This article reminds me of playing Minecraft with my stepdaughter. When we got her a PS4, I have to admit that I had a bit of a fuddy duddy moment. Games weren't like they were when I was young, blah blah blah, NES, blah blah blah, the damned princess is in a different castle. And, when I firstlooked at Minecraft, I couldn't for the life of me, figure out what I was supposed to do.
Then, my stepdaughter took over and taught me the game. I was amazed by what an incredible teacher she was! And, I was more amazed by how much I learned about her playing Minecraft with her. That's still one of my peak experiences in step-parenting and I hope that's a memory that I will hold onto until the end of my days.
One particular moment still makes me laugh. As I mentioned, she was an incredible teacher with an ability to teach through stories and an incredible amount of patience with me. So, I said, "You know, you should become a teacher." She gave me a look that can best (and only) be described as her stinkeye and said, "I don't want to be a teacher. I want to be normal."
I’m constantly encouraging the second, third, and fourth year apprentices at work to be the first stop and series of escalation points for the more junior apprentices and students who come in for week-long work experience sessions as part of their high school requirement.
Part of learning is learning to teach, to share the skills and knowledge we have. It isn’t strictly necessary, but we know more is revealed when we attempt to impart a skill or knowledge because we are forced to use our Beginners Mind.
Lots of kids will just do this as part of play. I think it’s important to continue doing as we age, but maybe that’s just my secret desire to be a teacher. As tradesperson at a company with two new apprentices each year that desire is fulfilled.
Nobody knows minecraft intuitively. There are many children's games that you can figure out easily, but minecraft requires "a lot" lonely experimentation or reading or someone shows it to you.
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 setting up a less impressive base first, and swapping out parts and do re-designs and expansions as more resources became available.
I later found out all games have a specific pattern you follow to win, many of these patterns are available in online communities/guides/cheat sections where I'd spend tons of time to read, try and experiment. Those were probably the peak happiness and best time I've enjoyed as a little nerdy kid. I never thought too much a big deal of these experiences but nonetheless I believe definitely contributed to a base reality of how resource management work, and how I manage my personal projects, finance, and career choices as I grew up.
I'd be super curious to see research / longitudinal study coming up from the past 2-3 decades of gaming on kids, and see if conservative gaming styles leads to conservative financial decisions etc etc.
I'm not a father yet but I thought it would be a really cool idea to understand my kid through game play like this, but I also don't want the kids to be limited by my personal value though these interactions - sort of like the "observer and supporter" role the author played.
Sidenote: I'm still playing the latest Civ6 and still enjoy a lot from the dynamics in the economy managements with A.I..
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.
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 doesn't the government print money and gives it to people?". He said that playing SimCity would have prevented his sister from asking such a naive question.
I also would love so see the results of research about these games on kids. Maybe someday kids will play Sim City and AoE at elementary school or similar games designed for schools.
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 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.
That’s why I never succeeded for long in Simcity 2000! I would buy the biggest items, because you know, you gotta invest, you gotta see big, so I’d buy the nuclear plant as soon as available because you know, availability makes businesses develop quicker. And I’d always fail because the slightest glitch (monster, earthquake, riot) would ruin the objectives!
Aside from being influenced by government advertising (“This airport in a no-man’s land is going to develop the no-man’s land into a city!”), it also influenced my entrepreneur life: Why see small when you can invest all you have and get increasingly more return? Why spend time debugging when I could have this other big feature on the marketing material? And that’s why I never went past a few hours in Simcity, and why my cousin, a less entreprising person, would succeed more! Ha!
This points out a possibility I never thought of: archiving your children's play! I suppose we already keep art that our children produce but something so complexly imagined & constructed over hours was previously fairly ephemeral.
I recently had the pleasure of reviving a game world my brother & I had built three years ago. Wandering around that was a nice trip through nostalgia. These kids will be able to do that for their ten year old selves, all the way up.
I also have visited old minecraft worlds i made with my friends, but I must say that bitrot is a serious issue. Once the world is corrupt or lost, you cannot look back at it like you did.
This save and restore is what I have grown up with. I remember the day my Pokemon Silver savegame got erased, due to a depleting battery, for example.
People should not forget to take pictures and movies and make them physical, instead of dumping it on the internet.
Having a small amount of pictures is more than enough, that make those events even more special.
I had a lot of gaming memories saved on Xfire. They stopped their service a couple years ago and all the contents and thus the strong link to memories are gone. Just like people you have had contact with online, eventually you'll loose contact and then these pictures can help you not forgetting that time...
Maybe we are making and processing so many events, that we'll get issues remembering stuff in a couple years?
