4 ms·

"My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration" I don't even know what to say to that. Seriously?

jimmaswell 10y ago
I never really liked outside much as a kid and found those kinds of games a lot more fun and "adventurous" than outside. To recall my exact feelings at the time, in Spyro I was working towards goals and finding cool stuff like fairies and treasure, while trees and rocks outside were just "there." Nowadays I can appreciate nature just fine (lately I watched a particular great blue heron occasionally throughout a semester that hangs around campus waiting to see if I could watch it catch a fish from the pond and it eventually did, cool thing to see) but at the time it kind of felt like a chore having to go outside. In addition to satisfying the criteria of exploration, I think the right kinds of video games are very beneficial with regards to reading/coordination/other skills at a young age, like with my reading anecdote, but I haven't read any actual studies on it. For stuff like building treehouses and other more creative ventures there's Minecraft et al. All without losing real limbs, falling down real wells, or getting stung by real bees a real mile from home and learning you have a real bee allergy.
- baddox 10y ago
  There's a big difference between letting a kid play in the way they want to play (with limits, of course), and forcing or strongly encouraging playing video games instead of playing outside.
- throwanem 10y ago
  That sounds much less like a genuine lack on the part of reality, and much more like your reward system being tuned so strongly to favor shiny polygons popping out from under polygonal rocks that, when you turn over a real one, their absence disappoints you. Your other examples are just as flawed. When you build a treehouse in your backyard, you end up with a treehouse - and the knowledge that you built a treehouse, and that you can build a treehouse. When you build a treehouse in Minecraft, you end up with nothing. It's an arrangement of bytes that's rendered by an imaginary machine into an arrangement of pixels that corresponds roughly with some abstract idea of what a treehouse might be. There is nothing in the slightest about it which is real, and that includes the feeling it might give of having accomplished anything. I get that, in an industry which revolves around building imaginary machines, it's easy for us to get confused and forget that's what we are doing. That it's easy is no excuse to let it betray you into sloppy thinking, though, and that's what I see here. Imaginary machines appear to have satisfied you well enough as a kid, which is reasonable. Assuming from this that imaginary machines are good enough for every kid is not reasonable at all. What you found to enrich your life would've intolerably impoverished mine, and those of almost all the people with whom I grew up. As such, I find your prescriptivism uninformed, premature, and faintly arrogant in a way I don't think you've reflected upon or even recognized.

I never really liked outside much as a kid and found those kinds of games a lot more fun and "adventurous" than outside. To recall my exact feelings at the time, in Spyro I was working towards goals and finding cool stuff like fairies and treasure, while trees and rocks outside were just "there." Nowadays I can appreciate nature just fine (lately I watched a particular great blue heron occasionally throughout a semester that hangs around campus waiting to see if I could watch it catch a fish from the pond and it eventually did, cool thing to see) but at the time it kind of felt like a chore having to go outside. In addition to satisfying the criteria of exploration, I think the right kinds of video games are very beneficial with regards to reading/coordination/other skills at a young age, like with my reading anecdote, but I haven't read any actual studies on it. For stuff like building treehouses and other more creative ventures there's Minecraft et al. All without losing real limbs, falling down real wells, or getting stung by real bees a real mile from home and learning you have a real bee allergy.

baddox 10y ago
There's a big difference between letting a kid play in the way they want to play (with limits, of course), and forcing or strongly encouraging playing video games instead of playing outside.
throwanem 10y ago
That sounds much less like a genuine lack on the part of reality, and much more like your reward system being tuned so strongly to favor shiny polygons popping out from under polygonal rocks that, when you turn over a real one, their absence disappoints you. Your other examples are just as flawed. When you build a treehouse in your backyard, you end up with a treehouse - and the knowledge that you built a treehouse, and that you can build a treehouse. When you build a treehouse in Minecraft, you end up with nothing. It's an arrangement of bytes that's rendered by an imaginary machine into an arrangement of pixels that corresponds roughly with some abstract idea of what a treehouse might be. There is nothing in the slightest about it which is real, and that includes the feeling it might give of having accomplished anything. I get that, in an industry which revolves around building imaginary machines, it's easy for us to get confused and forget that's what we are doing. That it's easy is no excuse to let it betray you into sloppy thinking, though, and that's what I see here. Imaginary machines appear to have satisfied you well enough as a kid, which is reasonable. Assuming from this that imaginary machines are good enough for every kid is not reasonable at all. What you found to enrich your life would've intolerably impoverished mine, and those of almost all the people with whom I grew up. As such, I find your prescriptivism uninformed, premature, and faintly arrogant in a way I don't think you've reflected upon or even recognized.