BigJKO

Video Game Baby - Idle Parents

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Alright. I've been thinking about starting a thread like this for ages. Here goes.

 

After having a baby boy, who's now one and a half years old, I've been thinking a lot about bringing up kids in our days of video games.

 

First off, I'd love to hear other Idle Thumb parents' thoughts on how they've introduced a video game diet to their own kids. Do you limit their time with games? Limit access to certain games? Which games? Is Minecraft potentially a massive time-sink I should keep my kids away from, or is it the very model of teaching creativity to kids? And with that, obviously, comes the question of how to treat their access to the ever expanding World Wide Web?

 

I like to think of myself as more progressive on this stuff than my parents, seeing as I've grown up with video games and try and read up on it regularly to gain a better understanding of how video games actually affect human beings. But I still find a lot of question cropping up in my head about how much I should enforce limits on this and that. My folks, not having much video game knowledge, let me explore it pretty much on my own granted I didn't ruin their computer (which I did several times) and I mostly used that freedom to play stuff that was pretty safe and mostly non-violent (or at least not graphically so) until I became a teenager. But then, back in those days the internet wasn't such a huge behemoth full of vile things and free to play/MMO time-sinks.  

 

I imagine I'll figure most of this along the way, but I thought it'd be fun to hear other's experiences with this and maybe we'll all learn something!  :tup:

 

I always assume Sean will be the first one of the Thumbs to deliver a podcast baby and with it a litany of baby anecdotes. I love every time the baby stories creep into the podcast, like that kid who narrated his Minecraft experience with a British accent or Sean's Monkey Island adventures.

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Congrats on introducing the next generation into our cabal!  I have a 4-year-old daughter I play games with all the time. As I was abandoned by my parents for hours at a time with an Atari, I don't have reservations about how long she plays generally, but I do try to limit her iPad time. Though I have to tell you the educational games have come a long way and are great for tricking them into learning. She's 4 and can do basic math already just from a 'Super Why' game she loves to play. I almost feel guilty until I realize that tricking people into doing something good for them by making it seem fun is basically how society works. I also know it stimulates her imagination and critical thinking, so whatever. As far as content, I do limit violence in games and generally stick to Nintendo titles for now but I'm looking forward to the day I can play more serious stuff with her, in the same way I'm excited to start her film education. Kurosawa at 6, Kubrick at 7, etc... I'm kidding, but planning out when I can share certain games and films with her is really exciting. That's the brainwashing I get to do. Like when I get to explain why only an idiot would think Deckard is a replicant. ;)

 
The one thing I'm constantly surprised at is her taste in games. It's funny how kids generally don't care about graphics, and her favorite game is Super Mario 64. I tried all the Marios on all the platforms (No Wii U at the moment though) and that's her favorite. The 2D ones get hard fast and the later ones are too difficult for her to control. She still has trouble navigating a 3D space (camera) and Mario 64 is the sweet spot as far as controls, presentation and narrative. Princess wanted to bake us a cake, got captured and we need Stars to get her out of the cage. Done. She couldn't relate to Mario trying to clean up the world in Sunshine because "cleaning is boring". We're also deep in Machinarium. Adventure games will be a big staple for us moving forward as we aren't time restricted and it lets her think about what we should do next. Of course she hasn't been limited by years of Adventure game training so her suggestions are often ludicrous, but that's half the fun. 
 
Anyway, you have a lot of time so I wouldn't worry about it too much now, just be happy you have a boy! I spent the last week playing The Little Mermaid II (PS1) and I never want to play another licensed game on the PS1 again, my god. 

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I'd guess a backlog of Humongous adventure games would be good. They were a created a little bit too late for me to be a part of their targeted age group growing up and I had already played some hefty adventure games, but I can imagine that they must be a lot of fun for kids.

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My daughter is 4 now and the only games she's been exposed to so far are Final Fantasy 13, the LucasArts adventure games, Minecraft, Animal Crossing New Leaf, Wii Fit, and A Link To The Past. She absolutely loves all of these games and for the most part our game time together consists of me playing and explaining to her what I am doing and why I am doing it. I have found that the games I mentioned above have some level of inherent simplicity in their design that is easily explained and can be understood by a 4 year old. Of these games the only one she has actually played herself is Animal Crossing. It is surprising how fast she was able to pick up the controls and it is pretty awesome seeing her learn how to navigate the town and catch bugs and fish.

 

As far as limits on time goes, our sessions usually don't go over 1 1/2 hours long. This isn't really a mandated limit, but is more of a natural time frame where she stays interested and engaged with the game before wanting to do something else (and that something else is usually Chutes and Ladders which is the bane of my existence). I also make sure to save any violent games for after she goes to bed. Some day when she's older I'll introduce her to more mature themed games but for now I only see those as a detriment to her developing brain.

