Late Night PC

I'm waiting for my car at the dealership and there's no wifi here. Fortunately I've got my laptop and some music. Before I hibernated the laptop apparently I was over at gewgaw. Thanks for putting your full posts on one page :) I've been catching up and one thing from a post a couple weeks ago resonated with me. In this post: "active consumption includes production" I can't follow the links, from here to follow up but it sparked some thoughts on what we think of as play and what qualifies as work. One of the rules I keep at our house is that I don't limit my daughter's time on the computer any more than I'd limit her time studying. Instead I try to teach her to balance her time between consuming and producing. Creating and observing. The idea is to keep her aware of the difference and consciously decide how she's spending her time. The computer is a tool and a toy, just like a pencil and paper. You can read books or write books. You can listen to music or you can play it. Creating is a lot harder than observing. Most people spend more time observing than creating and that's fine. I think though, that where you make the balance has a lot to do with what you get out of life. Full time observation makes you a couch potato and when you go to bed at night you've got no dreams of your own. Spending a tenth of your time creating doesn't mean you're going to write one book for every nine that you read. Creation is complex and difficult. Creation doesn't have to produce tangible results or even results that are meaningful to anyone but yourself. Personally I like to create things that I can tell other people about - they're not always interested, but it feeds my ego. My daughter likes to build her house in Neopets. Sometimes I agree with her that she's creating, other times I'm not sure. When she decides to write a story or make up spells to play Harry Potter with her friends, that's clearly a creative activity. Maybe it's the narrower scope of a game or maybe it's the lack of total ownership that reduces that creative aspect. Video games and online communities definitely blur the line though. If you can share it and others can build on it, does that qualify creation? I think so. If you built it by repetitive mechanical action (click this, click that, repeat), does that mean it's a less creative activity? I think so. Does it matter if it felt like work? Definitely not. People can have a lot of fun building things that are great and useful. Some things can be creative, easy to do and still leave you with something to show for your effort. I made some really big Katamaris over the Christmas holiday. I didn't think of it as anything really useful or creative, I think of that as part of my consuming time. Katamari's a lot of fun, but I suppose there's an in-game result that I have more stuff in the cosmos and more cousins hanging around. I guess I can't tell where the line is between producing and consuming, but I can tell when I' too far into one or the other.