This is what I meant with “impatient”. Though, I assume that the attention span, the concentration, the memory, the ability to reason and the patience of a child can be trained to a certain extent with adventure games, thanks to both the complexity and the longer play time, as opposed to arcade games.
Sounds like a question to @RonGilbert - one of the creators.
Seeing all the differing opinions on Loom, it seems to be a very controversial game.
I disliked the second half of the game, but maybe I would have appreciated it more, if the planned sequels weren’t canceled. Now, we only know the first part of the trilogy.
Interesting theory. The problem is that if kids play adventures alone, they play for some minutes and then give up. An exception is, if the story “sucks” them in, so that they want to know how the story develops.
I started with Labyrinth and Maniac Mansion as a kid. The difference to today is, that I played these games together/parallel with some friends. So we could help each other and -important- motivate us.
So I would recommend @samsaffron to play these games with his daughter. So you can interrupt the game and ask her any time later: “Shouldn’t we play further?”.
I’d say, not for Spy Fox. The whole spy parody would get lost on younger children. I only played Spy Fox in: Dry Cereal, but I loved it. Well, the puzzles are obviously easy, but it has a lovely comedic timing and it made me laugh out loud in a couple of occasions.
There are a few more differences than that. For one, it was a different time, and there were much less games being released than today. As a consequence, one would get perhaps one or two games for your birthday or special occasion, and that’s all you had until your parents bought you another one.
Even if you had access to pirated games, you still had less variety than what is available as entertainment to a child today.
There were also different attitudes to the contemporary games. An adventure game with dead ends, illogical puzzles, and learn-by-death mechanics was de rigeuer back then, so it wouldn’t necessarily turn off a child’s engagement like it would do today.
I don’t think so. Back then we had more games than we could play. Someone at school had a (printed!) list with pirated games for the C64 and that list was very long. (But we were playing much more outside than the kids today, so we hadn’t even the time to try all these games ) And there was variety. The genres haven’t changed much over time, only the graphics are better today.
No. I tried and then never played several adventure games again (for example “Mask of the Sun”, “Murder on the Mississippi” and some of the Infocom adventures) - just because I wasn’t patient enough back then.
But I really miss the time where my friends, my brother and I played games together - in the same room! (I just say “Winter Games” )
You are applying your personal experience to the general case. Given the popularity of such adventure games in the past, not everyone got bored or impatient playing the games.
Contrast that with today’s mainstream player, whose very first complaint is that it takes too long, or it’s too slow, or “there’s no shooting.”
Also, you may have had more games than you could play when you were young (I did too), but today’s kids have even more games – and not only that, they can play a vast number of them because they are short and targeted at those with short attention spans. That wasn’t the case back in the 1980s, where most games required a heavy investment in time and effort to learn the mechanics.
Doubly so if it were pirated, since you had to invest even more effort and time just to get the program to run and to figure out what it did and how to play without instructions.
I grant that playing together may increase engagement; I just argue that it wasn’t necessarily the most important reason why we were attached to those kinds of games back then. They were different times.
We build the games for different age groups, the order is.
Putt-Putt Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam, Spy Fox.
We found that once kids hit 8 (or so), they stop playing the same game over and over. 5 or 6 year olds would play Putt-Putt everyday from beginning to end and not think anything of it. Once kids hit 8, they stopped doing that and we didn’t make adventure game for 8+ due to the scope needing to be much larger. Games like Backyard Baseball, etc, hit kids older than 8.
Arcade games and console games were not the same as personal computer games.
I also had hundreds of C=64 games in diskette, acquired from various pirate BBS’s. Most of them I didn’t know what they were, and the rest took too long to figure out without instructions. There were very few that I actually played. I persevered the challenges of those because I was interested and had nothing better to do.
A kid with an iPad or iPhone nowadays, has a veritable conuccopia of games to choose from, all instantly accessible, and most easy to use adhering to common formulas. There is also much competition from many other media, from instant messaging, social networking, movies, music, games, etc.
