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Ask Slashdot: Will You Start Your Kids On Classic Games Or Newer Games?
An anonymous reader writes "An article at The Verge got me thinking. Parents and those of you who plan to become parents: will you introduce your kids to the games you played when you were younger? Those of us who grew up playing Pong, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man have had a chance to see gaming software evolve into the enormously complex and graphically realistic beast it is today. I've begun to understand why my grandparents tried to get me to watch old movies. I'm also curious how you folks plan to teach your kids about computers and software in general. When teaching them Linux, do you just download the latest stable Mint or Ubuntu release and let them take it from there? Do you track down a 20-year-old version of Slackware and show them how things used to be? I can see how there would be value in that... the UIs we use every day have been abstracted so far away from their roots that we can't always expect new users to intuitively grasp the chain of logic. How do you think this should be handled?"
When teaching them Linux, do you just download the latest stable Mint or Ubuntu release and let them take it from there?
When we what?!?
Our kids will be pushed outside for as long as they can take it, and then they'll come inside and play on whatever system is en vogue when they're the right age for it. They don't give a crap about your nostalgia, and your music sucks.
Many replies below mine will be from Nintendo eta hipsters who'll be pushing them Mario, so they can feel good about their 8-bit tattoos.
the graphical beasts of today are nothing more than slightly more complex interactive movies of the 90's
walk in line,
talk to NPC's
kill someone
grab loot
repeat
at least on the consoles. if you want different genres you have to play on the PC for strategy and mobile for puzzle games. even then there is no need to play the original Sim City to enjoy today's farm or city or whatever building games.
anywhere near a console. Get them involved in other things instead.
For crying out loud, please stop it with these "How do I force my kid into liking ${some-random-shit-you-like}?" submissions. It's tiring to see them showing up two or three times each week these days.
Let your kids develop their own interests. If they like Linux, or gaming, or programming, or whatever, then so be it, and encourage them however you can. If they're interested in something else that you know nothing about, encourage and support them to the best of your ability anyway.
But please, for fuck's sake, don't try to force them into the crap you like. By doing that, you'll very likely make them hate it, even if they might've liked it had they had the opportunity to stumble upon it on their own (or even while watching you).
When teaching them Linux, do you just download the latest stable Mint or Ubuntu release and let them take it from there? Do you track down a 20-year-old version of Slackware and show them how things used to be?
I don't need to track down a 20-year-old version of anything - just install the latest Debian build.
Feels pretty much the same.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Classics. Like peek-a-boo and "roll the ball back to me"? Sheesh.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't have kids of my own, but I do work with other people's children in education and recreation. In that context my answers would be:
For games, a mixture. I look for games that allow children to express themselves either creatively or constructively. In some cases, modern games are excellent. An example would be Minecraft. In other cases, older games are wonderful. Think Simcity (the different versions are also good for different ages or levels of sophistication).
In the context of computer skills, I prefer modern vintage. Old system software doesn't necessarily teach contemporary skills and frequently has a high barrier of entry for fairly basic skills. Why would I want to spend time teaching command line utilities just because they are scriptable? (Worse, why would I want to expose them to archaic GUIs as a crutch when they would be expected to use modern GUIs as a crutch in the modern world?) A similar parallel can be drawn for programming. BASIC, C, and Pascal probably won't be in common use when they grow up. So I prefer to use something like Scratch. That won't be in common use either, but at least it allows the to focus upon programming concepts like control structures and concurrency without the hurdles of things like syntax errors.
Don't let the lure of nostalgia fool you.
Go to some abandonware site, play a few of these ancient games...frankly, they rather stink. I mean, they were great in the day, no question.
But by today's standards (and no, it's NOT JUST THE GRAPHICS) they usually are very simplistic, clumsy, with limited reflex-based gaming choices at best. Tactical choices are extremely limited, conflict resolution is opaque and arbitrary. Save game? Hahahahaa, no, sorry.
