Counterpoint:
The reason they will be out of touch is that they will have better impulse control and better spending habits than kids raised on modern games with their FOMO MTX and gacha bullshit.
So basically, actual ‘nerds’ are rasing another generation of ‘nerds’, except this time, nerds 2.0 will probably actually be more socially intelligent than the brain dead zombies being raised on fornite, roblox and tiktok, who have negative attention spans and cannot fathom the concept of doing any actual thought-work, when chatgpt can just do their homework for them.
They’ll also be more tech savvy, like being exposed to or having to learn at least some of how emulation works, which kinda de facto makes you understand things like a file structure, which an increasing number of kids (now adults too) raised on modern mobile UIs… have no clue about.
Oh, they’ll also likely just be generally more literate.
You’re not kidding about file structure. I haven’t got a fucking clue how to do it with phones. Every thing is just “in here somewhere” and it’ll pray the search feature can find it when I eventually locate the file browser.
I miss my PC
Due to circumstances, I’ve had to emulate more on phones. You very much can figure out the file structure so long at its Android (and 9 times out of 10 shit is just in the download folder). I swear my wife’s iPhone is a little black box, though.
IIRC modern iOS ships with a file manager. The black box used to be even worse!
iPhone bitch here
Yeah we absolutely have a file manager!
And where might I find the files saved by an application?
“Files”
IIRC modern iOS ships with a file manager. The black box used to be even worse!
you mean to tell me the patient zero of enshittification was fucking trash? No, really??
The whole fucking movement happened the second they rolled out the fashion adverts for fucking ipods that required itunes to scatter your files into a zillion folders for no fucking reason and people went “yeah, I don’t give a shit about owning my device or data”
Then came the walled garden, then the shitty apps, then the perpetual surveilance machines.
Now I literally cannot avoid having a phone since work , citizenship and banking two factor authentications are mandatory and on my phone. Fuck sake.
Walled garden i remember from the 90s.
You’re in a virtualized container that only exposes some directories, also those directories are mostly hidden from you, also within this container you generally don’t have any permissions to them, and also every application completely obfuscates it’s folder access via some file access API.
It’s crazy to me how hard consumers got fucked right from the start on phone software and how normalized we are to it.
It’s mainly done for security reasons, but yes it is not the most friendly way of doing things.
I agree with you, though… it’s definitely good for the general population as a whole. Tech savvy peeps should have the option to…be, but most folks should not have root access.
If it was primarily done for security then it was a massive fucking failure. But I believe that security was a secondary concern.
What reason do you think? Also what makes you think it was a failure? Seems pretty successful to me.
The app store and permission model hasn’t stopped malicious code from making it onto users devices. So if security was the concern, I’d say that’s a failure. But I think the primary concern was control. Control by manufacturers (And eventually, thereby states) of what people see and do on their phone. Make sure they have to pay for access to features. Easily surveil what they do.
Security is very often the excuse for control.
I haven’t got a fucking clue how to do it with phones.
In a certain way, probably me neither. I use ls, df, md5sum, cp, mv, rsync, tar, gzip, gpg, vim, touch and mkdir in Termux (terminal emulator for Android). For example, say I am replacing MP3 for FLAC. I really like to keep the timestamps of when I added the specific song, but I can’t find any better way than
touch -r oldfile.mp3 newfile.flacBut I also use FX File explorer for certain tasks, as it thankfully keeps timestamps. I absolutely hate how moving photos in Google Photos updates the modified timestamp to the date of when the file was moved. Why?
And I also have an ancient version of ES File explorer, version 4.0.2.3. Before it enshittified.But I am not sure whatever that is installable from within the device, or it’s old enough to require
adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block app.apklike some other old apps I use.Anyway, I have no idea what’s going on with iPhones and files, or whether that’s a non-existent concept there.
Do yourself a favor and install a FOSS file manager system, if you can / its not too much trouble on your particular phone.
Basicslly every phone OS goes out of their way to make their particular file browsing app batcrap overcomplicated and unintuitive if you want to do anything other than exactly what they want you do do.
Which is usually sync everything on your phone to their cloud and your account.
I am running a sort of jerry rigged, half baked, de goodled android, … basically I have torn out, replaced or disabled everything I can without root, but left in play store and core g services so i can actually still use it for common apps… done the best I can to lock down everything to its bare minimim privelege set, never use a big ole shared account for anything, everything is a separate, old school email account.
With android the default file thing is integrated with cloud. The version of files that was local only like a real operating system is in there somewhere but not something a user can access on demand. So it’s literally not ‘in here somewhere’ anymore.
I had to find a third party tool on f.droid.
Apples and oranges.
'90s equivalent to “them goshdang tiktoks and fortnites” isn’t Half-Life and Ocarina of Time, it’s Television. The Simpsons or DBZ. Or those awful “classic” animated shows from the '80s that were designed from the ground up to be toy ads. “Impulse control” my ass, most of y’all were glued up to the TV screen like a moth to a lamp and only got consumption impulses out of it. Calling young people “brain dead zombies” is such an “old man yells at cloud” moment, look at yourself.
