My Son, the Alien Boy

I’ve been worried about my son ever since he started getting bounced out of day-care centers 20-odd years ago. Now he’s a strapping young man with a good heart and an inquisitive soul, and those years of Ritalin prescriptions and parent-teacher conferences are well behind us.

But I’m still trying to figure out what “Attention Deficit Disorder” really means. And I still have a son with a mind that can throttle up and careen off into the distance at any given moment, veering in and out of junior college classes and part-time jobs.

Sometimes he reminds me of the aliens in an episode of the original Star Trek series. They had invaded the starship Enterprise, but they had such a high metabolism they were not only invisible but barely perceptible to its crew. They didn’t have a disorder. They simply operated outside the Federation’s speed limit.

Last month, Taylor and I spent the better part of a weekend together at Otronicon, an annual event at the Orlando Science Center that shows off the various usages – mainly medical, educational, military and gaming – of the latest interactive technology.

To me, it looked and sounded like a grand opening at Chuck E. Cheese. But my son was in his element. He peppered a Marine with insider questions about a video game that simulates realistic battle scenarios. He paused at a set of flight simulators to chat with Lockheed Martin reps about the difference between the F-35 Lightning and the F-22 Raptor. And I think I may have heard him actually Seeking Gainful Employment as he plied a game designer for information.

In a virtual universe, he was the smooth operator and I the dorky wingman.

I watched him sit down next to a 12-year-old kid named Zach to play a video game called Portal 2. They’d never met before, yet they formed an instant, expert split-screen partnership, cooperating with each other to outwit a disembodied computer that had trapped them in a cerebral, lab-rat maze.

By then I had struck up a conversation with Elaine Raybourn, a research scientist with Advanced Distributed Learning who was at the Science Center to observe what young people can learn through video games.

She rattled off just a few of the useful skills for me: “Complex decision making. How to solve problems. Leadership. How to overcome constraints for their own goals.” But, she added, “The real question is: How do we make gamers more aware that the real game is the game of life?”

I was too overtaxed by all the virtual bells and whistles to venture an answer. Eventually, I went off in search of solid ground. I knew just the place. I headed for the dinosaur exhibit.