 

If you have a young kid and what to introduce them to video games the two that I would recommend the most are Secret of Monkey Island and Minecraft. I think Secret of Monkey Island is good because it has an excellent story with some genuinely good humor and the interactions with the world that are necessary to solve puzzles can be easily explained but still require some thought to figure out initially. Minecraft is good because it allows for an incredible amount of creativity and the premise of the game is so fundamental to how human beings work: build shelter, find food, gather resources, and survive. 

 

My best gaming experiences so far with my daughter have definitely been with Minecraft. My friend and I have been playing in the same Minecraft world for over a year and a half and we have our own cities, minecart tracks connecting everything over multiple kilometers, vast underground mines, a giant tree with rings of land built around the inside, a treetop city spanning an entire jungle biome, and a bunch of other stuff. So whenever my daughter would play with me I would just take her on tours through everything we built and explain how we did it. It would become ritual to go to certain places and she would basically just tell me where she wanted to go and how she wanted to get there (i.e. through the nether, over minecart tracks, or using a boat). Then we would usually go on some adventure to gather ore, search for new biomes, or just build whatever she wanted to build. Long story short, Minecraft is definitely a perfect game for kids.

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I don't have any kids but I am an uncle many times over.

 

One of my nephews was really into video games when he was growing up (as a kid) and I'm pretty sure I just kinda helped push that along. It started with Doom, and then Total Annihilation somehow. TA was kinda funny because while he wasn't like a super expert pro, he grasped the basics of it pretty damn well. I never had to worry about managing how much time he spent on playing games - my step-sister and brother would handle that.

 

I have a one-and-a-half year old nephew who I intend to (properly) engage with via video games. Nothing on the level of what my nephew played, I'm gonna be more mindful of what I do. But adventure games, like Sean's Monkey Island story, are definitely on my mind. It'll be a fun way to work in some problem-solving training.

 

I'll probably do the same for a friend's newborn when he gets older, since I'm a non-family uncle for the first time ever (gosh that was neat to be told).

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Also here, no kids (yet), but last year I did babysit a few times for the neighbor's kid, a seven-year-old. He was content to watch me play video games like Lego Batman on the 3DS. The most violent thing we played was, well, The Force Unleashed, which is actually pretty fucking dark. However, the kid was crazy about Star Wars and watched the films all the time. As he was already familiar with stormtroopers dying by the dozens and Anakin murdering kids, I didn't think I had much to spoil there. I didn't allow him to play it himself, though.

 

We did play a bunch of Mario Kart together, and taking turns at Forza Horizon. Racing is really fun together!

 

The moral of the story is that I'll probably be a little less slapdash with my own kids later on.

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My 3-year old daughter likes to wander around Proteus for about 30 minutes. She also loves to play dressup with my Dark Souls characters, and running around Firelink Shrine and falling off the cliff there.

We have Colors on the DS for her to draw with (better than capacitive touchscreens because the fine motor skills of gripping a pen/stylus have been shown to aid cognition).

Overall we limited screen time to zero up to about 18 months, having read some research that showed adverse effects. Now it's no more than 1 hour a day.

She's always interested when I'm doing something colourful on the computer which means I actually have to get off it frequently, which is probably good for us all.

My basic attitude is: she's going to get so much exposure to this stuff naturally that I see no need to push it on her, and rather feel it important to show her the other things in life. We carved a pumpkin, made a kite, painted, that sort of thing lately. Physicality is still more important than virtuality, at least to me.

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I'm happy this thread exists. I have a son coming in February. My dad was actually very cool about it when I was a kid and we played a lot of King's Quest games together. I may try and recreate that adventure game vibe with my children. Maybe not, like, The Walking Dead though.

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My daughter is only 23 months old and her gaming interaction is fairly limited at the moment. She calls Pokemon X "Pokeys" and refers to Animal Crossing as "Outside."

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My kiddo is now off at college, so we've been through the whole gamut of age development and whatnot.

 

Our philosophy was to encourage well rounded interests and to try and avoid falling back on fixed rules like X hours of gaming a day/week.  So she participated in sports, had music lessons, read a fair amount, etc.   About the only thing I ever felt the need to restrict was watching crappy reality television. 

 

Most important though is that we gamed as a family.  We always had at least one or two co-op games around.  Even if one of us was playing a SP game, usually someone else in the family was hanging out with them.  Gaming is rarely a solitary experience around here. 

