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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

#41

Post by ekianjo »

mcphage wrote: post #12
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…

> Is this a Minecraft PR Piece? Because the games of my childhood were not just action games of the NES. You accuse this of being a paid plant because you can’t imagine that someone played different games than you as a child?! > RTS made you build bases from scratch and react to impending waves of enemies until you finally could crush them. Flight simulators were all about "open world" since you could have missions a…

> You accuse this of being a paid plant because you can’t imagine that someone played different games than you as a child?!

I accuse them of making a very simplistic comparison against "old video games" while that person does not seem to have much exposure in terms of video games genres in the first place. Either they are ignorant or dishonest. It's difficult to be ignorant these days with the mass of information on the Internet.

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

#42

Post by titanix2 »

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…

SimCity, Red Alert, AoE so much time playing on them. I’m not sure what they teach me but I’m confident it exposed me to problem solving and persistance which are always useful skills.

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

#43

Post by graedus »

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…

"If people doesn't have money, why doesn't the government print money and gives it to people?"

Because people are not systemically important financial institutions :)

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

#44

Post by bwang29 »

c3534l wrote: post #24
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…

Even something like Civilization can be expressive and educational. I mean, I also loved Mortal Kombat as a kid, before my parents figured out it was a game where you could punch a man so hard you could pull his beating heart out of his chest. But I also remember learning about ecology from SimEarth, and learning how to balance a budge from Theme Park.

I think combat games teach a lot about improvisation, especially if you're playing against another human, you'd have to adapt in realtime the pattern the other person is using and trying to develop a strategy to counter the other person's attack/defense. In recent combat games, the startup/cooldown time are so precise that pro players literally need to remember, compute and combine maths in their game plays in real time into combos.

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

#45

Post by earenndil »

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.

It's not even execution, it's luck (and marketing). Minecraft was marketed as a toy, even though 3d modeling tools already existed (I'm assuming) but they were marketed as professional tools for trained artists.

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

#46

Post by Retric »

skookumchuck wrote: post #37
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.

I think the biggest difference is most games tend to have anything not dead + positive resource stream = a win. People tend to build city's / county's / etc that go through a major such phase to maximize resource collection.

In reality you generally don't want to have 40 years of suck to get to some long term gain, because you need to live those 40 years.

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

#47

Post by sundvor »

cptskippy wrote: post #31

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…

Terraria is brilliant. My 7 year old son and I have just discovered it; I must say after spending quite a lot of time in Minecraft it's a fresh breath of air.

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

#48

Post by nemothekid »

>Once, a friend yelled at me for having breathed too audibly while he played a hard level of Batman. Since it was his Nintendo, he decided I would from then on hold my breath during his turns, lest I corrupt his delicate focus.

This is so incredibly nostalgic.

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

#49

Post by gdubs »

skookumchuck wrote: post #37
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.

I don’t have a source — lazy Saturday here — but I recall something about city planners using Sim City back in the day as part of their education, which horrified Will Wright since in his words (paraphrasing) “sim city is just cellular automata with some differential equations sprinkled on top.”

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

#50

Post by skybrian »

sundvor wrote: post #47
cptskippy wrote: post #31

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…

Terraria is brilliant. My 7 year old son and I have just discovered it; I must say after spending quite a lot of time in Minecraft it's a fresh breath of air.

Why is it better?
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