Really, don't let yourself be fooled by your rose colored glasses. There's no reason to punish your kid by making them play old crappy titles so they "appreciate" the new ones more. Don't waste your or their time.
Nota bene: I'm 46. I started playing Oregon trail on a MECC terminal in 3-4th grade at age 9? 10? I've been a dedicated gamer since then, playing everything from the Atari800 Space Vikings from cassette tape, to Apple II space empires, to Ultima (before they had numbers), etc etc and so on. Bought my own first computer (a Zeos 386-20, regrettably without a co-processor, I simply couldn't afford it) in my early 20s, wrote computer game reviews for nearly 15 years, and have been involved in several titles from alpha to release. If there's anyone who could be suffused with nostalgia, it's me.
-Styopa
Everyone without kids replies saying they'll never let their child do anything but play outside, do arts and crafts, read books and be the pinnacle of amazing parenting while still working a full time job and have a rich adult social life.
I agree with your goals, but here are some of facts as I see them:
(1) Kids of this age do not have the higher thinking skills to appreciate sacrificing something for longer term gain.
(2) If you force them use an outdated or substandard system, they will resent you, be humiliated with their friends (or more likely, lie about it to prevent that).
(3) You're not really teaching them anything useful in a practical sense. Yes, I love the Atari 2600 too. It is completely irrelevant to anyone born after 1990 except in a historical sense.
(4) Desire to learn history has to come from the seeker, not the purveyor of that knowlege. It can be encouraged, but not forced.
Games are games.
Just had a Christmas party with some 20-somethings where we all played Gauntlet II on the big TV. It was a blast. None of them had ever played it before, but it was about how you play it - not what you're playing.
In the same way that I don't mind loading up a Speccy emulator and then playing some title from Steam and then going back to a DOSBox title from GOG.com and then playing my family at Mario on Wii U, games are very variable and enjoyable across all eras and platforms.
The problem is people who think one is "better" than the other and trying to enforce that opinion on others. Imagine trying to do that with movies - making your kids sit through The Goonies or whatever just because YOU enjoyed it. I bet you can find half-a-dozen people from your school year that also hated such a film. Similarly, people play games that suit them.
This is also why it's so difficult to get someone who "isn't into" games into games... they aren't into it for a reason, or it would have taken their interest years ago. Sure, they might have one particular title that they like, but chances are that even if they like a game, it'll be one you don't like. This is why every year or so, the "how do I get my girlrfriend into games" question pops up on here... show them a couple, if they don't like them, then they don't like them, and chances are that they won't like the same games as you.
Hell, my brother and I were from the era of "the family computer", used to play together all the time (sharing a keyboard!) and are both massive gamers still. Even we don't share the enjoyment of every title we owned - there were lots of games he loved that I can't stand and vice versa.
Don't force your opinions on your kids - let them play what they want (to the normal parenting extents!). And I'm sure if they get into a family tradition of, say, playing Monopoly at Christmas, they'll get into a family tradition of playing some Bomberman when you dig it out and put it on the TV for them all to play. But that's got infinitely more to do with "playing together" as it has the particular game.
You want your kids to play games with you? Do that. Don't worry about what the game is - it can be one of their or one of yours.
You want your kids to learn how to play old games? You might as well try to convince them to put all their MP3's onto cassette.
Read "Ready Player One".
Ponder the world that book portrays, and think that's the world your gaming children will live in if everybody plays games.
Then ask your question again.
All three of my boys learned to touch-type quite well playing the old Hero's Quest game. So there is definitely some benefit at least to the old text-based games. "Pick up rock" "Throw rock" and the faster you got at typing the better you took out the monsters.
Just let them play ET all day long. Pretty soon they'll be great at outdoor sports.
