Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by hluska » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #83

I tried Minecraft for the first time in my life a few weeks ago. Together with my 5 year old son. He loved it, and I liked it too, but we really didn't get very far - the moment night fell, we got brutally slaughtered by zombies or whatever. Respawning only made things worse, because later nights seemed to bring stronger attackers. I played some Quake back in the day, it's not like 3d games are totally new to me. Sti…

First, remember that there are two modes - creative and survival. Creative is a world where nothing will try to kill you and you have access to all the materials without having to explore/mine for them. In survival, you're dropped off with a few basic items and told to survive. Both are fun, but if you're having trouble in survival, it's good to start in creative to learn mechanics and build some really cool things!

When I've played survival with my stepdaughter, in the beginning, we usually spend our days collecting resources to craft torches, doors and pickaxes, then spend our nights underground, where we build large mines (and often build elaborate underground structures). We keep this up until we have a steady food supply, good quality armour/weapons and lighted defensive structures outside.

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

#152

Post by fyi1183 » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

ascorbic wrote: post #104

athrun wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, this is a very interesting (and intriguing) perspective. Couple of questions: - Does this mean that there’s a case for QE to be made permanent under a low-inflation environment? - Under this model, govermnents would be directly responsible for the allocation of the newly created money. How can this not lead to a depressed economic output over time? - Where can I read more about this?

My naive question is why so few governments or central banks tried implementing QE as helicopter money, rather than for bond purchases. It seems to my (undergrad-only econ) perspective that the person in the street is far more likely to put the money to use in the economy.

I've been wondering the same thing. A few points come to mind:

It's easy trot out the "but the bureaucracy!" argument.

Helicopter money is in-your-face money creation which brings out the gold bugs and inflation hyperventilators. QE as practiced is in comparison too mysterious for people to latch on to effectively.

Helicopter money was never really championed by anybody in the first place, so nobody really had to argue against it.

It's really unfortunate that a perfectly reasonable policy never got a fair chance. I do think it has a lot to do with ideological bias especially among central bankers, and with the fact that a lot of people on the left, who should naturally be in favour of such a policy, are too averse to studying economics and finance thoroughly enough to participate effectively in such discussions.

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

#153

Post by UncleEntity » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #87

icelancer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Keynesian Economics, which ended the Great Depression This is a pretty bold claim and not one that should be stated as fact.

What are the competing theories? The most common one is "WWII", which is another way of saying "Keynesian Economics"

There's a ton of competing theories that like to point out that previous depressions lasted a year or two while the Great Depression went on and on because of all the government interventions that prevented the economy from being able to recover.

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

#154

Post by bjornlouser » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

senectus1 wrote: post #128

I found playing Minecraft with my 9yr old son a painful experience.. all he wants to do is get into creating mode and make stuff then grief it. All I wanted to do was explore and battle against the odds with what I could make of it. It was/is a disappointing experience.

I have experienced this with my kid of similar age. I think the survival mode is a bit scary even if they won't admit it.

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

#155

Post by UncleEntity » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

gonzo41 wrote: post #72

icelancer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Keynesian Economics, which ended the Great Depression This is a pretty bold claim and not one that should be stated as fact.

Keynesian Economics kept Australia out of recession in 08. They literally gave everyone 800 bucks. It was awesome, went out a bit more, bought lots of takeout and a few bits for around the house. And the economy kept moving. Now if only i could figure out a way to get more people to live in my SIM tower!

Why stop at 800?

Give everyone a million bucks and you'd have a booming economy.

