I see a lot of this in other fields. People will use a sub-standard workflow and think it's fine until they experience something better and at that point they realise how bad their previous workflow was.
There is a reason why pros who play with controllers never play against pros on PC in shooters. And I can easily imagine the controller pros will be much faster than swipers.
So, for just building with blocks, I can see why parents just give the kids an ipad so they don't have all the running and screaming, but it probably won't be a competitive way of playing games. I only say probably because I just can't imagine me watching someone swiping on a screen.
A game on the other hand can create a sort of rewards treadmill where no one ever really 'finishes'. A book can't adjust rewards in real time to fuel addictive behavior.
Books don't really exploit gambling mechanics, which is what can drive some of the most pernicious addictions.
It's literally virtual building blocks (+ hack and slash combat and crafting and exploration etc). Would you have the same level of derision for kids who sink thousands of hours into playing with lego? Kids have a lot of spare time to kill.
From the way some people talk about video games on here sometimes I assume they think the android/ios market is representative of all of gaming (even then there's plenty of good "buy once" mobile games without microtransactions, the discoverability on the stores is just godawful - presumably to steer people towards more profitable crap rather than what's actually good).
This applies to basically every form of media prior to the internet—movies, TV shows, music albums, etc.
I personally prefer games that are one-and-done too, and this is partly why. I want to immerse myself in a virtual world for a little while and then move on with my life and/or find a brand new virtual world; I'm not looking for an endless rabbit hole.
> This essay will focus on two particularly striking mid-nineteenth-century examples of the complex relationships that unite the writer, readers, and editor of a serial. The first one is a French novel. Les Mystères de Paris, by Eugène Sue, which was serialized over a year and a half in 1842-43 in the Paris daily Le Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, which translates literally as the Journal of Political and Literary Debates; the second is Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which first appeared in the antisîavery weekly, the National Era, between 1851 and 1852.
> My first point is that in the case of both works, apart from the fact that they aimed at social reform and were tremendously popular and violently criticized, their respective readers played a role in giving final form to each novel, particularly in terms of length. I will then examine the locus of the discussion that is being carried on between the readers and the writer. In Stowe's case, since she was writing far from Washington, where the National Era was based, the conversation between the reader and the writer was carried on in the columns of the Era itself. In Sue's case, the correspondence between reader and writer was mostly conducted via private letters, for reasons I will go into later. Sue kept more than three hvmdred of the letters he received while writing Les Mystères; those letters have now been edited and published. As can be imagined, they provide a rare and invaluable insight into the interaction between reader and writer during the publication of a serial.
I know the games have been tweaked for the format but not by much, at least in the instance of Minecraft.
The virtual controls infuriate me but they're tapping and swiping away building some complex creations. They do this in the middle of a family social, necks bent, staring down at the screen. The only time they look away is when the iPad runs out of juice.