But if you want to think that there are no differences in attitude or in the circumstances between then and now, then that’s your problem.
I was there and I am here now, and I can see that the markets, audiences, attitudes, and customer focus have change. *shrug*
No. Others had the same experience. Of course I can only speak about the German market.
Ehrm. That was true back then too. A lot of my friends loved games that were “fast” and with shooting.
Back then we had “game parties” where we played several (multiplayer) games in a few hours. For example you don’t need much time to play Winter Games with 3 or 4 people.
Can you give an example? I, for myself, can’t remember at the moment an old computer game (never played console games) where I actually need instructions or more then five minutes to understand the controls and game mechanics. And most of them were similar to the current casual games.
Oh, that’s a coincidence: I was there too. And - surprise - I am here now. To be serious: I know that the market has changed. But the kids from the past and the kids today aren’t extremely different.
Today more people with less spare time are playing games, so of course the customer focus changed. And that’s the difference: We and our kids are “speeding up”. For example the kids in my neighborhood have fixed appointments (Wednesday football, Thursday swimming, etc.). When should they play adventure games or games that need a long attention span? Most times they are sitting in cars driving from one event to another. So it’s natural that they train a short attention span.
There are lots and lots of shoot em ups for the C64 that take 5 minutes to figure out. Not everything was was an RPG or Adventure game.
Also games in general are more complicated now than they used to be. Even games where you “just shoot stuff” start out with 30 minute tutorials.
I agree that attention spans are shorter now, and that many has changed(and that includes the casual/mobile market). But to say games then were complicated and games now are simple, seems simplifying to me.
So this answer is hard to answer. It probably mostly depends on your style how you parent / educate your child. My son is 9 and I didn’t allow him to play Thimbleweed Park for several reasons:
Willi is always drunken
Ransome is always cursing
The puzzles are a bit to hard for a child from my point of view
The story might be a bit to complicated for a child and just confuse him / her in the end.
As I wanted to introduce him to adventures, too, I decided to play Monkey Island with him. We just finished MI 1 and 2 a week ago and he can’t get enough of it. In fact he was really sad when I told him that Ron Gilbert didn’t make any more Parts of Monkey Island. So from my experience Thimbleweek Park could be a bit inappropriate for a kid whereas Monkey Island seems to be perfect.
Then again on the other hand. It probably all depends on how sensitive your daughter is. As somebody else already mentioned, there are 8 years old playing GTA. I guess to them ThimbleWeed Park wouldn’t cause much harm.
I was thinking about that, too. Currently I don’t have a copy of MI 3. So I guess I’ll buy one (if they are still sold somewhere) and give it a try. Maybe he likes it, maybe he doesn’t. I’ll keep you informed on the result
I don’t understand your point of view. I’m very interested in this. I don’t have children, and I often ask myself if I’d be able to be a good father, one day. Since everything seems so difficult… So please explain me where I don’t get the point.
I mean, ok, Willi is always drunk. But in the game this aspect is quite edulcorated: he doesn’t seem violent or wahtever. At a superficial look, you don’t feel his tragedy, because everything is… “cartoonish”. So, what a better occasion to discuss about alcool with your child? You can explain him that alcool abuse is a bad thing. After all, if he is 8 or 9 years old, he has his private life yet. He is not always at home with you. He goes to school. He has friends. Are you sure that censoring a drunk cartoon is enough to protect him? Are you sure nobody at school will show him more impressive depictions of alcool abusers, that can maybe scare him?
Uhm… I don’t know. I was the one saying that some 8yo play GTA. But I was just stating it, I wasn’t saying I’d agree with that. I must be sincere: if my 8yo played GTA, I’d not be happy, sure. But avoiding to buy the game isn’t enough to protect him.
Maybe I’d prefer to listen to him, and if he is curious about that kind of games, I could discuss it. Ask him why. Maybe try to look at the game together and explain him what’s bad.