I archived a bunch of my old worlds as well, though I need to go back and organize them and triplicate the backups as well as getting back into some of those worlds and playing around again on an updated rig. Some worlds I had to cut short due to diminishing FPS the more and more I built (shakes fist at stair roofs).
One thing I wish I had access to though were the builds I've done on public servers.
I tried to play with my 4 y.o. son to NES classic games. He loved Donkey Kong County, and some other arcades, but I found games affects his behavior in a bad way. He was always asking to play more, refusing to go and play outside, working at home with books, paper, and color pens and water paints. So we're not playing for 6 months or more. He loved plasticine, and makes some really fancy and realistic animals. He likes water painting on the paper, and likes when we read him books. We believe video games is not something we should hook up our kids for. Avoiding games, and limiting the amount of youtube videos to 30-60 mins helped a lot.
Learning how to put the video game down is just as big a life lesson as many of the things the actual gameplay teaches you.
I think maybe 4 is a little young to ask a kid not to let their emotions drive them. But by the time they get to ages 6-10, video games can be a valuable tool for teaching time / life balance. Better to figure out at a young age that you have cravings to screw around when you should be doing something else, and you have to resist or bad things will happen.
Better they figure it out as a kid when "Bad things will happen" means "Parents will be mad." It's a lot tougher on them if they have to figure it out when they're a young adult, and "Bad things will happen" means "Flunking college" or "Losing a job."
Too many young adults can't deal with managing free time when they're first out on their own, and there are actual consequences to it at that point in their life.
Source: Was a kid once, was a young adult once, saw a couple other young adults wash out of college because nobody'd ever taught them how to stop playing video games when it starts to interfere with what they need to do.
I don’t have kids yet, but if I become a parent I also plan to encourage them to play more in the real world. I didn’t have access to a games console or computer at home until I was 10, so most of my youth was spent creating my own fun, usually outside.
What scares me even more is seeing parents of younger kids, giving them their phone and letting them watch episodes of Peppa Pig or similar, all the time. Guess it works to keep them quiet though...
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.
There should be more collaborative games rather than competitive games. One of my fondest memories is playing Quake 2 in COOP mode at a LAN Party back in the 90s getting stuck in a mineshaft with the group way past midnight. Extremely immersive and bonding experience. We still talk about this moment years later.
A lot of the really popular shooters out there now are collaborative, or have a strong collaborative element. For example, Destiny 2 can be solo, but really encourages you to group up with a couple friends to run 3 person strikes and other activities. Overwatch is a 6v6 game that is unwinnable without teamwork, and similarly R6 Siege requires advanced team collaboration. PUBG (2.2 million current active players at this minute) and Fortnite both derive a large part of their appeal from their very popular duo and 4 person squad modes. If you look at what people are actually playing right now, a huge chunk of it is largely collaborative games.
I definitely wish there were more collaborative games. I like to game with my wife, and we don’t prefer games where the objective is defeating each other.
Minecraft far and away is the game we play together most of the time. Alas it has finally gotten old to us.
One Christmas we played eve online. That was a great bit of fun. Bit of a time sink though.
Nintendo is still the go-to for couch co-op, especially with players of varying skill levels. Between the flagship and indie games, their brand is still very much based around family and friends playing together.
> In Minecraft, the imaginary worlds my son dreams up are expressed and realized in a virtual environment multiple people can occupy and affect together. When he tells me the floor is lava, I look down and notice that the floor is indeed made of burning lava, fatal on contact. In response, I construct a bridge.
I always wondered about my nephews fascination for minecraft. This is probably one of the main reasons.
A friend makes elaborate Minecraft worlds with his five yo daughter and it echoes what is here.
But there is another darker Minecraft world he operates with entire subspecies of Minecraft being chained helplessly in dark towers making lava derived net worth in a very Faustian "it's just a machine" life. Even their bodies when done with plummet into trains, to be taken for subsequent processing. We do talk about this. Will he introduce his daughter to mechanized entity-farming? How will he vocalise the stages? "This is where the bodies are taken to be turned into chicken food for the egg factory..."
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 aren't really intrinsically interested in video games like mine. Maybe one day...
(Could probably google this, but I imagine there must be ppl here who have actual experience)
I remember my kids playing Minecraft at 6, the exploring and the building like the article describes. But by 8 they had discovered the 'other side' of Minecraft, the servers that turn the world into a low-res version of a PvP game, and most of the 'building' went out the window.
My greatest times playing together with my young sons was had not in Minecraft, but in Age of Empires II (vastly preferred by all over I or III). Usually we'd play us against the AI, and they got pretty good at it so we'd sometimes play against each other as well. I think the RTS genre holds more potential for a common ground between parents and kids than either the 'virtual lego' or the FPS categories.
