Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: The Next Generation of Geeks

When my stepkids were younger, their hyper-competitive father coached them on baseball and soccer teams. I was shoved right out of the picture, and I never really got to enjoy that sort of interaction with them. I went to all their games, though, and over the course of a few seasons, I realized that I didn't want to share those things with them. I can think of a lot of ways to spend my weekend mornings, and while it's nice to get outside and get some sunshine and exercise, dealing with ultra-competitive, win-at-all-costs parents -- who are screaming at their eight year-olds -- isn't one of them. Rather than engage in a silly pissing contest with their father and make the kids uncomfortable, I backed off, sat quietly in the bleachers, and cheered them on, no matter what the outcome of the game was. I tried my best to instill in them one of my core values: if you only focus on winning, rather than doing your best and enjoying the game, you're setting yourself up to be unhappy a lot of the time. (I developed this philosophy over countless board games when the dice just wouldn't fall my way no matter what I did, and it's served me rather well ever since.)

There was a time when I wondered if I'd ever be able to make strong bonds with my stepkids because I don't have that sports gene that most guys have. "I can't throw a curveball to save my life, but I can throw a d20 to save vs. poison," I once said to a friend of mine . . . and instantly realized that instead of trying to be someone I wasn't, and instead of trying to play into the typical "fathers play sports" thing, I could just share with my kids the things that I love, that made me who I am today. I carefully introduced my boys to the geeky things that shaped my life.

Timing, as they say, is everything, and in this case, I lucked out, because Lord of the rings and Harry Potter opened the door for fantasy games like Talisman, Dungeon, Munchkin, and Heroquest (which, I saw in the store this holiday season, is making a triumphant return, complete with expansion packs!) We have spent hours playing these games together over the years, and I will never forget the day that Nolan (my younger boy) pulled out Talisman, and convinced two of his friends that it was "really cool" and got them all to give it a try.

After I proved to the kids through gaming that I wasn't entirely lame, I showed them how cool backyard astronomy can be. I was helped in this regard, again, because five years or so earlier, when they were really little, comet Hale-Bopp was huge in the Western sky almost every night, and the Leonids had one of their once-per-century peak storms, so they knew there was cool stuff up there, and trusted me when I said I'd show them how to find it with a star chart and the red-cellophaned flashlight. To this day, they point out Orion, Sirius, and find Polaris when the skies are dark and clear enough to see it. They even took it upon themselves to learn some of the mythology (via my bookshelf) surrounding a few of my favorite constellations Cassiopea, Cephus, Perseus and Andromeda.

When League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was in theaters, I pointed out to my boys that the graphic novel that inspired the movie was pretty good, and that I had it if they wanted to read it and decide which was better. They couldn't believe I was encouraging them to read comic books, and that opened another door for me. Ryan turned 17 this year, and I gave him a complete set of Sin City books, while Nolan enjoyed a lot of my old superhero books. This particular area wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, though; neither one of them understood why I like Watchmen so much, and one of them (who will remain nameless for his own protection) even said that it was "boring." Yes, a little bit of me died that day; you can't win them all.

The greatest challenge, which surprised me, was introducing them to geeky movies and TV shows. I thought this would be simple, since they were already into Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings but I made a fundamental mistake. This will actually be a column entirely on its own -- a guide to introducing a non-geek to geeky movies and TV shows -- but I'll just say that The Prisoner and 2001 are not the best place to start, especially with kids. Luckily, the new Battlestar Galactica and Firefly proved to be a much better place to introduce my guys to science fiction that had the perfect balance of story, classic Sci-Fi themes, action, and pretty ladies (hey, I'm dealing with teenage boys, remember. Thank you Number Six and Kaylee, for, uh, various reasons.)

As a parent, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing a little bit of yourself in your kids, and as a geek, it's 3d6+4 times more rewarding to see my geekiness reflected back at me from my boys. Nolan is into Magic: The Gathering, we frequently play Settlers of Catan (with my non-geek wife, no less) and they both embrace all of these things I've shared with them over the years. They're not hardcore (yet) but Ryan was recently accepted into Mensa with an IQ of 159 (!), and with an interest in quantum physics, he's on his way. Nolan never met a gadget he didn't want to take apart, understand, and put back together (occasionally with some spiffy modification) and both of them like to celebrate personal accomplishments by eating Sir Robin's Minstrels, which I'm pretty sure they picked up from me.

They haven't played organized sports in ages, but we play games together a few times a week, and when I was watching movies for last week's column, they watched Logan's Run and Westworld with me. I spared them The Omega Man, though, because one of our jobs as parents is to protect our kids from things like that, right?

Wil Wheaton hopes to attend the Midvale School for the Gifted one day.

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