I think that’s the lesser evil, if the alternative is to consider him too sensitive and censoring him GTA at home, while maybe he plays it at his friends’ place with NO filter and NO guidance at all…
You are raising some very good points in your post. Educating a child and being a good father is indeed a difficult task as in a lot of situation there is no yes / now black / white, but more a gray (if that makes sense). From my point of view the first step however is to actually think about how you want to educate / parent your child and why. From what I’m observing far to many parents don’t do that.
In our parenting, my wife and I try to find a mix of helping our children to grow on the one hand while protecting them on the other hand. I don’t know if we’re right with our parenting style as we can’t probably answer that until our kids are in there mid twenties
Anyway, I’ll try to answer your questions in a way that makes more sense than “I feel that this is the right thing for my son” :
This is a good point and one could probably argue wether I’m a bit too strict with my son on that point. Explaining that alcohol abuse is bad with the example of Willy could work. My concern however was that as an adult we can clearly spot that Willy’s life is far from being optimal. I’m not sure if that’s the case from the eyes of an child, too. Children observe the world around them quite different than adults do.
If you look at Willy through the eyes of a 9yo, he’s living on the street which is bad, but he doesn’t seem to be to sad about it and doesn’t show some of the typical behaviors of drunken people (like being aggressive, talking nonsense, …) . So that alcohol abuse is a problem might not be too obvious to a Child. And personal for my child I don’t want him to give him the impression that alcohol isn’t that bad which was my main concern with Willy.
Absolutely not! However I don’t see why not censoring would protect him, so I decided that I won’t let him play Thimbleweed Park before he’s 11 or maybe 12.
This could absolutely possible. Things like smartphones make it really easy for children to consume media which is not appropriate for their age.
This sounds very good to me.
This doesn’t sound too good to me. Depending on the situation you demonstrate this could lead to many sleepless nights.
As an example: Tow years ago, our son visited the neighbor who is a little bit older. He was playing some kind of 3D graphics (murder simulator type of game, I don’t remember the name of the game) and told my son that the game is OK even for kids below 10. The scene he was currently playing didn’t look to bad. It was just a man standing somewhere in a city on a sidewalk.
The next moment a car passed by, some guys jumped out of it, started to beat up the main character pulled him in the car and they eventually abducted him.
The total scene was maybe 30 seconds. Those 30 seconds were enough to result in nightmares for several weeks. And even though we explained that this was just a game and that we’re living in a very safe area, we was still afraid of that situation vor quite some time.
So showing game scenes to smaller children in order to explain why that is bad could lead to unexpected situations.
What we tried instead is to explain to our son that there are games and movies that are just not apropiate for his age and that he should always ask his friends if the games they want to start are officially ok for his age (like with a pegi rating)
Thank you for your reply. I agree with most of it. Not 100%, but I have to say you’ve raised good points too, which I couldn’t get so easily before, maybe because I don’t have children yet.
I think that it’s impossible to protect your child from any bad influences. Nowadays there are YouTube, porns etc. And they are easily accessible via the internet. Sooner or later, a child has to learn how to cope with them.
However, there use to be drunk people in shopping malls, trains and buses in everyday life. It’s just important that your child recognizes the consequences of alcohol abuse. This can be extremely difficult. There are so many movies in which the protagonist, acted by a respected film star, drinks some hard liquors because there is something that stresses him. A child just has to stand above this and recognize that alcohol will never actually solve any problem but even cause additional problems.
Though I don’t agree with every rating. There are movies which are rated too carelessly. For example some Disney movies: E. g. Pinocchio and Snow White are rated without any restrictions, even though they contain several scenes which in my opinion small children cannot handle. On the other hand, there are movies which could have been rated a bit more liberally. Nonetheless, ratings are a good guideline.
The problem is that if kids play adventures alone, they play for some minutes and then give up. An exception is, if the story “sucks” them in, so that they want to know how the story develops.
) And there was variety. The genres haven’t changed much over time, only the graphics are better today.
To be serious: I know that the market has changed. But the kids from the past and the kids today aren’t extremely different.
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