There’s more culture than ever being created now thanks to the incredibly lower barrier to entry. There are more incredible microtransaction-less indie games made in the last 10 years than the exhaustive library of most gaming consoles back then. Celeste, Outer Wilds, Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tunic…
The existence of slop is a constant across generations, and clinging to an idealized past is such a foolish endeavor, and will cause you to lose out on so much relevant cultural discourse happening right now. How many classic video games from the '90s might a queer kid growing up nowadays look up to? How many?? How many had, oh, I don’t know, a goddamn female protagonist? And don’t say that Samus counts. What a lame-ass culture to let our daughters grow up in.
I mean, as a 90s kid, and tech dork… yeah, I largely did drop TV almost entirely, in favor of console and pc gaming, and exploring the early public internet on a 56k modem.
I would imagine most tech dorks of the era did as well?
Like, as soon as I learned how to block ads on the internet, then later on youtube, as well as uh, obtain audio visual media without cost… I did that regularly, never looked back, began to actually not be able to stand TV due to ads everywhere all the time.
And yep, I am still calling anyone who watches ads for anything, anyone who buys into incredibly exploitative business models that waste your time, money, or both, yep, I’ve been calling them idiot consumer zombies since the 90s, consistently.
You are right that there are more non bs indie games now. That is great! That is good.
Are more games more diverse now?
Yes! Also good.
… But I’ve had basically the same opinions on all this since the 90s, I am not rembering an idealized past, I am one of the nerds thats been this way the whole damn time.
They call Gen Z the digital native generation, but this omits the ubernerd Millenials such as myself (and others from other generations) who forged the way, who were early adopters from a young age, who were digital visionaries that forged the path before the ecosystems got to be more user friendly, more accessible, more mainstream.
Like uh, without potentially doxxing myself, of those indie games you list?
Yeah, I know a few people on one of those game’s dev teams, personally, met them online when I was first like like 13, back when multiplayer games had server browsers with private custom servers, some of those also had their own websites and forums, all we had for voice comms was ventrilo… I met these people way back, have regularly voice chatted and gamed with them for… 20 years?
I myself have been modding (as in making mods) for that long as well, I literally taught myself how to code so that I could do it, before I got out of high school, before any high school offered coding classes, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and flash games on Newgrounds were all the rage.
Not to try to gatekeep nerddom with some kind of official checklist you have to measure up against, but I think you are considerably underestimating the potential nerdiness of a lot of really dedicated nerds from that era, and thus writing them off as ‘old men yelling at clouds’… when we’ve been yelling at those same clouds since we were kids, then we went on to actually implement the changes we deemed necessary, as best as we could when up against the corporate and financial behemoths constructed by Boomers.
My public high school in Southern California had programming class in the late 1970’s. Nerds been nerding for a bit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta yell at some clouds, now where did I leave my onion belt…
You do realize that is/was extremely uncommon, right?
Not to argue against your nerddom, I’m sure you are, and of course nerds have been nerding for quite a long time, but uh, you won the time and place birth lottery to be a Boomer born into prime recruiting territory for Silicon Valley, IBM probably directly paid for that class.
Programming, actual courses in writing code… beyond maybe basic HTML… were basically unheard of in US public k-12 schools untill like, the late 2000s at best, more like 2010s.
You were in the right place at the right time to be able to recieve formal nerd training in a public high school in the 70s.
Yes a privileged place and time.
Nerds v Normies?
With respect
Yeah the nerds usually find themselves in very powerful social circles if they survive school. Circles of emotionally mature experts with strong careers.
Kids’ needs are of course very important, but abandoning engaging hobbies in favor of some phantom desire to fit in is dumb.
Never discount the sheer volume of text and dialog contained in the average mid-90s JRPG!
4 CDs of text to be read!! Though I’ll gladly replay the 2 CDs of Chrono Cross for the beautiful graphics, music and characters.
Cant force the shit, same with any culturally significant thing from your childhood. Think of it in reverse: if you aren’t willing to engage with their zeitgeist in good faith, how could you expect them to engage with yours?
Yeah, if she plays an N64, she won’t be exposed to any popular series from today, and will instead play things like Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Smash Bros., and Pokémon.
Yeah but (with the exception of Pokémon) the graphics have moved on a bit
Stop this slander
The N64 Pokémon games aren’t that bad
There are plenty of games up to the PS3 era that every kid would do well to play at least once. Stuff that is objectively good, that aged well, or close enough.
The problem, as I see it, is that if they get too used to mobile games, they won’t have the patience for typical console or PC games, because those, on average, aren’t dopamine dispensers and won’t be rewarding every second click or button press - more importantly, they should NOT nag the player with cash shops.
Also important: limit the amount of games available - this is valid both for current and retro games. The moment you have “all the games” at your disposal, several things kick in: analysis paralysis, appeal to familiarity (will only play what you already know or someone knows), seeing no value in the games[1].
