, far more disturbing, or feature worse language than L4D, or feature other things I don't want her exposed to, like more sexual content.
But for now, I have a 10-year-old girl that shots zombies... and she kicks butt at it.
As a Christian family, we would try to pray for her every night, pray for her again when she would get scared, and comfort her when that didn't seem to be enough. We'd try giving her melatonin, we tried leaving lights on, we tried playing music, we even tried letting her sleep together with her sister when she came along. But no matter what we tried she still had the nightmares.
Ava also has problems with her confidence. She almost constantly tells us (and herself) that she can't do things that seem hard. Of course, as parents, we try to be encouraging. We tell her she can do those hard things, we tell her that she's extremely capable of doing great things. Sometimes she believes us, but self-doubt occasionally keeps creeping in on her, and she either talk herself out of doing something the slightest bit difficult or whine the entire time she's doing it.
The most recent thing has been her gymnastics, where she recently advanced to level 3. She had kept up with it and practiced as best she could, but after a few weeks of doing quite well at it, her confidence began to slide. Her skill level was there, her teacher was pushing her to get better, but her confidence in performing her skills was lacking. Her self doubt won out, and she convinced herself in her mind that she wasn't ready, that she wasn't good enough. She told us she wanted to go back down to level 2.
Something needed to change.
Then about a week ago I got an idea that she was getting old enough that she could stay up a little bit later than her siblings, as previously they all had a bedtime of 8:00pm. Well, approximately anyway. She has her tenth birthday coming up next month, and I thought it might be time to see if we could push bedtime back until 9:00pm. I discussed the idea with my wife and Ava, and my wife agreed.
So, the first night came around where I would let her stay up, and the moment her siblings were in bed she told me she wanted to play a video game with me. I thought that was cool. I like playing games with my kids, and to think she wanted to use that extra hour of awake time to play with me instead of watching a show or playing nonsense on her Kindle for an hour felt kind of nice.
I offered up the usual (sort of) age appropriate suspects: Minecraft, Goat Simulator, and a couple of other silly, at least somewhat kid-friendly games. I even tried a few more kid-friendly-yet-challenging games such as Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time and Portal 2 multiplayer. But those options got shot down.
She wanted to play something she couldn't play while her siblings were awake. So I looked through my library, thinking maybe something like a milder shooter would be okay, like Halo (she's played the campaign of that with me up until the points where the flood come into play before, but not often), or things like some of the older Star Wars Battlefront games. But she said no to those as well.
Ava wanted to play something scary.
I was kind of stumped on what to let her play at that point. I mean, it wasn't like there were a ton of games out there that were scary but appropriate for an almost 10-year-old girl. It wasn't like there weren't a ton of options though: as an avid gamer I had games in my library that even freak me out a little as a grown adult, but many of those were extremely violent and had a ton of extreme language, and I didn't know if I wanted to expose her to that just yet.
 |
| Cheery! |
But then, upon browsing my library I came across a pair of games that I hadn't played in a while that made me stop. Something was telling me that I should let her play a Left 4 Dead game. Specifically Left 4 Dead 2.
For those of you who know the game, you know exactly why as a loving parent I might actually want to avoid exposing a young kid to that. But for those of you who are not avid gamers such as myself, you'd probably be fairly horrified as to the content of this game: zombies. I don't mean those somewhat cute zombies like in Plants vs Zombies, either.
We're talking bloody, half-decayed zombies that usually end up being shot, smashed and blown up in all sorts of ways, as well as some special zombies (known in-game as 'special infected') that puke, spit acid, explode, cry like little girls but are freakishly fast and have massively long claws when disturbed, zombies that grab you with elongated tongues, grab onto you and drag you off before pummeling you into the floor or cover your eyes and beat you in the face while you run around like an idiot, or giant hulk-like zombies that pick up and throw cars and chunks of concrete and can annihilate your team if you're not careful.
That's not to mention the environments: set mostly post-Katrina Louisiana (some of which features New Orleans) with a liberal sprinkling of bloody streaks leading into closed rooms, bodies littered about, and bleak, depressing graffiti written on the walls of the safe rooms of people trying to contact their separated loved ones in a zombie apocalypse.
FYI: this is also one of those games that was banned in several countries during it's initial release, like Germany and Australia, for graphic violence. (Heavily censored versions are available in those countries now, apparently.)
This is an M-rated shooter. Not really that kid friendly and totally not appropriate for the majority of children. If I heard of someone just letting their kids play this at Ava's age I would probably be raising an eyebrow and questioning their parenting skills at the very least.
But as I flipped through my game library something told me that is what I should let her play. Maybe I was a little crazy to pop in the disk and boot up that blood-soaked, zombie-dismembering game from 2009 (side note: this, interestingly enough, was the year Ava was born.) I think my wife was a little skeptical that she could handle it, and even I had my reservations. But I made a deal with Ava: if she didn't like it, if she felt scared, or if she couldn't handle it anymore, we were going to turn if off and play something else.
She agreed.
I started up one of the campaigns (of which there are several) and let her pick her character (she picked the only playable girl in the original portion of the game, Rochelle) and I picked mine (I'm partial to Ellis). After a quick explanation of the controls, we started out into the zombie-infested city of New Orleans, looking for some way to escape the hordes.
