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Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

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Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#31

Post by cptskippy »

My kids and I use to play Terraria together. I would always challenge them by building things like a castle on the edge of space or a mine car track that ran the length of the map but hidden either in clouds or deep under ground.

I would leave them rare materials or dyes in chests and see what they would come up with.

The fun part was that we didn't have to play at the same time, every now and then I would log in and they'd have left something in my house to let me know they found my hide out.

We eventually invited some of their friends and a co-worker's kid who was getting griefed in public servers.

Every so often we'll spend an evening on the couch playing some co-op or competitive game but we don't spend much time in our Terraria world anymore.

I should check it out and see what's become of it.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#32

Post by pasabagi »

reificator wrote: post #26
pasabagi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played a lot of red alert as a kid, and flight simulators, but honestly, calling the first 'creative', and the second 'open world' is ridiculous. They were nice games - but if you play them today, you'll see how far games have come. You can literally build a computer in Minecraft. I don't like the game, don't like that the developer ripped off the idea, and find the art obnoxious - but you have to admit, it's basic…

> don't like that the developer ripped off the idea Minecraft and Infiniminer are two very different games, similar in superficial visuals and technological implementation but completely different in terms of gameplay. Besides, if you enjoy a game and then development of that game stops, what's wrong with making your own?

I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat.

It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money.

I've no idea about the exact mechanics of the copying - whether he just copied the idea, or copied the implementation from the source, or indeed used parts of the source in his game - but I think these are largely small differences. The real problem I have is it seems like this is basically how our society works - somebody thinks of something cool, then somebody else gets rich / famous / tenure off it, while the person who did most of the work is lucky to get a footnote.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#33

Post by gowld »

sdfin wrote: post #28
bwang29 wrote: post #15

I definitely feel games like Sims and Simcity changed my perception of resource safety as a child. I played Sims/Simcity2000~3000/Civs for hundreds of hours as a kid, and I loved the "realistic" feels and setups of these games. When I started to play I always had later stage trouble when I'm overspending on building fancy roads and bridges in SimCity or buying expensive items up front. I slowly learned the way of set…

Resource management in video games is a skill that I'm sure transfers to real world resource management. Apart from the simulators you mention strategy games like age of empires and red alert also teach about it. Some weeks ago a co-worker told me something similar to what you share, how he learned about resources while playing SimCity. He also said his younger sister asked him "If people doesn't have money, why does…

It's not a naive question. She was on the verge of re-inventing Keynesian Economics, which ended the Great Depression.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#34

Post by gowld »

pasabagi wrote: post #32
reificator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't like that the developer ripped off the idea Minecraft and Infiniminer are two very different games, similar in superficial visuals and technological implementation but completely different in terms of gameplay. Besides, if you enjoy a game and then development of that game stops, what's wrong with making your own?

I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat. It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money. I've no idea about the exact mechanics of the copying - whether he just copied the idea, or copied th…

Isn't infiniminer just a computerized copy of Lego.

As the old saying goes, "If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook". Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#35

Post by pasabagi »

gowld wrote: post #34
pasabagi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat. It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money. I've no idea about the exact mechanics of the copying - whether he just copied the idea, or copied th…

Isn't infiniminer just a computerized copy of Lego. As the old saying goes, "If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook". Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.

I generally agree. To be honest, I wasn't so much making a general moral judgement about copying. Hamlet was a copy. Bach was a music kleptomaniac. Execution is way more important. I just find minecraft a particularly uncreative copy, and personally like zachatronics - so I 'don't like that he ripped it off'. Which he did. I don't think this dislike could or should extend to other copied pieces of work, games or otherwise.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#36

Post by stagbeetle »

reificator wrote: post #26
pasabagi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played a lot of red alert as a kid, and flight simulators, but honestly, calling the first 'creative', and the second 'open world' is ridiculous. They were nice games - but if you play them today, you'll see how far games have come. You can literally build a computer in Minecraft. I don't like the game, don't like that the developer ripped off the idea, and find the art obnoxious - but you have to admit, it's basic…

> don't like that the developer ripped off the idea Minecraft and Infiniminer are two very different games, similar in superficial visuals and technological implementation but completely different in terms of gameplay. Besides, if you enjoy a game and then development of that game stops, what's wrong with making your own?

I believe the OG is referring to "CastleMiner Z," the other, not-so oft mentioned, precursor to Minecraft. The investigative should also take note, that Infiniminer is also based off of CastleMiner Z. And that CastleMiner Z itself, was based off of another game.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#37

Post by skookumchuck »

bwang29 wrote: post #15

I definitely feel games like Sims and Simcity changed my perception of resource safety as a child. I played Sims/Simcity2000~3000/Civs for hundreds of hours as a kid, and I loved the "realistic" feels and setups of these games. When I started to play I always had later stage trouble when I'm overspending on building fancy roads and bridges in SimCity or buying expensive items up front. I slowly learned the way of set…

I'd be very careful about applying lessons from a game to the real world. Lots of games designed by economists, for example, tend to validate the pet theories of the economists, despite not working in the real world.

Real world economics is infinitely more complex than the handful of rules in a game.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#38

Post by ekianjo »

pasabagi wrote: post #14
ekianjo wrote: post #5

> But those games are about stretching and challenging him to fit the mold of the game’s demands. When we play Minecraft together, the direction of his development, and thus our relationship, is reversed: He converts the world into expressions of his own fantasies and dreams. And by letting me enter and explore those dream worlds with him, I come to understand him in a way that the games from my childhood do not. Is…

I played a lot of red alert as a kid, and flight simulators, but honestly, calling the first 'creative', and the second 'open world' is ridiculous. They were nice games - but if you play them today, you'll see how far games have come. You can literally build a computer in Minecraft. I don't like the game, don't like that the developer ripped off the idea, and find the art obnoxious - but you have to admit, it's basic…

> You can literally build a computer in Minecraft.

It's not because you can that everybody is using it in this way. I mean technically you can make a piece of art with brushes and paint yet almost nobody can.

> That's an order of magnitude more creative than anything we had twenty years ago.

Wow, you just brushed off like 30 years of video games in one sentence, without any argument. Well done.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#39

Post by ekianjo »

megaremote wrote: post #11
ekianjo wrote: post #5

> But those games are about stretching and challenging him to fit the mold of the game’s demands. When we play Minecraft together, the direction of his development, and thus our relationship, is reversed: He converts the world into expressions of his own fantasies and dreams. And by letting me enter and explore those dream worlds with him, I come to understand him in a way that the games from my childhood do not. Is…

I don't think that is fair, adventure games and RTS still has a purpose, an plot. Minecraft is more like lego, it doesn't have an end game. I think the closest we had was Simcity? Not sure why you are making this a personal attack on you? I though this was an interesting read, and something I hadn't thought of before.

Nothing like a personal attack. But he is pretending previous games were simplistic or worthless compared to Minecraft.

Re: Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

#40

Post by ekianjo »

jpatokal wrote: post #9
ekianjo wrote: post #5

> But those games are about stretching and challenging him to fit the mold of the game’s demands. When we play Minecraft together, the direction of his development, and thus our relationship, is reversed: He converts the world into expressions of his own fantasies and dreams. And by letting me enter and explore those dream worlds with him, I come to understand him in a way that the games from my childhood do not. Is…

RTS and flight sim games were the domain people who could afford PCs. The average American kid only had a game console.

> RTS and flight sim games were the domain people who could afford PCs.

Not at all. You could play them on an Amiga or an Atari which were miles more affordable than a PC.

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