Others mentioned the social aspect, which is true as well and something they just can’t experience nowadays anymore. Minecraft and Roblox are famous because they’re easy for kids to pick and play with friends. Back in our days, we had to physically sit beside one another and play together, or pass the controller on death; we also physically lent and traded games, so the games also had value within our little social circles. While fully digital games are extremely convenient, the “scarcity” gave them a social value that they completely lack today and which I suppose boardgames now fill out (yes, you can play them online, but playing on an actual table is almost always better)
If, when you were small, you only had a limited selection of games, which was common during the cartridge era, you would be very careful with choosing new games to ask your parents to buy, though renting was an option to see which ones were good or not. You had to make do with the little you had. When you got bored with one, you either looked through your collection and played something else, or did something else entirely; you never threw away a game (unless it really sucked) and you never got a new game on a whim. That is good. ↩︎
i don’t think i’ve ever heard anyone call it “the ps3 era”.
You’re not wrong about “freedom within limits” when it comes to gaming imho. Having access to everything means you/they will play nothing. Witness my Steam library :/
But introducing artifical scarcity means you can curate the experience with them. Something small, bespoke and meaningful that you can bond over.
As the saying goes, you can never step in the same river twice, but you can point out the best spot for others.
Now my daughter brings her friends home to play Mario 64! Masterpieces have no expiry date!!
I have had an N-64 plugged into the back of my TV for 25 years straight. The TV has changed. My kids were raised on this shit.
This is the responsible way to raise a child on video games IMO. Modern games have predatory practices like microtransactions.
The look on her face says everything to me though.
Plenty of fun normal games, especially indie games.
Jokes on them. I hack games that have micro transactions and DLCs and make them entirely free. Even games I have paid for. My child hasn’t seen an ad or a micro transaction yet.
Can you elaborate a bit more on that? Most of the games with dlc or microtransaction stuff that I play have it all verified with some sort of online system (steam, mostly). What games are you hacking, and how?
steam does not verify much by itself, its not made to be a strong security system. look up goldberg emu, cream api, etc. they work if the DLC content is not really downloadable, but already baked in just locked away behind a check
This.
The look on her face says everything to me though.
lol, it wasn’t even attempting to be a good photoshop. Maybe your screen needs cleaning?
Well, what about this: Early exposure to the shithead practices of modern gaming can enable children to more easily identify what’s good and what’s just trying to take money from them.
I dunno.
You could argue the other way around - growing up with decent and non-predatory practices makes you less tolerant of when companies try to extort you because you already know what “good” looks like.
I’m sure the corpos would love nothing more than kids getting exposed to predatory practices from a young age so they grow up feeling those things are acceptable and normal.
Drag thinks we should expose kids to a safe environment most of the time, and to little bits of predatory design in contexts that make them easy to identify. Like a vaccine.
“Dad, how do I put armour on my horse?”
“You need to grow up and get a job and a credit card for that.”
“That sucks, I hate Oblivion! I want to go back to Morrowind!”
“It’s okay buddy, I pirated the Oblivion remaster. Let’s play that instead.”
I am 50+, remember paying quarters to play Pong and Space Invaders.
Built my kids a game box using Batocera Linux and ROMs from the 80s and 90s (Atari2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc)
I was thereby able to show them the True Magic and Wonder of Computers
When I was young my parents encouraged me to watch Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, and Abbott & Costello. These are easy things for children to watch because the physical comedy is universal.
As I got older my love for them remained, but also it gave me a love for media from any age. So long as it’s done reasonably I think this sort of thing can be quite enriching.
we are currently playing stardew valley and I don’t think harvest moon would hit as well, but maybe that’s an exception overall, they truly just enjoy hard simpler games like the classics are
Given all the child predators on Roblox, can’t blame ya
Don’t forget the slavery and financial exploitation!
Ive heard of the financial exploitation and pedo controversy but what is the slavery controversy for roblox?
My little guy just started Mario Paint this week and he’s loving it. He’s not reading yet so a game with easy symbols and painting is age appropriate. Plus that fly game is getting him a lot of practice learning how to use a computer mouse.
Yes! On the SNES switch online thing? My 3 y/o has been loving it too, especially after finding the rocketship eraser.
I grew up playing games with my dad. I wouldn’t change a thing. I miss it dearly.
He never went easy on me in Soul Calibur.
He never went easy on me in Soul Calibur
Dad aint raising no wimp! Get good or get schooled.
But seriously that’s really sweet.Your dad is Nick Swardson? That’s cool
Yeah my mom was an old school namco head and we’d play together when I was a kid
Telling my five-year-old that if they can beat Ecco the Dolphin in front of me I will take them out for ice cream, but I’m not sitting down to watch more often than once a week.
Woah you just unlocked some core memories.
Shit this is what I’m doing. My kids are nuts about the niche indie games I play. My son has crazy good skills for Super Meat Boy and Super Hexagon.
The other one loves Mario games from the 3DS.
Is really super meat boy “niche” anymore, lol.
Yes. It was a big fish in a small pond when it came out, compared to where indies were at back then. And where indies were back then was a niche. I’d say it’s largely been forgotten compared to the most popular indie hits today.
Not really, all games age. But niche games also exist, it’s not fair to them to classify a classic as niche when stuff like shadowveil exists
