Guest post by Back in 2014 OSAlert reported on Andy Baio’s experiment raising his son on classic video games and “compressing 25 years of gaming history into about four years”. Somehow the recent lack of activity on OSAlert made me think of it. At the time Thom wrote:
I sometimes wonder if I ever have kids (god forbid), how would I introduce them to the world of computers? Just hand them a dumb, locked, experimentation-hostile box like a modern smartphone or tablet and be done with it, or hook him up with a textual, CLI-based computer that I grew up with? I’m convinced that the latter would instill a far greater appreciation and understanding of technology than the former.
As an avid gamer, I read the original article enthusiastically, but since then I’ve often wondered what the actual outcome of Andy Baio’s experiment was. So I thought it might be worth trying to find out.
Happily Andy later gave a presentation in which he summarised some of his own conclusions.
So if this was an experiment, what were the results?
So without question, I think it’s clear, this affected the kinds of games that Eliot gravitates to now, especially compared to his friends, to start he likes hard games. Really, really hard games. Games that cause me to curl up in a ball and cry, or want to like, pick up my laptop and throw it in the garbage.
[…]The second result that I’ve noticed from our experiment: Eliot’s exposure to early games with limited graphics and sound seems to have kind-of inoculated him from the flashy hyper-realistic graphics found in today’s mainstream triple-A games. He can appreciate retro graphics on their own terms and just focus on the gameplay.
But the most important outcome as far as Andy was concerned was that it left a deeper appreciation for games in general.
My hope is that this experiment instilled a life-long appreciation for smaller, stranger, more intimate games, in my son. And hopefully he’ll continue to think more critically about them, enjoy them more, and maybe someday even make some of his own.
But this was only six month’s after the original article. Was it a bit too early to come to that conclusion? Did the long-term effects actually result in a negative reaction, against video games?
Well in 2019, five years later, Eliot released his own take on the History of Video Games. I think his words, a decade after Andy’s original experiment, speak for themselves.
I highly recommend going and downloading an emulator (from a legitimate site!) and playing some of these classic gems in gaming history. There are many games that I’m sure I even don’t know about that are incredible. You may find overlooked gems that never got attention. Sometimes, people have a hard time playing video games that have a more “primitive” old, or 8-bit style. Try looking past the graphics, after all, there was a time when games didn’t even have graphics.
So, for any new parents out there, it seems raising your kids on the classics is not such a crazy idea after all.
Funny that this came up.
My 3 kids are now on vacation and as I write this, my two boys (9 and 10 y/o) are playing minecraft and my youngest girl (7 y/u) is playing some tablet game.
While looking at them play, I wondered if I should try and get them to play some old games from my childhood, and see if its sticks.
Test drive 2/3? Space and king quest (great way to learn English, we are not native English speakers)? C&C?
My 7 y/u also loves MInecraft, and loves playing it with a variety of mods that he experiments with as well. The combination of blocky 8-bit-style graphics and creative-mode-building like a Lego set make it a good combination of modern and retro.
… Forgot to mention that all my kids enjoy building things with my ~40 year old lego collection.
(… me as well)
After I posted the above, I offered my kids to show them the games I played in the back in the mid 80s and 90s and they were thrilled.
This applies not just to gaming, but to computers in general.
People who started off with older computers such as the C64 or Spectrum tend to have a much better understanding of how things work, as well as much less fear of experimentation or learning new things. These older systems encouraged or even forced you to learn how they work, and encouraged experimentation.
Compare that to an appliance like an ipad that actively discourages you from trying to access the underlying system, or a system like windows which is filled with all kinds of warnings designed to put you off from doing so.
Kids learn through experimentation, you try something, it doesn’t work so you try something else. If you introduce fear through constant warnings, you prevent this process from working and teach the kids to be afraid to try things and thus afraid to learn.
This is very much reflected when i have to interview people for highly technical roles. Those who grew up with older systems are far more capable of learning and adapting to new things and thus much better suited to the roles i’m interviewing for.
My fiance and I are planning on having a child soon and the thought of how to introduce children to technology has been swirling in my mind, as well. The idea of introducing older computer architectures is interesting, but I think it really all boils down to allowing children to easily tinker with their computer experience. I’m lucky because my fiance is a kindergarten teacher with 12 years of experience, so she has a lot of experience with early childhood development, too.
I’m hoping to introduce something like a Raspberry Pi-based computer early on. There are some great children’s games like Gcompris and after that transition into Python and physical computing. Eventually, an environment like Squeak, where you can actively change the running system, would also be very cool.
At the end of the day, the reason why those old computers were so great was because you couldn’t really mess them up too badly. Rebooting usually got you to a pristine environment. The goal is to be able to experiment with little to no consequences for failures. That’s a big part of how children learn.
I think you’re displaying some serious confirmation bias.
I work in an organization which is pretty much the state of the art when it comes to computer engineer, and formal education is what makes the difference. A person who has farted around with old systems is pretty much useless if they’re not up to date with the latest concepts and tools.
Ironically, people raised with the iPad are far more efficient at finding out the information/tutorial that will help them to get up to speed with the task at hand.
The issue with old systems that predate the turn of the century is that they are a product of their time, and as such they are incredibly limited and flawed. In a sense, things like the c64 or Spectrum are awful teaching tools as they really have too many examples of what not to do and silly design decisions.
I think the issue is that a lot of people tend to assume that the matter of how they were introduced to a field/concept is the proper/unique way to do so. As if the rest of the world, specially academics, just sat there with their thumbs for 4 decades… in a field that is exponential in development pace.
javiercero1,
I disagree with your opinion here. I see a lot of parallels with cars, new technology has made it harder to go under the hood and be self sufficient.
That’s not the way everyone thinks. I for one recognize that technology wasn’t optimal in the past and there were plenty of evolutionary mistakes. Hindsight can yield real improvements, but this is all tangential to bert64’s point of having systems that are open and encourage experimentation. For those of us promoting open computing it really isn’t about moving technology back to the past, but rather (re)embracing the ideals that made computing accessible rather than walling it off, which some of today’s tech companies are guilty of doing.
I’d caution against trying to plan too much, see what the kid likes when they get older. There are other things to play with other than electronics. “I don’t want to play video games, I want to practice Math!” Parenting is all about understating the meaning of TIMTOWTDI.
Not that I intend on spawning, but I am still giddy about being able to play games now that I really wanted to back in the day, but couldn’t either because of availability, or it wasn’t out for the computer I had at the time (Atari 800xl). Now I own some C64s, an Apple IIGS and several Amigas that I did not when growing up, so am now able to play such things!
Also got a flash cart yesterday for my Atari 7800. So old games ahead! Pretty funny that I would rather shuffle around through decades old libraries of games looking for the ones that got away… than sotrt through my 2k+ number of games on Steam…
This had me snickering a bit: “At the time Thom wrote: I sometimes wonder if I ever have kids (god forbid),”
My eldest son will be 23 soon and I raised him on emulated console games, Amiga games and he had all the Nintendo consoles from the GBA onwards. He also uses Linux on his laptop by choice and he’s not nerdy in the slightest.
My youngest three kids have been raised the same way, however my 13yr old is addicted to Fortnite and has the only Windows PC in the house lol
CONGRATULATIONS THOM!!!!
This is an amazing testament to how time changes us! I would have been saying god forbid to kids back in 2014, now I’ve got two!! Welcome to parenthood Thom! And welcome to all the contributors that have been posting lately