There was a bit of a rocky start: we had some truly scary moments together. We encountered a witch (the crying female wolverine zombie) and a tank (hulk zombie) and managed to make it out of both encounters alive. Then there was the time when an angry horde was attracted to a car alarm started by a stray bullet. Then there were a few times where the friendly AI decided to do something stupid and shoot a witch we had almost managed to sneak past, almost wiping out the team in the process. Another time we got separated while I was searching for gas cans and I got attacked by a jockey on my own, but she pressed on like a champ and saved my butt.
Amidst the scary things there were moments of triumph: the time she managed to take out a charger solo, or when I came to pick her back up when the tank had smashed her with a car. Then, after our brief excursion into the horrifyingly bleak landscape of L4D2's version of a zombie apocalypse, we reached the first safe room and shut the door behind us. Sure, we all had our scraps and bruises, but we were all alive.
Then it was time for bed. There was no arguments there, and she got herself ready and I did my nightly routine for putting her to bed (praying for her and whatnot) and then prepared to comfort her should she wake up with the expected nightmare.
To my surprise it was a moment that didn't come.
The next morning I asked her how she slept, and she told me to my surprise that she slept fine. No problems. No nightmares. She slept like a rock, and then proceeded to say that she wanted to play Left 4 Dead again. Obviously I wouldn't let her play it when her brother and sisters were awake, so I told her she'd have to wait until they were in bed.
Bedtime rolled around again, and with a bit more confidence in her ability we started out once more this time into coming ashore to look for fuel near an abandoned sugar mill. First way made our way through a dilapidated neighborhood, passing through a diner and passing by a garage sale. It was pretty hectic until we actually got to the mill, where things ground to a halt: the place was chock full of witches.
At first we just tried to sneak past them all. The first one was pretty easy, the second we had to wait a minute or two until it wondered just enough out of our path to get by her. The third... well, I accidentally shot her with a stray bullet from across the map. So much for stealth. From there it was us trying to make our way through as best we could.
Eventually we made it up the sugar mill to the top floor, where we had to wait for the elevator to reach us while fighting the zombie horde (and a tank!) Then from there it was down the elevator and through the cane field, and after that we found ourselves on a two lane road facing our destination: a boarded-up gas station.
That provided us with the perfect stopping point for Ava to go to bed. She didn't even protest. She just went and got ready, climbed into bed and went to sleep. Like before, I was ready for nightmares. But they never came, and the next morning was just like the previous: Ava woke up chipper and ready for the day, no sign of nightmare-fueled sleep deprivation. Just... Ava.
A few more nights went by, and she was just as eager to join me on the hunt for a safe place through the zombie-filled alleys, a burning building, a mall, and even an amusement park. We even played through a few of the original campaigns from Left 4 Dead, through Mercy Hospital.
During that time I've learned a few things. She likes duel pistols, I like using melee weapons. I like moving quickly, she likes going slow and methodical. I'm usually going out of my way to take out special infected, she can't see a jockey without saying "Jockey! Jockey! Jockey!" We both think there's nothing quite as satisfying as the sound of a smacking a zombie with a frying pan or guitar.
But while I enjoy having a teammate to blast zombies with and she likes playing a game with her dad, there's an added benefit that I did not expect: she hasn't been as scared. She hasn't had as many nightmares. When she does have nightmares, she's managed them tons better.
In talking with my wife, Brie, Ava has said that the last bad dream she had she was was being chased by a ghost, but instead of her being scared, she turned around and punched the ghost in the face. She was able to face her fear.
Another thing I noticed the last few days is her confidence level has gone up as well. Throughout playing Left 4 Dead she has begun doing things that I hadn't seen her do before. Occasionally we'll run across a difficult area or a "crescendo" event: difficult areas where swarms of zombies come out of the wood work and can overwhelm even the best of players.
During those times even I get dragged off by some of the special infected, leaving her with the two (stupid) AI helpers while I get beat to death. I'll tell her to come help me, to save me. Even though it seems difficult, even though it's scary, even though she says "I can't" she does it. She CAN do it.
Perhaps something about playing a game where you are faced with near-endless flood of undead monsters and somehow being able to make it through okay has helped her cope with her own fears. Maybe seeing she can be able to punch/shoot/blow up things that are normally scary has helped her look at them as beatable, even when it seemed difficult. Even when we failed to manage to gas up a stock car in a mall, her confidence was built to a point where she wanted to try again.
I could see a change in her attitude the first time she managed to down a special infected: a charger. The fast-moving, muscle-bound monstrosity charged at her and missed, and she was able to take it out with her duel pistols all on her own. After that point, she realized that she was capable of more than just cowering behind her meat-shield father. She had at least some power to deal with scary things, and that was a lesson that was translating into her very real life problems.
Would this be something I would recommend to just any kid? No way. Not every kid out there is ready to delve into a world filled with zombies with a hankering for human flesh.
But as it turned out for one kid, one child that suffered near constant nightmares... a potentially huge parenting fail on my part turned into one of my proudest moments. Left 4 Dead is not something I would recommend anyone play to combat nightmares or self confidence issues, but for my 10-year-old little girl, it has become almost like a video game therapy miracle.
Are there still games out there that I wouldn't let her play at this point? Heck yes there is. There are tons out there that I would consider far worse, far more disturbing, or feature worse language than L4D, or feature other things I don't want her exposed to, like more sexual content.
But for now, I have a 10-year-old girl that shots zombies... and she kicks butt at it.
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