I also had access to my grandparents collection of National Geographics going back to the 1920's.. I could get lost for hours reading those on a rainy day. Then there was my ham radio station, mostly home built while I was in high school. I lived in the country and had my own .22 rifle from the time I was 10 and could go outside and do some "plinking" even though there weren't other kids to play with. I didn't need video/electronic games. I know I'm old, so excuse me for thinking that video games are way over-rated.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
While daughter was growing up, we had a strict no-console policy at home. Yes, I know, I was a horrible parent blah blah. Her friends had consoles of various types, as did her grandmother, and she was free to play them as long as it was at someone else's house. What I was trying to avoid was the all encompassing time-sink effect that I had observed had happened to my nephews. The ban did not apply to PC games, so she spent a lot of time growing up with Oblivion, Railroad Tycoon, The Sims, Spore and the like. But she spent most of her online time researching stuff and reading news. At one point she started asking me to find the collections How It's Made, Dirty Jobs, How Art Made the World, Mythbusters. Her interests would fluctuate but were always about real things. Currently she's reading and watching everything she can find about orcas. (Apparently, we're never supposed to step foot in a Sea World ever again...)
Somewhere along the line she developed a taste for things retro -- charlie chaplin movies, swing music, early roll film cameras. She said she wanted to buy a Nintendo 64. Why? Because it's cool. Shrug. Ok. I said go ahead, it's your money. This was our first console, purchased in early 2013.
She had to do a lot of research to figure out what all the parts were, and what was affordable, and eventually had enough pieces to make a working system. She's collected six games now, and plays with them once or twice a week. I get the idea that putting the system together was more fun than actually playing it, but again, it was her money. So I guess I'd say, she was drawn to older games. But it wasn't me who led her to them. Besides the Mechwarrior series, I haven't really played games much. I tried Warcraft once and got so heavily addicted that I neglected to bathe or eat. I finally gave the disc to daughter and told her to hide it. I still don't know where it is, and I haven't gamed since.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I have five kids, (ranging from three to eleven years old) and while they do sometimes play video games, (the four year old is almost better at MarioKart Wii than me, and he's only been playing it for less than a year!) my focus for them this year has been primarily Legos. We made a point of scavenging all of my old Legos from my parents house just a couple of months ago, and we purchased hundreds of dollars worth of new Legos for Christmas. And you know what? While only a couple of them have had any kind of a lasting interest in video games, every single one of them is perfectly happy to sit down with a pile of bricks in front of them, for hours on end.
I think there is just something intrinsically satisfying about building something with your own hands. Legos capture that in a simplified "child friendly" form like nothing else I've experienced in my own lifetime. So no: I won't focus specifically on those "vintage" video games... but I will be searching the web for PDFs of my old Lego kit instruction manuals. (So far, I've only found one... the official Lego site doesn't go far enough back in their archive. Yet.)
they can be hipsters with good taste
Wait, if they have good taste, would they still be hipsters?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Before my daughter gets to ride in a fancy-pants self-driving car, she's going to start in a Model T, with a steering rod and a hand-cranked starter. And that's only if she's mastered horse-riding first! Also, we're only speaking to her in Latin and Ancient Greek for now, gradually working our way up to modern English and Spanish by the time she's around 10. She's gonna love some of these Jacquard Loom games I've printed out from an abandonware punch-card site...
Just look at Japanese society today. There are many grown men in their 30s who have no desire to start their careers, to get married, to raise families, and to otherwise act like adult men have for centuries. All they do is sit around in their undergarments, watching anime. They attempt to engage in "relationships" with cardboard cutouts of anime characters. Their only sexual interests are concerned with octopuses molesting anime women. By all measures, these people are failures in life.
Who the hell are you to judge what constitutes success or failure in regards to another person's life, and to clarify such people are hardly exclusive to Japan, all over the world we are seeing grown adults who for whatever reasons do not strive for what others consider "maturity", and why should they, in this modern age for many in so called "developed nations" maturity means becoming a wage slave to pay off perpetual debt generated by pursuing a consumer lifestyle to distract themselves from the purgatory existence of waking up, going to work, coming home, watching regularly scheduled programming, going to sleep, waking up and doing that over and over again because anything else costs more money which means more debt which means more slavery and if that's adulthood can you really blame some people for saying screw you I'm gonna stay a kid forever?