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

#156

Post by scott_karana » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #127

What age is ok to start Minecraft with? Can you do couch coop with it? I have a steam link and some couch coop games but it doesn't work very well for my 5 and 7 year olds. (Steam link and steam conrollers are really finicky to set up, too). Should I just get a ps4 or xbox? And how does minecraft compare to Lego Worlds? I've played Terraria in the past, but that seems too hard for that age - at least for kids who are…

You can disable monsters altogether, if that's the concern. :)

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

#157

Post by pfarnsworth » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 8:37 PM UTC

prdonahue wrote: post #80

pfarnsworth wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play a lot of poker, and will risk hundreds of dollars on a single hand. All of my 401k is in money market mutual funds. I'm not sure that a straight up games-to-financial-decision type study would be useful, there are many different motivations between playing games or even gambling, and financial decisions.

I hope by "money market mutual funds" you mean some general sort of passive-markets based investment approach (not actually holding 100% of your 401k in cash-like instruments)?

Money market mutual funds is a very well defined term.

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

#158

Post by pasabagi » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

slavik81 wrote: post #101

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…

RAedit (the Red Alert game editor) was simple enough for a child to use, and powerful enough to basically build your own RTS. I spent hours designing maps for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 as a kid. It was really not that different from how I played Minecraft as an adult.

I used the same editor. You could draw like, cliffs. Water. Trees. That's not a RTS. That's a picture and some pathfinding. Actually, I don't know how Red Alert did their pathfinding - perhaps it's just a picture. Building a RTS implies making your own gameplay - not just playing the same game on a different geometry.

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

#159

Post by pasabagi » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

reificator wrote: post #126

pasabagi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 othe…

I like Zachtronics, but I really, really don't get how you view Minecraft as a ripoff of Infiniminer. Infiniminer is a competitive class-based game in a constrained arena. The goal is to get a higher score than your opponents. Minecraft is a survival game in an infinite world. The goal is to build a base and progress through a tech tree, or to build things for fun. Ace of Spades is closer to being a ripoff of Infinim…

Well, the explanation is probably that I've been taken in by a meme. I should have added a disclaimer that I've not actually played infiniminer a good deal earlier in the thread, and my feeling that Minecraft was derivative was almost entirely based on its timing, visual similarity, and my understanding that the basic mechanic (digging through voxel based terrain) was the same.

An additional factor that made me extra-specially susceptible to this meme is that when I played minecraft, I immediately thought it was essentially a dumbed-down version of dwarf fortress with better graphics. What I saw at the time as the basic innovation - which I think is still what makes dwarf fortress exceptional, is a game that uses a tiling or cubic grid to allow for real creative play, with an attendant focus on mining, survival, and craft.

I don't think Star Wars is a rip-off of star trek, but it absolutely is and was always intended as a derivative work. All the ideas and content was developed in earlier sci-fi. Star Wars was an interesting contribution in terms of execution - and that's exactly why I like it. It had genuinely new ideas about set design and special effects. Minecraft, on the other hand, has no new ideas I can think of.

I still think it's a good game - and I'm very happy that when my kid hits the age where they wanna play games, I can point them to Minecraft and be pretty certain they're not going to be loading naked kidnapped people into a sausage factory (I played GTA2 when I was a kid), or squashing people with tanks, or irradiating them until they turn into mush. I mean, I guess they'll do those things at some point to, but it's nice that there's an actual honest-to-goodness kids game out there that doesn't suck.

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

#160

Post by slavik81 » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #158

slavik81 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAedit (the Red Alert game editor) was simple enough for a child to use, and powerful enough to basically build your own RTS. I spent hours designing maps for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 as a kid. It was really not that different from how I played Minecraft as an adult.

I used the same editor. You could draw like, cliffs. Water. Trees. That's not a RTS. That's a picture and some pathfinding. Actually, I don't know how Red Alert did their pathfinding - perhaps it's just a picture. Building a RTS implies making your own gameplay - not just playing the same game on a different geometry.

I made my own units, too. And you could write events in their scripting language. I think you could make a basic mod without much trouble.

I mostly made a lot of giant bases and scenarios, but the tooling was quite powerful.

The move to 3D basically killed that for me. Editors became much more complicated. In a way, simplifying the interface for building things in 3D was one of Minecraft's great successes.