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I have a 7 year old. He's never played a video game outside of a DIY version of online chess against me.
I notice a lot of kids play Minecraft. I've never played it. This is a little odd since the entire reason I have a career is because I wanted to get into game development and learned to program C.
I would like to expose him to video games since I believe they have upside, but I'm pretty worried modern games are crack and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.
He has an excellent attention span right now and we play a lot of card (MTG) and board games (Catan Jr) and I don't want to ruin that. Other families say once their kids play video games they stop caring about all of that other stuff and see their attention spans go to shit.
We homeschool him so he's not exactly surrounded by other kids trying to relate to him re: games but it's only a matter of time.
My daughter is about to turn 4, and her crack right now are sugar and any form of media consumption. For the latter, there are gradations of addictiveness ranging from oral storytelling to getting to watch children's TV shows. My appproach is simply the following - if I notice that she gets riled up about not being given something, and focuses on it to the exclusion of all else, and throws a tantrum when her alotment runs out, and is unusually dysregulated when she does get it, then she just plain doesn't get it anymore. Life is full of things to do, even for a 3-year-old. It doesn't have to be sugar and screens. The reverse side of this coin is, of course, that I need to be available for her all day long. If I tell her she can't get what she wants, I need to offer an alternative. I guess the historical approach would have been to just send her off to play with the neighbors' kids or her siblings, but alas, she's an only child in an atomized society. But in between hitting the playground, playing ball, riding her bike, visiting relatives, going swimming, doing chores together, reading books and playing the occasional infuriating board game, a day can be passed.
I play games myself; more than is good for me I suppose. I would say I have it in check - I only do so after the little one is in bed, and only briefly and up to a pre-set goal (e.g., play one match of Nebulous and take notes, finish that mission in Cyberpunk, concluce war preparations in a 4X game, make one run in a roguelike, etc.) or until a fixed time limit after which I retire to read and/or sleep. Still, not playing games at all would probably be better? I'd get more reading done, I guess, or sleep a little earlier. I doubt I'd use the time productively since I'm usually thoroughly tired by those times of day. But if I had to point at something that playing games does for me, I'd probably come up pretty blank. It's obviously an indulgence.
My wife is addicted to her phone and stares at it constantly. Her favorite parenting method is to switch on the TV or some other electronic media. Lately she's taken to playing PC games again, and does so whenever she thinks the kid is occupied (because I'm around, or the kid is on the toilet, or the kid and me are going outside), and simply continues when the kid is back again and is actually offended and angry when I tell her that this behavior is dumb. Screens are a hell of a drug. I expect this to be a phase on my wife's part, but I really don't see how to maintain any sort of screen discipline when this is what our daughter gets to observe. Oh hey, I'm wifeposting again. Let's stop here.
For video games, I have no plans for her. If she really wants to game at some point, I'lll run the same rules as for everything else - she may, in moderation and with clear limits, but if she throws tantrums about it then I'll put a stop to it again for a good long while before we try again. Is this good parenting? I have no idea.
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Don't.
Treat video games as you would sugary drinks, staying up past midnight, sleeping until mid morning. Delay the acceptance of these habits as long as possible, until the likelihood of them becoming habits dwindles and a certain ability to self-regulate has developed. The trade-off is simply not worth it.
I never played video games growing up (well we didn't have them, although I played Adventure and Pong on my friend's Atari), nor even was I allowed in principle to buy comic books, which were seen as brain rotting by my parents. By the time I could buy them on my own I just wasn't that interested.
Others may disagree. My sons now are fixed to their phones and often playing some game which, because of its design, not only pulls in their attention but cannot be, as in the old days, simply paused, without suffering some in-game loss. Predictable tension occasionally ensues.
In any case the toothpaste will make its way out of the tube, it's only a matter of time. In Japan I'd never homeschool as the socialization aspect of school is vital to functioning in society, but I am no longer very savvy how anything works in the US.
Seconded. I would no more introduce a child to gaming than I would introduce them to porn, or gambling, or alcohol. Or social media, for that matter.
