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?"

Comments

What?

[mythosaz]

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.

Re:What?

[dyingtolive]

Yeah. Should I ever have kids, the first version of Pong we're playing is "catch".

I've seen kids raised by video games. No thanks.

Re:What?

[unixisc]

You mean that games like Monopoly, Chess, Clue, Stratego, Risk et al didn't/don't count?

Re:What?

[mythosaz]

I'll no doubt be trolled, but as a complete techno-nerd, it was tough getting our kids outside. We enrolled one in Karate, got him trying out for every sports team, but still he'll play as much LOL or DOTA as we'll let him. [...much the way some animals will eat themselves to death.] My daughter, on the other hand, is a book-nerd, and it's hard to dissuade her from wanting to read endlessly.

The two younger kids both leave the house and seek sunlight on their skin without prodding, so we figure we've done OK for having teenagers in a major city.

Re:What?

[ApplePy]

You have some smart friends.

There was no TV or video games in my house when I was growing up. I'm pretty sure I'm not mentally under-developed as a result.

Most of my peer group, however, was raised on television... and it shows. It is somewhat disconcerting at times to be the only one in a room with an attention span.

My kids (someday) aren't going to have TV either.

Re:What?

[chispito]

My son is active, but any gadgets that hold my attention become the objects of his desire. Phones, tablets, computers, etc., generally get shelved while he is awake. If I want to play something, I'll get down on my hands and knees and play hide and seek or blocks or something. Video games can wait till he's asleep or till some other odd hour.

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.

Re:What?

[narcc]

It depends. Do you want your children living in your basement 40 years from now?

Re:What?

[PopeRatzo]

There was no TV or video games in my house when I was growing up. I'm pretty sure I'm not mentally under-developed as a result.

Growing up in Chicago in the 60s and 70s, local TV stations had massive libraries of films, from silent movies to film noir, foreign films (subbed and dubbed) and just about everything ever made. In the later evening and sometimes early in the morning, they would put one of those movies on and they had low-cost programming.

It was possible, if you watched The Late Late Show and WGN and Midnight Movie, you could get an extremely complete education in filmmaking and film history. Over years. I would bet that students from the best film programs didn't get a chance to see as many movies as I did growing up, including Fellini, Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Ingmar Bergman. I remember watching Roberto Rosselini's 1946 classic Open City when I was 13, and I had no idea what it was, but it was transfixing. They Drive by Night, Angels with Dirty Faces, Greed and Battleship Potemkin, The Red Shoes and everything in between.

Later, when the rights to a lot of these movies were gobbled up, those movies were replace by two episodes of some bad TV drama and it was a terrible shame.

But for a little while, the entirety of film history was available to anyone who cared to watch. Television wasn't always a wasteland.

Re:What?

[mythosaz]

The wife and I are fairly indoor types ourselves. We're lost :)

We have to make a conscious effort to get outside, since we wouldn't otherwise. [We've always been much more at home in a casino than in a tent.] We schedule weekend activities with the kids that involve walking - even if it's just touring the outdoor park-and-swap instead of the mall - and are much more apt to do things with our kids outside rather than in. We all enjoy a day at the Ostrich Festival more than an afternoon in front of the TV. The wife and I wouldn't go by ourselves, but we do enjoy those things as a family.

I'm pretty sure more active parents have more active kids, and obviously leading by example is a great way to lead. We're home-bodies, so we make a point of doing pretty much all of our off-the-couch activities with the kids (where possible), and we encourage them (actively) to have their own off-the-couch activities.

As such, we've got some fairly well balanced kids, one involved heavily in sport, the other heavily involved in academics; both of whom spend some of their time playing video games, but neither of whom watch a lot of TV.

Re:What?

[anagama]

You know, crime rates are down from the 70s.

I don't have kids, or want them, so I don't know what I'm doing in here but gawking, but having been born in 1968 to some hippie parents who spent the first two years of my life camping out in various places in the NW US and Canada, and then spending almost all of my time as a toddler and kid outside doing various things in all sorts of weather, I feel sort of bad for kids who have parents hovering over them. People don't even let their kids ride the school bus anymore, opting instead to drop them off and pick them up at school. It's like all parents have become exceptionally paranoid, which from the perspective of a kid, must be really annoying.

Re:What?

[mythosaz]

You know, crime rates are down from the 70s.

I'm amazed regularly by how many of my peers believe in the boogeyman. The problem isn't that it isn't safe out there, but there unless you're taking kids to organized activities, there just isn't anyone outside. I know that's a suburban viewpoint, and that the urban reality in big cities is different, but my kids could walk for miles and might only encounter people getting into cars or walking their dogs.

Another force-your-kids-into-shit-you-like topic.

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Linux

[CanHasDIY]

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.

In before

[stigmato]

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.

excellent plan

[hypergreatthing]

Just let them play ET all day long. Pretty soon they'll be great at outdoor sports.

Not just games!

[santiago]

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...

All of the above, and more.

[VortexCortex]

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