 

As far as violence goes, she wasn't allowed to watch anything violent in elementary school.  But once she was midway through junior high, we relaxed and only worried about her seeing really obscene or disturbing levels of graphic violence (things like tortore or rape).  Both her mother and I grew up in rural Kansas in families where killing animals and cleaning them were things you were expected to be able to do by junior high.  I highly doubt that the cartoon violence in most games can be more damaging than the actual crap I saw/did growing up.  And she loved watching me play games when she was younger, particularly ones that were too hard or scary for her to play herself (Res Evils, Silent Hills, etc).  She is actually a bigger ResEvil fan than I am now, and she's only ever played RE5 and RE6.  But she's seen every single one played through by me.  Those hours of tank walking through zombies ended up being some real bonding moments for us, as odd as that sounds.

 

If I could go back and change one thing about gaming and my daughter, it would be that I would have tried to make a game with her, even if it was just something small and simple.  It's something that she's interested in.  I thought about it a few times, even downloaded some of the easier engines you can use.  But it just wasn't something I prioritized. 

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HOLY SHIT! this thread is amazing already. I'm so happy with all the stories shared so far. Keep it coming, because this is all immensely useful and awesome to read.

 

The iPad is brilliant when it comes to introducing my boy to reflex gaming because you don't have to worry about buttons. He can't do much, but slicing fruit in Fruit Ninja comes to him naturally and you can see his reactions becoming a tiny bit quicker. And he can actually fling birds in Angry Birds. They go every which way, and mostly never land on the pigs, but they be flung!

 

That is the extent of my experience with Video Game Babies.

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If I could go back and change one thing about gaming and my daughter, it would be that I would have tried to make a game with her, even if it was just something small and simple.  It's something that she's interested in.  I thought about it a few times, even downloaded some of the easier engines you can use.  But it just wasn't something I prioritized.

There's some amazing things coming out as far as teaching children to program goes. I'm chomping at the bit to see how well my eldest does. 3 is a bit young because she can only do letters, not words and most systems do need some word knowledge.

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Oh, god yes. I really hope to do some Games Making with my son one day. The entire history behind Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure and his daughter's continued interest in development as told on Untold Entertainment's blog is fascinating.

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My kids are also older-ish with my boys in their teens. We play a fair amount of games together but they definitely are way into Twitch etc in a way I am not. Otherwise they generally remind me of how I was at those ages (mostly as in they would die of bedsores from gaming endlessly if we let them).

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Such awesome stories in this thread!

 

Don't have children (and believe me, it's going to be a very looooong while till I do), but the landlady of my mom's home has a 7 year old grandson who I talk to and kinda babysit. I kinda consider him like a little brother I never had (I do have a big brother though, who introduced me to gaming). Not only do I help the kiddo get into reading and writing, but I also try to teach him game design stuff as well. I've made him watch and play games like Beyond Good & Evil, Braid, Shelter, Psychonauts, Bastion, and the Portal series, which he considers to be his favorite game series ever and taught him some science stuff too! Me and him played Portal 2 co-op and it was fairly interesting. During these play sessions, I'd teach him basic logic stuff and how certain parts of each game was made. It's incredible the wealth of knowledge a game's design can teach a child.

 

Probably the most "mature" games I've let him watch me play have been LIMBO, Arkham City, and Mark of the Ninja. But he seems to take more interest in the more kid friendly stuff I introduce him to, though he's gotten to love Batman due to AC.

 

Oh! And I downloaded Foiled when the Thumbs mentioned it on the podcast, and I've been playing with the kid since then. It's amazing to see him getting used to the game's mechanics over time, to the point where I can actually not go easy on him and let him wreck me up through his own skill. 

 

What I see myself doing in the future is basically giving my kids uber-basic game design courses while they play their games. Wonder how THEY'LL respond. :P

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I actually learned to read playing the original Final Fantasy on the NES. I would call my mom in and make her read me all the menu options. i would then "draw" the words and sit there and say them over and over until i could remember what their pictures looked like. Oddly enough I did this because my mom would eventually get annoyed and make me stop playing if I continually called her in. I actually taught myself how to use computers to get Ultima working and I did my first computer programming trying to hack X-Wing. 

 

I actually think video games where probably some of the most important formative experiences of my life. I actually don't even consciously remember the Final Fantasy stuff it's just a story my Dad thinks is hilarious. He actually brings it up when people talk about how games are bad for kids. 

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I actually learned to read playing the original Final Fantasy on the NES. I would call my mom in and make her read me all the menu options. i would then "draw" the words and sit there and say them over and over until i could remember what their pictures looked like. Oddly enough I did this because my mom would eventually get annoyed and make me stop playing if I continually called her in. I actually taught myself how to use computers to get Ultima working and I did my first computer programming trying to hack X-Wing. 

 

I actually think video games where probably some of the most important formative experiences of my life. I actually don't even consciously remember the Final Fantasy stuff it's just a story my Dad thinks is hilarious. He actually brings it up when people talk about how games are bad for kids. 