Video games are fundamentally synthetic work, presenting you with fake skills to master and providing you with illusory rewards. They are explicitly designed to be much more fun and addictive than any real work could possibly be. And maybe this would be fine if we lived in a post-scarcity world where there was no real work to be done, or if at the very least if you were already financially independent and romantically successful and there was nothing left for you to do but enjoy life. Anything short of that and video games become a permanent drain on your ability and willingness to get things done; "devourers of life’s potential" as jimrandomh called them.
Any purported educational benefits of video games are bogus. All research on transfer on learning is that it doesn't exist. You don't get good at X by doing completely different activity Y that arguably has some kind of underlying similarity to X; you get good at X by doing X and by training under somebody who is better than you at X.
I game, but I would have been better off if I had never been introduced to the hobby. At most, some of the very best video games I have played (Metal Gear Solid, Fire Emblem, Days of Ruin, Cave Story, Iji, etc.) have provided approximately the same level of enjoyment, emotional release, and intellectual stimulation as a great movie or a good novel, except that they took much longer to do so (your average video game takes 20+ hours to beat, compared to 2 hours for a film and however fast you can read a book). At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.
As an anecdotal counter point: I played through the "Age of Empires 2" campaign at around 13 years old. Not only did it teach me more about history than the entire middle school curriculum, it also awakened my love for history. The combination of both lead to perfect grades in all my history classes till I graduated high school.
AoE2 is an exceptionally well done game, and arguably stands undefeated in almost every metric used to judge a real time strategy game, even today - so this is by no means an automatic result of video gaming. But it is one possible result.
Kerbal Space Program (which reignited my passion for rocketry long after studying mechanics at university) and Dwarf Fortress (which is the source of 99% of my knowledge about minerals, ores and metal smelting) are two other examples I would have no trouble letting my kids play, once they are around... 12?
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A quote below from your article linked in the above line.
Solid points.
That all said, switching gears to adult stuff.
We're in adult entertainment territory here and I suppose I would disagree with this. Steam tells me I've played Cyberpunk 2077 for about 25 hours or so and I'd say I've enjoyed it a lot more than any movie. Maybe even more than 12x ~2 hour movies, though the median movie is bad.
The art direction in Cyberpunk is top notch and often inspiring and while some of the storylines are camp, some of them are really thought provoking and interesting. It's very good interactive sci-fi and I don't want it to end, though I'm near the end of the expansion pack now.
If I were playing video games 10 hours a week constantly chasing that high I might reconsider the category. But Cyberpunk is like an hour or two every few weeks right now. Seems fine.
Yeah I hear this. I've only played like 20 hours of the first or maybe second Civilization in my life, when I was a kid, and it taught me a bunch, but I could see how if this grew to 1000 hours between all of the sequels I'd feel like they were a loss.
I suppose in my ideal society I would have access to video games but most people who seem to ruin their lives with them would not.
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Note that Minecraft is also in this category; the fact that it's like this but without any of the optimization/active engagement in the gameplay makes me feel like I'm waking up from the Matrix. I really don't understand why people like this game at all (much less why the modding community exists, to say nothing about its size), though admittedly it's much easier to play with friends who don't have that... anxiety? about it.
Terraria puts more work into being actively entertaining to play and less intrinsically complicated, and it was always the better game.
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I'm staring down the barrel of this as well, my daughter is 5. We play a smattering of board games with her, with the occasional concession (Carcassonne, Ingenious, Kingdomino, My First Castle Panic), and she's watched me play some old games (Super Mario Brothers, Gradius, Galaga). I'm trying to plant the seeds of good behavior by choosing games that have a natural end time (1 credit, 3 lives, etc) and then walking away when I'm done. I also emphasize that I finish all my "daddy chores" after dinner, and she has to have her teeth brushed and get ready for bed before she can watch me play.
Lately she hasn't really cared to watch me play anything, and has preferred I read Lord of the Rings to her instead.
My wife has most of the same fears you do about video games devouring her attention, but none of the first hand experience to discern addicting slop from a fun game, so it's all scary to her.