Kids are natural born scientists. Give them some rules and they'll begin exploring the limits of reality, authority, or the game's (possibly quirky) physics engine.
In addition to playing the games I teach youngsters how to write a little code to help with their mathematics and make games, game mods, and graphical programs -- Hey, if Alice can write a program to do long division and show the work graphically for her to "cheat" at her homework, then she knows long division inside and out. If Bob can program a ballistic projectile targeting system then he'll ace his physics test. If Mal can exploit a bug in the game's physics to make Bob and Alice cry foul then they've all learned a valuable life lesson -- Feelings get less hurt in a game than reality.
Kids can craft 2D & 3D architecture, or even planetary systems in the virtual worlds. They can learn to use evolution as not just a theory but as a tool to create all the various desired AI behaviours for a game's enemies without having to write additional lines of code. Most game AI is nothing like machine intelligence, AAA games allocate only 1% to 2% of the asset/processing/memory budget but if you don't care about pushing the graphics envelope then the embarrassingly parallelizable n.nets can exhibit some neat emergent behaviours. When Evolution vs Creationism comes up my niece laughs and says, "Evolution is real, I use it at my uncle's house all the time."
As for classic games? It's not mandatory, but I happen to have a collection. They're good for youngsters who are honing hand-eye coordination: Intellivision's dial/knob controller is still great for pong. The Atari 2600 joystick sucks for kids though, fortunately you can just plug a Sega Genesis controller into it and it'll work great. Young kids do best with high contrast games with simple objectives, but they quickly outgrow this phase. There's an unaddressed gap between Atari and NES where a minimalist style would be great for developing young minds... Some indie game developers are finding and exploring this niche.
As for the violence thing? We'll I watched Tom & Jerry and Loony Tunes, I didn't turn out to be racist or violent. There's no evidence to support the claim that media causes violent behaviour. Competition, maybe, but that's a healthy beneficial trait. I gave my little brother the mouse to shoot Doom's demons and open the doors while I controlled the movement and lined up shots for him when he was under a year old. He turned out to love games and people, and became a pacifist...
One thing to watch out for is isolationism. Introversion needn't be deemed harmful, but exposure to social situations is good. Kids just love having something they imagined come to life for all to see, so consider helping them make a simple game or game-mod with any of the freely available engines as an ongoing weekend collaboration. They can take breaks or trips to the park to play hide and seek, Frisbee, or other sports to work out some energy and make concentration on collaborative engineering tasks easier.
Most modern games (and kids' shows) I consider just bubble-gum or mental candy. There's a difference between playing a game designed to entertain you the longest and playing a game designed that lets you learn or leverage real world skills; Pokemon grind-fest is the former, Minecraft and Halo world editing is the latter. I persuade kids to eat their mental vegetables by having them work on or in a game together towards a common goal. Have them all team up and strategize against me in a 8-way classic Doom Deathmatch, or have teams build new co-op levels then playtest them against each other -- BTW, have you seen all the free zany and even cartoony mods for Doom and Quake "source ports" now? They've even got Monopoly and Clue clones. If anyone says: "Wouldn't it be cool if ___ in the game?", I write it down. Have the kids pick an idea amongst themselves, then help them build it. Combine that with my 3D UI, OS dev, electronics, and robotics projects we've g
Everyone without kids replies saying they'll never let their child do anything but play outside
Especially when urban and suburban environments aren't designed to expose children to a lot of quality outside time. They often aren't pedestrian-friendly, and a child might not have a playmate within reasonable walking distance. Parents are afraid of vehicular traffic, abduction by strangers, and abduction by the ex-spouse. Nor can parents with full-time jobs always manage to find stay-at-home neighbors to supervise their kids' outdoor play.