Notorious M.O.M.- How GTAV Helps One Mom Cope

Description: From the game Grand Theft Auto V, a behind
the shoulder perspective of a man firing a machine gun at a gas
station, with multiple fireballs, explosions and plumes of smoke.

Last week, I linked to an article in the Guardian written by Keza McDonald that gave advice for new moms wanting to balance gaming with the responsibilities of being a new parent. This week in the Guardian Sarah Lee Donlan talks about how playing Grand Theft Auto V helps her cope by offering a little escapism:

My daughter’s constant night feeds are keeping me awake, but not awake enough to do anything useful. So I pass the time in my preferred way. I steal aircraft. I take a sleek black jet, fly it over a sleeping city and land it smoothly on a desert strip, narrowly avoiding a wild dog... 

Suddenly faced with a new and overwhelming responsibility that came with a seemingly endless list of dos and don’ts, GTA V allowed me to break the rules, mess about and act in a wildly dangerous manner. 

During the day I was an exhausted new mother making small talk at Brighton baby groups, but at night I escaped to San Andreas, where I lived a life of violent crime and irresponsibility.

One complaint about open world sandbox style games in general, and the GTA series in particular, is that lots of times it's just a lot more fun to mess around causing mayhem or exploring the game world instead of doing the quests that advance the main story. For Donlan, this is part of the game's appeal. After she recounts the effort she undertook to create a gigantic explosion by taking down a jumbo jet:

The amazing thing is, all of this adventure exists outside the plot. To me, GTA V is at its absolute best once the campaign is done. San Andreas is filled with detail, most of which is barely touched upon in the main story.
It has luscious scenery and diverse wildlife. I have been eaten by a shark, swum with orcas and even found a humpback whale singing gently off toward the upper limits of the ocean. I also have my favourite places to find peace: a sea cave on the bottom right of the map and the quiet mountain stream just north of the city. GTA doesn’t just give you permission to be irresponsible, it gives you permission to rest.

How about you, readers? Does this sound like the appeal for open world games for you, or is it something else? Comment below!

Super Powers, Super Mom: Raising Dion Now Online

Description: A young black boy faces the camera, giggling. He closes his
eyes, then disappears with a puff of black smoke. He reappears on the other
side of the room, suddenly reappearing in front of his mother, who drops the
bag of groceries she was holding in surprise.

Many young children dream of having super powers. Many people compare parents to super heroes. So what do you do when you have to raise a child who has all the normal evergy and curiosity and fears of any other... but also a bevy of barely-controlled super powers? These issues and more are being tackled in xxxx xxxxx 's new comic book series, Raising Dion.

Raising Dion offers a novel way to look at so many issues and ideas: super humans in society, superpowers and how they affect relationships, the challenges of parenting, and race in American society.

In particular, Dion's mother tells him not to use not use any of his super powers in public addresses how society implicitly judges his as a black child and explicitly how he is judged as a super human in a comic book world. It also echoes "The Talk" that parents of color have to have with thier kids about encounters with the police. As Raising Dion's artist Jason Piperberg says in an interview at Fusion.net:

“Traditionally in comics and really most stories, the protagonist is the one with the powers,” said Piperberg. “You see the world through the eyes of the character with all the abilities usually because they are immediately the most exciting and/or interesting person in the story.” 

... “I think a lot of people still don’t get that The Talk is a real thing that black families have to have,” said Piperberg. He admitted that initially the parallels weren’t all that clear to him either. “I think it’s really important to step out of my bubble of privilege to see what’s really going on. To discover and look at injustices that have been swept under the rug, or worse, accepted as the norm by society.”

The first issue of Raising Dion is available online to read for free.