Personally, I think going with old, offline, preferably couch coop experiences is best. Any old two player NES or SNES game or old arcade games. I have a retro lan in my office, and that may come into play at some point, but it's not part of the plan at the moment. I plan to keep it limited, and keep it in person and social within the friends and family. I do want to avoid hard time stops though. I knew kids who's parents put everyone on strict 15m time limits, and it drove me up a wall when I'd be having a really good run in say, Super Mario Brothers, and they booted me off in World 5 with 4 lives left. I do want my kid to have that sense of accomplishment that video games can give you, and not cutting her legs out from under her with arbitrary limits. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it I suppose.
As a child I was given a restriction of 10 minutes a week with a Gameboy, including starting up the game, and the only game I got was one of the first-gen Pokemon games. It was not fun. I don't think I ever got past Erika before the Gameboy or the cartridge died.
I kind of made up for it by binging the shit out of different Pokemon games later when I had access to a computer and learned what emulators were.
Rofl. 10 minutes per week is a joke. Cruel and unusual punishment.
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This is true of many modern games (nearly anything you can play on a phone...) but not all.
This is true of nearly all games, both modern and ancient. Minecraft is a great way to share a game world with your kids, but unless/until you go down the "making a microcontroller out of redstone" path, it's not an educational game. By far the greatest educational benefit we've seen from any video games is the simple fact that our kids will happily do extra educational activities to earn a little more of the limited "screen time" we allot for them.
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MTG and in-person gaming is always going to be less "damaging" than vidyas. I strongly disagree with the other comment here about that. Especially if you're getting them exposed at 7, they'll get over the insane excitement phase before the most important part of their development, and you still have a huge amount of control over when they play (What are they gonna do? Drive themselves to FNM and invest in a $300 booster box? I think MTG sucks compared to 10 years ago but whatever.
Another point for it over modern video games is they're all completely devoid of a social element. Every single one is locked down for no cross-gamer communication. To me this is a point against them - yes you're developing hand-eye coordination and problem solving, but you're doing so in isolation.
I'm a couple of years behind you, but my plan is to replay co-op games with my kids to start and give them single player games to get into. Once they're older I may open up the floodgates for multiplayer stuff, but probably I'll have them scratch that itch with MTG and board. We'll see!
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My father made me play and complete some of his "old man" video games before he would allow me to get a gamecube when I was around your son's age in 2001. Mainly it was Dungeon Master for the Atari ST. Things are different now with the always-online attention farming microtransaction slop that we call modern video games - but maybe some older titles/consoles at first. I cant imagine what my brain would be like if I was exposed to something like Fortnite at age 7.
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I don't myself play MTG and board games (that much), but I sorta knew guys who did in college. If I am in uncharitable mood , the MTG/Warhammer/tabletop looks almost as bad as gaming. It can be huge time-sink, which can ruin your education / early career transition, it becomes a "hobby" that furthers no other adult life goals, and your peers are likely to play inordinate amount of video games, anyway. Phone media is the technological designer drug, video games are the 80s crack epidemic, in comparison MTG is more wholesome, but in way as cocaine was when they put it into Coke.
I am only guess here, but I would recommend:
(1) Diet of limited amount of computer games, but important thing is not only the time limits but developing the mental muscle to cut off the "one more turn in Civ" getting in way of other more adult priorities.
(2) Try to avoid them starting socializing with kids who are failing at that.
There's board games, then there's those. I suspect the people playing things like Dominion or Seven Wonders generally would have a more limited relationship with the hobby than dedicated MTG and Warhammer players.
I do wonder if there is a way to both participate in "lifestyle games" like these without it being an undue weight on everything else in life.
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I'm of two minds with regards to this. On one hand I wish that my parents would have been stricter about video games. I sunk so many hours into CK2, Civ, Dark Souls,etc. that could have been spent hanging out with friends in real life (perhaps one of the reasons I don't have any friendships remaining really from this period), learning a language, or just chilling out/running slightly more. On the other hand, these games got me interested in history and geography (CK2, Civ), and philosophy (Dark Souls). Also my ex-girlfriend and her siblings were raised with no video games/social media. It didn't really help at all: she still got addicted to instagram/tiktok, her brother still got addicted to video games in adulthood.
To synthesize, I think some kind of exposure is good to be able to handle the super stimuli in adulthood, but I would recommend some kind of limits to be put in place. My parents let me play video games for 2 hrs Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Sometimes I would go over a little, but these limits were pretty well enforced. Maybe you could do something like this?
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