It’s almost become common knowledge fact, that Halloween is all about acquiring as much candy as you can possibly hold before returning home.  Every year I see posts from other parents about places to go to dispose of all the excess sweets, as if suddenly you household has been inundated with hundreds of pounds of sugary confections that simply must be done away with at all costs.  Parents inspect the candy, checking to be sure the wrappers are intact, tossing out any of those forbidden home-made delicacies that, oddly enough might even be less harmful than the overprocessed sugary death that comes in the mass-marketed 2lb bags found in every grocery store and mini-mart.

But this year, I’m feeling a bit over-hyped on this whole process.  Looking over mine and the children of my friends, I really feel like the insanity surrounding the sugar is overblown, like we’ve been caught up in another mass idea that caught on somehow without any real backing other than the overimaginitive processes of the well-meaning adults out there.  There are dentists out there, bless them, who are taking up collections of “extra” candy to send to our troops overseas, there are websites ranting about households in a down economy spending $20 on candy to hand out to trick or treaters.

Wait.  $20??

Just so we’re clear.  Your average bag of candy, say one of the 2lb bags of Snickers, costs around $5 and contains roughly 40 “fun size” candy bars, right?  You can even do better than that if you look around a bit or go with one of the “fun mix” bags.  After 2 hours of trick or treating this year, my kids came home with roughly 25 pieces of candy each.  You heard me.  25 pieces.  Not POUNDS of candy.  In fact, if I put all 3 bags of candy together and weigh them, I’m looking at less than 3lbs all told.  So if the kids are bringing home 3 lbs of candy between them, and I’ve gone out and bought 20$ worth of candy (assuming $20 buys me four 2lb bags) to hand out to trick or treaters (which in my neighborhood are few and far between, by the way) guess what.

All that extra candy is probably not from your kids bringing it home.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, my situation is probably a little bit different.  I have about 5 trick or treaters come by my house in a good year (and I live in suburbia).  But to me, as a card-carrying participant of All Hallows Eve, theres nothing more soul withering than *not* having anything to hand out when the doorbell rings.  So I buy a full-sized bag of candy.  Basically, I’m *overbuying*, just in case, right?

So if you live someplace where there are a *lot* of trick-or-treaters, say you get a hundred on a good year, theres a good chance you’re going to overbuy in much the same fashion.  So that candy, those *pounds* of candy is just as likely to be from your guilt-riddled spending spree as it is from your kids being extra-industrious.

So, here in the aftermath, it just doesn’t seem fair to get on our kids cases about too much candy.  To hear people going on and on about obesity and health risks and bad teeth and oh how dare you let your kids collect candy when they could be collecting money for the homeless or handing out little bags of raisins or carrots instead.  The kids are getting targeted, but it’s we parents who really should be taking the blame.

It’s interesting what you take away from a game, or a movie. What you notice, or what you prefer to focus on. I make so secret of the face that video games and media are firmly integrated into my household. Rather than attempting to eschew all forms of digital media for my family and children, I am instead attempting to properly integrate it, to use it to it’s fullest capacity not only as a source of entertainment, but as a tool for teaching, for opening doors and entering into discussions that we might not otherwise has the chance to touch upon. My kids are well educated in the forms media takes, in why and how books are different from TV or even movies and why both are important in equally valid ways. They know that even the most reputable sources, print or otherwise, can be abused and they should always double check their sources. I use RPG’s and games that are heavy on the written instruction to encourage my kids to read and expand their vocabularies. For every anime series they are involved with there is a related manga, for each movie there is a book. Storytelling is encouraged, in fact, DrSpaus and Thing01 (so named online because they can get their own darned selves into trouble’ they don’t need me naming names) have a running space opera they have been working on in verbal storyteller fashion for over four years now. Unfortunately none of it has been written down, or they might have a viral meme on their hands.

The end result of all this digital chaos has been an air of remarkable aplomb when media is present. At a friends house they’d much rather play in the yard than watch a movie, on long road trips, the DVD player stays off for most of the trip. The outside world is a much more interesting place. I fear, somewhat, that i may be killing their ability to suspend disbelief. Thing01 loves to go through GCI movies with me to pick apart FX errors, Thing02 has a talent for deconstructing plot (which often runs to the bizarre I will admit). Thing03, well he’s still little. He hasn’t quite reached the development stage where he can see beyond the magic pictures or the fancy FX.

So imagine my surprise when Thing01 is playing through Modern Warfare 2, and the rest of us are watching (house rule, all video games must be played in the living room and kibitzing and commentary are encouraged). Thing03 pipes up, right in the middle and shouts “Yellow Car!”. And he’s right. There in the background of the environment is a burnt-out yellow taxi. Noone else in the group “saw” it, or at least, no one saw it and processed it in the context of that tried and true road trip game. It really got me thinking about perception, about how different minds take way different things from any piece of media. Thing03 wasn’t watching his brother play with an eye towards how many baddies he killed or how fast he was hitting checkpoints, in fact, the game itself, as the creators intended, had become irrelevant. What he was seeing was an opportunity to one-up the rest of us in a never-ending game of “Yellow Car”.

Interestingly enough, this incident has changed the way I look at games and media (for the nonce, at any rate) changed the things I am looking for at any given point in time. I have a tendency to look beyond the gameplay to solve problems in my own work (how did this designer use the lighting to show the player where to go, how far down did that artist build the LOD meshes, or is it all being guessed at by the engine) but what Thing03 pulled off was even beyond that. It’s a perception I hope to imitate.