 

This may be treading into "grumpy old man" territory, but kids today really do have a radically different experience.  I remember having to write my own custom DOS boot discs in order to get some games to play.  The amount of reading in old games versus new just isn't even something that's comparable.  My daughter tends to find games without full VOs to be quaint and almost unplayable. 

 

Of course the flip side for kids today is that if someone is the kind of kid who would have reprogrammed a computer back in the day to play a game, that kid is now likely one who will make mods and dig into the crazy side of PC gaming.  Or make amazing fan art, or something.  The work and enthusiasm are still there, the end result is just different.

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I have a four-year-old who plays a lot with me.  [One time on Idle Thumbs, they read a question I wrote that ended with 'anyway I have to go---my wife is having a baby'.  She's that baby!]

 

She's tried a lot of things but the best is Kirby's Epic Yarn.  I highly HIGHLY recommend this game for anyone who would like to play something cooperative with a 3-year-old or older.  Many co-ops come close, but Epic Yarn is the only one that really does this right:  Mario lets you pick up your friend when it gets too tough, but after a few levels it's always too tough, and becoming a bubble when you die is too frustrating.  The Lego games have non-punishing death, but don't let you help a partner when it's tricky, and too much of the platforming is frustratingly finicky for little fingers.  Kirby's epic yarn nails it on all fronts.  The cave seemed like it would have worked too, but then a princess got eaten by a dragon.  [Hey, does anyone know if there's a 3 character set in the cave that doesn't lead to gruesome visuals?]

 

 

Regarding boundaries---on some old 1up podcast, John Davison gave advice that sort of stuck with me.  He talked about his kids getting too interested in watching star wars over and over, and how rather than saying no star wars, he found that the smarter thing to do is say "let's draw pictures of star wars instead", or other activities that can engage the interest without being unhealthy.  So when the Kirby game was getting a little overplayed, my daughter and I made ourselves a board game to play.  (Felt world glued to cardboard, with little cardboard monsters and characters.  There aren't really any rules, but there are dice to roll and jewels to collect.)  I don't think I could ever keep to the two-hours-screen-time rule that many parents do, but so far we haven't seen any resistance to being told to take a break every so often.

 

Sometimes we like exploring the indie space.  Proteus was her first try at 3d dual-stick controls.  Thomas was Alone makes her laugh and laugh.  Monster loves you (I think is the name?) is really engaging for her.

 

She really likes Wind Waker, but it's a weird game to her.  For two weeks it was a game that takes place on outset island about a girl visiting Grandma and chasing crabs and talking to her sister.  I tried to charge through and accumulate some more items for her to play with and bring her back to outset, but man that took forever.  When her sister got kidnapped, she freaked out and wouldn't play for a while.  Now she really likes buying flowers to decorate the bigger town.  I thought she would get into Animal crossing but not so much.  Too much reading necessary, and me too bored to stay and read it all to her.  

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That's a great story juffowup (great reference in the username too). I forgot to mention my three-year-old's absolute favourite games right now: ridiculous fishing and the Get On Top prototype from the sportsfriends kickstarter.

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Regarding boundaries---on some old 1up podcast, John Davison gave advice that sort of stuck with me.  He talked about his kids getting too interested in watching star wars over and over, and how rather than saying no star wars, he found that the smarter thing to do is say "let's draw pictures of star wars instead", or other activities that can engage the interest without being unhealthy.  So when the Kirby game was getting a little overplayed, my daughter and I made ourselves a board game to play.  (Felt world glued to cardboard, with little cardboard monsters and characters.  There aren't really any rules, but there are dice to roll and jewels to collect.)  I don't think I could ever keep to the two-hours-screen-time rule that many parents do, but so far we haven't seen any resistance to being told to take a break every so often.

 

That's brilliant advice! Noted.

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Related: I have students creating mathematics problems based on Minecraft in class. They love that shit. While not a parent, I work full time with children who love to talk games with me, so I may chip in on this thread every now and then with thoughts, but really probably will not have much to say.

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That's brilliant advice! Noted.

 

Agreed!

 

@juffowup, Parenting: You're doing it right when you make your own board games with kids.

 

I love how kids of a certain age just treat games like toys.  They have either no concept, or no interest, in the goals of the game, and instead just want to play with it.  It's a charming reminder of the joy of games that you can lose track of as goal oriented adult.

 

As far as creative stuff goes, we love excuses to dress up in costume as a family.  We do zombie walks, RenFests, conventions and Halloween.  A few of them have been gaming themed.  It's another creative way to be geeky together as a family without having the screen as a part of it.  It also teaches useful life skills, like basic sewing and how to properly apply a prosthetic neck wound.

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