AUTUMN PERSONAL VIEW
Personal view
In this new series SWT staff and stakeholders will offer a personal insight into a wildlife-related topic.
GAMING FOR NATURE Always treating screen time as the enemy means we miss an opportunity to engage children with the natural world. Ben Siggery, SWT GIS, research and monitoring manager
Since I first became attached to my GameBoy and obsessed over catching Pokémon, I have loved gaming. However, I also grew up loving nature and, despite what the media and people around me were saying, never felt my two passions were irreconcilable. I didn’t want my nature-loving friends and colleagues to judge me if I spoke about the latest thing I’d been playing, or the new game I was looking forward to. However, this was the way people seemed to refer to the new generation of children – that gaming was a technological evil of the modern era, disconnecting them from nature and distracting them from the real world. Surely it was even worse for someone working in conservation.
20
However, over the years I have become increasingly convinced that I was right.
Unexpected knowledge The first indication of this was when I started working at SWT’s Nower Wood Educational Nature Reserve, where I quickly became familiar with what children were interested in (spoiler alert: it’s still Pokémon). We ran sessions for local school students, teaching them about everything from trees and invertebrates to woodland management, and one curious thing kept happening: they came to the woods already knowing about silver birch trees and how charcoal is made. I soon discovered why. It wasn’t because of school or trips to nature reserves with their parents. It was because they’d seen it on Minecraft.