To avoid monsters, one torch covers a radius of about 7 or 8 blocks (in Manhattan distance). But judging by that bedroom screenshot, he's being really overboard.
Most kids I know play on sandbox mode. Building a fairytale scenario in normal mode takes dozens of hours, which most kids don’t have the patience (or computer time) for.
I grew up playing computer games with my father. He was terrible at the actual button pressing so I would drive and he would be responsible for the logistics (and often for removing the copyright cruft, as these games were pirated in USSR). It was kind of like buddy programming. I don't think we would bond as much if we played on separate computers.
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. Still, I felt completely incompetent. Does anyone know what someone should do to get past these first few days? I keep reading articles like these on the internet about how kids build fantastic structures, but how do you do that if half the game is basically about being hunted down by mindless killers?
I feel like there's some key aspect I don't understand. Any tips?
>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.
Oddly, my favorite memories of playing games with my parents were of the Myst series. We huddled around our computer, took turns "driving" and taking notes and managing the CD changes (in Riven at least) and just generating ideas to try. It was exhilarating and great bonding time. Like exploring a new world together and piecing together mysteries.
Anyone here spent their childhood playing Transport Tycoon 2 ?? I would soent ages reinwenting and redesigning my whole network as better engines become available, until I had MagLev networks running everwhere in loops (one way so that multiple tracks where one after another). Golden times never to come back again ;(
On the Switch playing Mario Kart 8 with a 5 and 3 year old is everything I wanted. It can both be cooperative and competitive. We have also ventured coop through Mario Odyssey. I think Minecraft is fun, but you definitely have whole bunch of games you should explore with the kids.
Mario Kart is now banned in my house. My youngest never wins and he never takes it well. Mario Odyssey is everyone's jam. They kinda like Minecraft on and off.
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.
I’ve play so many games and had every system that came out up to ps3, Xbox 360 from NES. I still don’t know how to properly play Minecraft. Is one of those game I feel sorry for myself for still now knowing how to play lol!
[+] [-] hluska|8 years ago|reply
Then, my stepdaughter took over and taught me the game. I was amazed by what an incredible teacher she was! And, I was more amazed by how much I learned about her playing Minecraft with her. That's still one of my peak experiences in step-parenting and I hope that's a memory that I will hold onto until the end of my days.
One particular moment still makes me laugh. As I mentioned, she was an incredible teacher with an ability to teach through stories and an incredible amount of patience with me. So, I said, "You know, you should become a teacher." She gave me a look that can best (and only) be described as her stinkeye and said, "I don't want to be a teacher. I want to be normal."
[+] [-] mirceal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|8 years ago|reply
Part of learning is learning to teach, to share the skills and knowledge we have. It isn’t strictly necessary, but we know more is revealed when we attempt to impart a skill or knowledge because we are forced to use our Beginners Mind.
Lots of kids will just do this as part of play. I think it’s important to continue doing as we age, but maybe that’s just my secret desire to be a teacher. As tradesperson at a company with two new apprentices each year that desire is fulfilled.
[+] [-] gameswithgo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acobster|8 years ago|reply
I still haven't played Minecraft, but this makes me want to learn how from a kid.
[+] [-] bwang29|8 years ago|reply
I later found out all games have a specific pattern you follow to win, many of these patterns are available in online communities/guides/cheat sections where I'd spend tons of time to read, try and experiment. Those were probably the peak happiness and best time I've enjoyed as a little nerdy kid. I never thought too much a big deal of these experiences but nonetheless I believe definitely contributed to a base reality of how resource management work, and how I manage my personal projects, finance, and career choices as I grew up.
I'd be super curious to see research / longitudinal study coming up from the past 2-3 decades of gaming on kids, and see if conservative gaming styles leads to conservative financial decisions etc etc.
I'm not a father yet but I thought it would be a really cool idea to understand my kid through game play like this, but I also don't want the kids to be limited by my personal value though these interactions - sort of like the "observer and supporter" role the author played.
Sidenote: I'm still playing the latest Civ6 and still enjoy a lot from the dynamics in the economy managements with A.I..
[+] [-] skookumchuck|8 years ago|reply
Real world economics is infinitely more complex than the handful of rules in a game.
[+] [-] sdfin|8 years ago|reply
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 doesn't the government print money and gives it to people?". He said that playing SimCity would have prevented his sister from asking such a naive question.
I also would love so see the results of research about these games on kids. Maybe someday kids will play Sim City and AoE at elementary school or similar games designed for schools.
