Whats going to happen with the next generation (of kids, not hardware:)?
Reading this article, I realized I'm straddling this supposedly huge 'divide' between parents and gamers.
I'm old enough to have owned an Atari VCS (lots of newspaper deliveries for that one), watched the first video on MTV, and programmed a TRS-80. In high school, I played AD&D and envied my friend's VIC-20 (my parents got me a... PCjr! woohoo). I've been doing the multiplayer thing since Doom - we play almost daily at lunch, as we've done, nonstop, since 1994 (actually, my first multiplayer shootemup was Mazewar:). I waited in line to pay $300 for a PSX in 1995. I've owned just about every Voodoo and Nvidia.
So I'm a gamer.
On the other hand, I have a family, including two kids old enough to start gaming. They know how to make Crash jump, they know that the gold CDs are not from the store, and how to shut down windows. And this all before first grade. So, definitely, they will be gamers, and not think anything of it.
Every generation rebels against its parents. I did it (I still think they're rather disfunctional:), my kids will do it, and so on. Will they rebel by refusing to play video games, preferring instead the outdoors, and actually skating instead of pretending to skate? I kinda hope so. Even today, they turn the TV off on me and force me to go outside and play. Yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading this article, I realized I'm straddling this supposedly huge 'divide' between parents and gamers.
I'm old enough to have owned an Atari VCS (lots of newspaper deliveries for that one), watched the first video on MTV, and programmed a TRS-80. In high school, I played AD&D and envied my friend's VIC-20 (my parents got me a... PCjr! woohoo). I've been doing the multiplayer thing since Doom - we play almost daily at lunch, as we've done, nonstop, since 1994 (actually, my first multiplayer shootemup was Mazewar :). I waited in line to pay $300 for a PSX in 1995. I've owned just about every Voodoo and Nvidia.
So I'm a gamer.
On the other hand, I have a family, including two kids old enough to start gaming. They know how to make Crash jump, they know that the gold CDs are not from the store, and how to shut down windows. And this all before first grade. So, definitely, they will be gamers, and not think anything of it.
Every generation rebels against its parents. I did it (I still think they're rather disfunctional :), my kids will do it, and so on. Will they rebel by refusing to play video games, preferring instead the outdoors, and actually skating instead of pretending to skate? I kinda hope so. Even today, they turn the TV off on me and force me to go outside and play. Yeah.