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A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

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Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#361

Post by bobbygoodlatte »

manfredo wrote: post #139
Retric wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Right now the industry is largely unregulated, but that's more a question of enforcement than any sort of real legal protection. In the US you can't build a slot machine that accepts money and dispenses tokens that have value. That's often how things operate in Japan, but the same model is generally illegal in the US. It's questionable if spending real money on virtual currency to buy "loot boxes" th…

In game items don't have value. If they did, then effectively all games with RNG mechanics would be banned. Heck, even the original Rogue would fall under that umbrella.

That depends on the game. I believe one big trend in gaming will be connecting in-game economies to real-world economies. That might happen by tokenizing in-game assets and allowing free trade via exchanges / auction sites.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#362

Post by Cyph0n »

bluntfang wrote: post #254
Cyph0n wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come up with that percentage? Have you ever played CS? Firstly, OP basically said that CS is not a strategic game at all, which is completely false. Secondly, CS can get extremely strategic in the professional scene, but it is also quite strategic at higher ranks in the game's competitive mode ladder. It is also a heavily team-based game: e.g., if one of your team members is not communicating, you are at…

>How did you come up with that percentage? Have you ever played CS? Ok, well tell us the percentage of CS players that play at the highest level?

Do I look like I work at Valve?

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#363

Post by drb91 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #354
woolvalley wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like TV ads targeted to children 20 years ago to buy into the beanie baby craze?

Ironically it was the adults who were susceptible - they were just plush toys to kids. Which I suppose ironically rhymes with social media and deception.

Seriously, I enjoy my beanie babies the same as I did 20 years ago. They’re a lot of fun to throw around! I just never expected anything more.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#364

Post by drb91 »

usrusr wrote: post #282
kurthr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo (anecdata)... a few years ago I spent the last 15min of a flight into SFO talking to a lady (who had been playing Bejeweled for 4 hours straight) about using touchscreens so long (it's my job). She mentioned how shaky she gets when she has to stop playing... I asked what she did... a game designer at Zynga.

More anecdata: we're all here, right?

Painful but accurate.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#365

Post by drb91 »

clarkmoody wrote: post #124
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #21

>Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said. >"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand." A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all kn…

I disagree with your last point. Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it. Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.

Technology also always exists in context, removing any neutrality.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#366

Post by ravenstine »

jbattle wrote: post #287
rchaud wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys. But the addiction component wasn't built-in the way it is now. Everyone remembers "Saturday morning cartoons with cereal" because there was a set time and place for that event. After the episode ended, it didn't auto-play the next episode, or recommend 5 highly similar shows based on your "viewing history". Consid…

I dunno, I remember losing HOURS sitting in front of a TV. Watching whatever. Whatever they wanted to show me, I'd watch it. Commercials every X minutes.

That's how I remember it, but one difference in my experience was that it was understood by everyone that watching lots of TV was considered bad, but we all went ahead and did so anyway. Now it's considered normal to "binge" on TV, and I find it very disconcerting that people are using that word without even being tongue-in-cheek about it.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#367

Post by thowthisaway »

I as a parent am trying to do the best I can with what I can afford. This cost is both time and money (which honestly is vastly skewed). I learned watching my parents growing up and that's really what I have to go by.

I spent a lot of time growing up watching TV. It has helped me learn english (and the proper use of slangs) as well as teaching me some values and cultural references that I couldn't get from a book. If I was never allowed to watch TV, I don't know how I would have occupied my time. Libraries were a bus ride away, there was no local park for me to go to (even if I did, didn't have any friends to really do anything worthwhile)

So, is it my parent's fault? were they unfit as parents to let me watch whatever TV I could after doing my homework? would I have been a better person (whatever that means) if I would have had other after-school activities?

I'm writing this because I'm so sick and tired of people pointing fingers and speaking as though they have all the answers. If you identified the problem, you have to give me the solution as well. You can't just say "here's the problem, now go solve it yourself".

And for you non-parents, you have no idea the types of peer pressure these kids go through. Don't point fingers and label them as some kind of defects just because they've been exposed to the scary "screen time". Kids are just trying to survive, just like the rest of us.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#368

Post by LeftTurnSignal »

Aeolun wrote: post #128
wlesieutre wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to keep the useful parts of a smartphone without optimizing the addictive parts. Too much to ask apparently.

I feel like this is a fairly weird argument. Bigger screens are not more addictive by themselves.

Their argument seems to be more venting about Apple not selling a phone they want, rather than smartphone addiction.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#369

Post by Nasrudith »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #321
andrewla wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" ... is an extremely strong addiction factor. Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.

I'd say that the classic "Cow Clicker" game ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker ) is a strong counterpoint to what you're suggesting. Meant to be a satire with essentially zero gameplay, the author was surprised when it gained a dedicated following. There is just something about the "Skinner box"-style of frequent microrewards in games that scratches an itch in the human psyche.

I think cow clicker had novelty and the empty room psych on its side as well. Humans tend to obsess upon things which seem to have a purpose but no obvious one. Nobody bats an eye at the same tree used hundreds of times of a plot important but a single beggar with grey rags instead of brown? They must be more important somehow!

Well before then players of the original Diablo were obsessively clicking cows because of rumors and belief that there had to be something to the cow.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#370

Post by isodude »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #89
remarkEon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTS games in particular were extremely fun for me, and I don't see how playing hours of Starcraft and C&C wasn't an exercise in strategic thinking. I share Ms. Stecher's skepticism, though. Games today are fundamentally different from what they were when we were growing up (I'm guessing we're around the same age if you were big into AoE). Some of my friends have kids now, and the games I see them playing make me crin…

Talking about and being from that AoE games generation, I think a big part is the absence of any restrictions and incentives to stop. Only very few of my friends back then had unrestricted access to videogames or even TV. And even if they did, there is only so much time you could sink into a sp game before you might want to do other stuff. This even more so for non strategy games. There was only so much you could get…

The world is boring. I mean, doing anything requires quite the effort if you are not doing it with the correct tooling. Games helps out with that alot acting both teacher and timespender.

Everyone is attached to a screen, it's not just kids. Just sit down on a bench or a bus and reflect on your surroundings. It really is surreal. This is obviously the kind of reality they have to meet, so they adapt and learn.

Banning things have never really worked out in my opinion, compared to work together and talk about things.

Parents have always and will always act preventive, being concerned. Our biggest job however is to have faith in the minds of our kids. They are great at getting the best experience they can from their life. Just be there as a parent and help them navigate. They will probably be stronger and better at facing technology than us the parents ever will be.

This is atleast what I tell concerned parents and myself. The best thing we do here is to start a game of fortnite and play all together since that is the only thing everyone agrees on (used to be minecraft).

There's a lot of research on this to find bad behaviours, were peoples life actually change to the worse. And what I have learned is that we need to love talk and interact with your kids, try to understand their interests and be brave. The world is a tough place and they need all the guidance they can to figure out what we came up with actually means. Childproofing only gets you that far.

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