This is the reality. I lost days playing Red Alert. Video games used to be fun. The used to be challenging. Even Super Mario Bros 3 was a challenging game that provided a sense of accomplishment.

Today gaming is much broader. Video games have merged with the larger gaming world (gambling). Most iOS games aren’t fun. They aren’t challenging. The are games of random chance at best. Like video poker or a Vegas slot machine you just press a button and hear a “winning” sound, even if you didn’t win.

It’s the weirdest thing when you watch somone playing a game like this and ask them, “Is it fun,” and their answer is, “Not really.”

Challenge is not the issue. Dark Souls is bloody difficult, but that doesn't mean that I feel like I've been using my brain after playing it.

Video games are awesome, but they provide too much stimulation and instant gratification for little kids. I don't think TV is much better, but video games are way more entertaining than TV.

Dude, playing Dark Souls requires more brain power than the vast majority of most peoples’ jobs.

If my kid was good at Dark Souls I’d be impressed. Hell, if I was good at Dark Souls I’d be impressed with myself.

Difficulty != brain power requirement.

Flipping heads on a coin 20 times in a row is difficult, but doesn't require thinking. Flipping a water bottle to land is difficult, but doesn't require critical/analytical thinking skills.

Beating Dark Souls requires lots of things. Hand-eye coordination, focus, determination, discipline to grind until your are good at something, learning the game world, learning the enemies, problem solving, etc...

Good games definitely require brain power and critical thinking. I think most people that don't play good (at least my definition of good) games don't understand some of what they teach. I believe that learning anything can be good for you.

Kids need to learn how to learn, focus, and grind to be good at something. Video games help with that. Well, not the generic slot machine simulator "games" or "brain training" games that are popular on mobile, but actual games with depth that provide challenges.

I would say the distinction you're going for here is simple but not easy.

dark souls is basic pattern recognition and hand eye coordination at best.

Exactly!!!!

It astounds me how often I see ads for slot machine games on mobile. How could that possibly be fun? I guess there's an implication that you can actually win stuff, which I know isn't true. But them I've never seen the appeal of real slot machines either.

Games evolved from products that are sold once to a service that continuously extracts value from the customer. It's only natural that they try to be as addictive as possible when additional playing time means additional revenue.

Yeah, because games are really expensive to make. Fucking up a single time has been known to take out entire publishers. The issue is that many games simply can't break even at $60 a copy and so they have to look to other methods.

They used to be that before they were sold as one-offs, too. Arcade machines demanding more quarters for extra lives is a meme I grew up with, and my childhood currency didn’t even have a coin called “a quarter”.

Yeah, I know. I get that. I suppose I just think it's sad.

Maybe Nintendo will save us.

Talking about and being from that AoE games generation, I think a big part is the absence of any restrictions and incentives to stop. Only very few of my friends back then had unrestricted access to videogames or even TV. And even if they did, there is only so much time you could sink into a sp game before you might want to do other stuff. This even more so for non strategy games. There was only so much you could get from a Super Mario game. Internet access was even more restricted. And they would have been alot stricter if they had known what was out there. You might have heard the web is a fucked up place?

With even smaller kids having a smartphone and constant high speed access to the web, of course they are stuck to the screen. Its a never ending source of keeping you entertained and hooked and you might remember, that being a kid can be boring as hell. With the phones so affordable and everyone doing it, it was kind of inevitable of a development. I think we are witnessing the fallout of that development. With kids stuck to screens and as a reaction the ever increasing demand to make the web more childproof to at least have less of a bad conscience if you let your child have unrestricted access.

I dont think individual parents are to blame though, being a parent is tough and you dont want your kid to be the only one without a smart phone. Neither do I think an all or nothing approach is any more sensible. As always the dosage makes the poison, which is why I think approaches like in french schools are reasonable, who banned smartphones inside the school. Having it established, that there are restrictions to smartphone usage might help parents to establish restrictions as well. However, it all boils down to the question of what is appropriate content for children, and whether the internet is intended to be such childproof content. The answer might simply be no, in which case the only real option would be a second child proof web. Sure, it would be close to impossible to enforce, but so is the ban of giving alcohol to minors. Kids will get their hands on a beer sooner or later, but such bans are usefull enough to not give them easy enough access to drink daily.

But thats something we need to decide as a society. We might decide on something else or keep everything as is, but at least we would have made a decisions. Because we shouldnt kid our self, at the moment we simply keep ignoring the issue only interrupted from short periods of senseless actionism. The availability of smartphones have introduced new circumstances and it is no suprise, that without intervening, they had a clear effect.

The world is boring. I mean, doing anything requires quite the effort if you are not doing it with the correct tooling. Games helps out with that alot acting both teacher and timespender.

Everyone is attached to a screen, it's not just kids. Just sit down on a bench or a bus and reflect on your surroundings. It really is surreal. This is obviously the kind of reality they have to meet, so they adapt and learn.

Banning things have never really worked out in my opinion, compared to work together and talk about things.

Parents have always and will always act preventive, being concerned. Our biggest job however is to have faith in the minds of our kids. They are great at getting the best experience they can from their life. Just be there as a parent and help them navigate. They will probably be stronger and better at facing technology than us the parents ever will be.

This is atleast what I tell concerned parents and myself. The best thing we do here is to start a game of fortnite and play all together since that is the only thing everyone agrees on (used to be minecraft).

There's a lot of research on this to find bad behaviours, were peoples life actually change to the worse. And what I have learned is that we need to love talk and interact with your kids, try to understand their interests and be brave. The world is a tough place and they need all the guidance they can to figure out what we came up with actually means. Childproofing only gets you that far.

In re: boring, I guess it takes genius to see what everyone else doesn't.

> I don't see how playing hours of Starcraft and C&C wasn't an exercise in strategic thinking.

You're kidding, right? Those RTS, particularly Starcraft, are an exercise in APS more than anything else.

* For non-gamers, APS = actions per second. Being able to issue more commands than your opponent and "micro" (from the word micromanage) your units to tightly control their behavior are a large part of winning Starcraft. It's fascinating to watch high level Starcraft players clicking their mice at an almost inhuman rate.

I disagree. APM/APS is a requirement to play StarCraft well just like physical prowess is a requirement to play hockey. But it's far from being the only requirement.

The ingame Very Hard bot in SC2 can reach well over 2000 APM, but it's still perfectly possible for the average player to beat it.

I partially agree. You can achieve a decent rank solely through good mechanics (APM, mouse accuracy, etc). However, strategy is definitely important at the higher levels of competition.