So much better than my generation. Where our shared cultural point is sitting in front of the TV Saturday mornings watching cartoons and eating sugar cereal.

Now we binge watch on-demand TV as fat adults.

Some of us were perfectly capable of watching too much TV and eating too much sugary and fatty foods as children and not continuing that lifestyle into adulthood.

Not everything you do as a child informs and solidifies your decisions and lifestyle as an adult.

While I agree, and manage to live comfortably without TV in my life, i find the sugar addiction for me is still very real (despite a conscious effort to avoid it). Having said this, I don't believe it is directly related to childhood as much as it is just a fact of the food that is readily available to us as adults.

Young people and children still watch a lot of "TV" but a big share of it is done via streaming. Also, judging by how many young couples make their kids watch "TV" on a tablet or phone while they are waiting on some appointment (situations where my generation had to actually stay put or find creative ways to pass the time) I think the case can be made that children are actually spending more time in front of the "TV" than our generation did. In any case they are spending more time in front of the now ubiquitous screen and so may very well end up with a bigger waistline too.

It blew my mind when Lego Minecraft appeared a Christmas or two ago.

I saw Minecraft as a digital interpretation of Lego; how meta that you can now get a physical interpretation of Minecraft.

Simply having green and brown pixels[0] is enough to elicit cries of joy, regardless of whether there is any minecraft logo visible.

0: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pixel-Duvet-Cover-Pillow-Single/dp/...

My 7yo is pretty big into minecraft and lego both. We have close to 30k bricks in our inventory, and he did get a minecraft specific lego set for christmas. We have a LOT of fun building things from minecraft into lego sets and vice-versa. I thought that he would prefer to build things in the virtual world (prototyping etc) before building in lego, but he really enjoys the physical process in lego and then trying to make the virtual (and at times more restrictive) blocks in minecraft.

Or even just isometric boxes. "Hey! A Minecraft van!"

http://imgur.com/jeB5GHm

I'm 27 and I find this bedding pretty rad.

It's not just playing Minecraft either - it's watching videos of other people playing Minecraft EG:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/10980512/Stampylon...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Garrett

Steve's Law: No matter where you are on YouTube, you are never more than two clicks away from a Minecraft video.

Not necessarily true. The recommended videos are based on what you watch. I hardly ever get recommended Minecraft videos.

2 clicks away can be the following. If some channel you watch is subscribed to a Minecraft channel, you can get a Minecraft video by just looking at the channels profile. Not necessarily recommended videos.

Yep. It was tongue-in-cheek. More of a comment on th sheer number of Minecraft videos on YouTube.

My 9 year old daughter regularly watches "TheDiamondMinecart" on YouTube, who has 10.9 million subscribers. From the little I've seen, it looks like about 80% of his videos are Mincraft, 20% other games.

Yeah, we (if you are 30ish plus or minus) probably had TV shows and cartoons as shared reference points - this generation will have which Youtubers they watched as those reference points.

I don't know about that, there are so many more YouTube channels and videos, while there were few enough OTA channels and shows that there will be common experiences.

Everyone knows who Bugs Bunny is, and can probably share the memory of a few plot points of some iconic episodes.

A group of people 20 years from now talking about videos they watched on YouTube will have a hard time coming up with a channel that two of them remember watching, much less a particular video. Unless, of course, they play the stupid game of "no, I remember one that was funnier" and spend the time searching on their phones for that one video that will one-up the others while to playing the videos they have queued up...ugh. https://xkcd.com/920/

You're right that there will be a way higher number of reference points with varying degrees of awareness, but I'm pretty sure most kids know Stampycat, Evantube, etc..

The only thing both of my girls (9 and 12) do on their devices (Kindles, iPod touches and laptops) is play Minecraft or watch Minecraft videos.

My wife and I wonder what kind of amazing positive effect playing Minecraft will have on their and their generations 3d spatial accuity. Is it going to create a large cohort of architects when they hit college age?

Yeah, it's amazing seeing my brother's kids talk about Minecraft. My childhood centered around a few cartoons, most of which were made by the same groups of people. I like the idea of a small set of creators having such a huge impact on a generation.