[+] [-] c3534l|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tajen|8 years ago|reply
Aside from being influenced by government advertising (“This airport in a no-man’s land is going to develop the no-man’s land into a city!”), it also influenced my entrepreneur life: Why see small when you can invest all you have and get increasingly more return? Why spend time debugging when I could have this other big feature on the marketing material? And that’s why I never went past a few hours in Simcity, and why my cousin, a less entreprising person, would succeed more! Ha!
What a cautionary tale.
[+] [-] proaralyst|8 years ago|reply
I recently had the pleasure of reviving a game world my brother & I had built three years ago. Wandering around that was a nice trip through nostalgia. These kids will be able to do that for their ten year old selves, all the way up.
[+] [-] diamondo25|8 years ago|reply
People should not forget to take pictures and movies and make them physical, instead of dumping it on the internet. Having a small amount of pictures is more than enough, that make those events even more special.
I had a lot of gaming memories saved on Xfire. They stopped their service a couple years ago and all the contents and thus the strong link to memories are gone. Just like people you have had contact with online, eventually you'll loose contact and then these pictures can help you not forgetting that time...
Maybe we are making and processing so many events, that we'll get issues remembering stuff in a couple years?
[+] [-] RandomInteger4|8 years ago|reply
One thing I wish I had access to though were the builds I've done on public servers.
[+] [-] lbotos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heywire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RomanPushkin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csense|8 years ago|reply
I think maybe 4 is a little young to ask a kid not to let their emotions drive them. But by the time they get to ages 6-10, video games can be a valuable tool for teaching time / life balance. Better to figure out at a young age that you have cravings to screw around when you should be doing something else, and you have to resist or bad things will happen.
Better they figure it out as a kid when "Bad things will happen" means "Parents will be mad." It's a lot tougher on them if they have to figure it out when they're a young adult, and "Bad things will happen" means "Flunking college" or "Losing a job."
Too many young adults can't deal with managing free time when they're first out on their own, and there are actual consequences to it at that point in their life.
Source: Was a kid once, was a young adult once, saw a couple other young adults wash out of college because nobody'd ever taught them how to stop playing video games when it starts to interfere with what they need to do.
[+] [-] fyfy18|8 years ago|reply
What scares me even more is seeing parents of younger kids, giving them their phone and letting them watch episodes of Peppa Pig or similar, all the time. Guess it works to keep them quiet though...
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
4yr-old is very young for video games.
[+] [-] otabdeveloper2|8 years ago|reply
Giving your child video games is like giving him beer. (I learned this from bitter experience.)
[+] [-] cptskippy|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jsemrau|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProCynic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FPGAhacker|8 years ago|reply
Minecraft far and away is the game we play together most of the time. Alas it has finally gotten old to us.
One Christmas we played eve online. That was a great bit of fun. Bit of a time sink though.
I wish The Long Dark had coop.
[+] [-] ramblerman|8 years ago|reply
I don't think there is anything wrong with competition. I think it's the company that makes the experience.
[+] [-] duwease|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mithaldu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SimonSword91|8 years ago|reply
I always wondered about my nephews fascination for minecraft. This is probably one of the main reasons.
[+] [-] ggm|8 years ago|reply
But there is another darker Minecraft world he operates with entire subspecies of Minecraft being chained helplessly in dark towers making lava derived net worth in a very Faustian "it's just a machine" life. Even their bodies when done with plummet into trains, to be taken for subsequent processing. We do talk about this. Will he introduce his daughter to mechanized entity-farming? How will he vocalise the stages? "This is where the bodies are taken to be turned into chicken food for the egg factory..."
[+] [-] roel_v|8 years ago|reply
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 aren't really intrinsically interested in video games like mine. Maybe one day...
(Could probably google this, but I imagine there must be ppl here who have actual experience)
[+] [-] scott_karana|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterStuer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|8 years ago|reply
Um I'm pretty sure if you don't go overboard on the lighting monsters spawn. This is more of an in-game thing than a preference thing.
[+] [-] DiThi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] in_cahoots|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soyiuz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|8 years ago|reply
I played some Quake back in the day, it's not like 3d games are totally new to me. Still, I felt completely incompetent. Does anyone know what someone should do to get past these first few days? I keep reading articles like these on the internet about how kids build fantastic structures, but how do you do that if half the game is basically about being hunted down by mindless killers?
I feel like there's some key aspect I don't understand. Any tips?
[+] [-] nemothekid|8 years ago|reply
This is so incredibly nostalgic.
[+] [-] tgb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grangar|8 years ago|reply
I should try getting it to run again sometime.
[+] [-] joering2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctoestreich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senectus1|8 years ago|reply
It was/is a disappointing experience.
[+] [-] bjornlouser|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueprint|8 years ago|reply