4 ms·

I wonder if anyone ever asked whether playing with blocks is addictive?

derefr 11y ago
I've been waiting forever for someone to write the ultimate eloquent screed on medium irrelevancy, so I could link it in response to a thousand conversations including this one. It would cover things like: • How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices; • how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not; • how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets; • further, how talking to friends is talking to friends, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • but also how there are also structured leagues that kick out creepy people, both for soccer and Starcraft; • and, most importantly, that "playing on the computer" isn't an activity. The simplest and most useful metaphor is that the computer is a place, like "school" or "the park" or "a friend's house", where your child goes and all sorts of activities happen. Those activities are not better or worse for happening on a computer; they're exactly as they were when they weren't happening on a computer. Ideally, parents would treat the computer, the medium, as an irrelevant distraction to finding out what their child is up to. One is not "chatting on Facebook"; one is just chatting with friends, or with a kid in my class, or perhaps with some random person who started talking to me. That information, the important information, gets buried under the medium.
- golemotron 11y ago
  Good point. I think all the handwringing over computer games is society saying "This stuff is kind of new, maybe we should be cautious." Happens every time technology advances, particularly when kids are the users. The thing that is particularly bad in our age is that we're demonizing many realms of experience with the language of addiction. It's stupid. I hope we get over it.
- maaku 11y ago
  Except the argument doesn't hold water. There is a difference between playing with toy blocks or virtual blocks. The toy blocks develop physical skills, and teaches physical experimentation. The virtual blocks develops keyboard/gamepad skills and usually illustrates unphysical simulation. The toy blocks allow arbitrary social interaction with other kids, the virtual blocks constrain social interaction to the limits of the device or setting. I've been in that camp -- I got a degree from DigiPen before I decided to do something more meaningful with my life. But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play.
  - derefr 11y ago
    > But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play That sounds like you were in the opposite of that camp, actually. If you embraced the idea of medium irrelevancy as a child, then you would default to ambivalence between, say, playing a sports game, and playing an actual sport. This would let you freely weigh the pros and cons of each, which would likely end up with you playing the actual sport. The medium may be irrelevant, but the individual activities are not identical, they're just in an equivalence class with one-another. Playing with wood blocks can be better or worse than playing with abstract-vertex blocks, exactly insofar as either of those can be better or worse than playing with jello blocks, or imaginary blocks, or building something out of real fired-clay bricks. What I'm getting at, is that activities done on a computer are not in a separate magisterium where their "computerness" is their one and only property. Ignore that they're on a computer; look at them for what they actually are, what they actually require and enable you to do, etc. Soccer is better as a real physical activity on a field. Scrabble (as my grandmother continually attests) is better as an asynchronous online mobile game. The reasons why have nothing to do with the "computerness", and everything to do with the required affordances and social goals of the two activities. I should also note that frequently there isn't an either-or distinction. I "hang out with my friends" strictly more than I used to, because I do the same amount of real-world "hanging out", and a bunch of additional low-engagement online "hanging out." This is especially true of the friends I have in other countries; 20 years ago, my relationship with them would be something like "I write them letters and see them once every three years." Now we talk all night.
- zorpner 11y ago
  This is absurdly wrongheaded, and perhaps one of the most misguided things I've ever read on HN. The medium, as the old saying goes and in many cases, is the message, and the way information comes into our brains fundamentally changes the context of the information, how we learn it, and how we're able to access it (for a trivial example, look at the connection between scent and memory). How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices; No. Muscle memory and spatial skills are based on physical manipulation with the hands and arms. One cannot develop good body awareness/proprioception without actually using their limbs (this becomes even more important as we potentially move away from finger-based controls for computers). how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not No. Control over the outcome and process of an artistic object fundamentally changes the object -- an appropriate analogy would be to an echo chamber where people manipulate art into forms they prefer rather than be challenged by it. Games can be art, but a process you engage with and alter is different from a process imposed upon you as a single vision by a writer. how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets No. Physical reflexes and adrenaline responses operate in different ways when someone is perceiving real operations rather than an obvious simulation. Virtual reality may overcome some of these issues but it will do so by narrowing the analogue, not by analogizing bullets and packets. and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; No. Humans use an incredible number of feedback mechanisms to interpret person-to-person interaction, ranging from facial expressions to pheromones -- the idea that these responses can be coded into text or emoji in a coherent way is absurd (particularly given that many of them occur at an unconscious level). The computer is not a place -- it's a manipulatory environment that currently engages the fingertips, the eyes, and occasionally the ears, three of dozens of sensory inputs that our brain uses to model the world. The brain is plastic in many ways, but it is not so plastic that these inputs can replace scent, visual responses to faces, physical action of the limbs, the skin's response to environmental factors such as cold or sunlight, and many more. Messages are never independent of their medium, and this is never more true than when those messages are human experiences.
  - derefr 11y ago
    Did you read my response to maaku above? You're arguing against a bunch of strawmen points. I'm not saying that there is no difference between the two things; I'm saying that an "activity" is a concept that belongs primarily to the cluster in conceptspace representing that activity's goals and affordances, and you should evaluate an instantiation of an activity relative to other instantiations of that activity, rather than relative to other activities available in the same medium. Or, to put that more simply, I'm saying that you should treat e.g. Minecraft as an instance of the kind of thing that Lego is, compare the two based on their merits (with e.g. Lego on the motor coordination side, as you said), and only then decide what you want or don't want your kids playing with. The point I was trying to make is that, for example, telling a child to "turn off their computer and read a book" is nonsense if they were reading a book on the computer. Both things are books. In this case, there is no additional merit on either side of the ledger; in either case, the affordance is "text" and the interaction is "moving your eyes to absorb it." Likewise, it is nonsense to tell your child to "get off the computer and go play with your friends" when all their friends are stuck at home due to their own overprotective parents, and so the only place they can freely see their friends is on the computer. You're making an assumption based on the medium (that the computer is solitary and real life is social), whereas in the specific case-by-case evaluation at that moment, the opposite is true. Again note how I'm not suggesting the experiences are one-for-one replacements for one-another. Of course they're not. But the degree to which they're not is exactly the same degree that any other instantiation of the same {goals, affordances} tuple—any other instance of the same activity—is not. And one more alternate phrasing, for redundancy's sake: in the set {computer game, board game, card game}, the adjective "computer" doesn't magically make the first element more N-dimensionally distant from the other two than they are to one-another. You should do the same evaluation when comparing the merits of the computer game to the card game, that you would when comparing the merits of the card game to the board game. Don't bias yourself by assuming that anything on a computer is going to have the same merits and the same drawbacks. The medium is not the central cluster to which the activity belongs. It's just a property in the equation.
maaku 11y ago
Playing with blocks is a far better thing to do than playing with virtual blocks.
- golemotron 11y ago
  How do you know?
  - maaku 11y ago
    Well let's see: development of motor skills, physical exercise, development of a reality-based sense of consequences, ability to feel embodied cause and effect, chances for ad-hoc social interaction with other kids, truly open-ended possibilities for play unconstrained by the imagination of the video game creator, ... I think the onus is on the person claiming virtual blocks are an equal or better substitute to prove it.
    - anonbanker 11y ago
      Nope. No hand-eye coordination or motor skill improvement happening when you use a mouse-driven computer interface to place blocks on a screen. No ad-hoc social interaction with other kids either, especially on public servers where lots of kids hang out. have you even played minecraft?
    - duckmysick 11y ago
      You're the one claiming that "playing with blocks is a far better thing to do than playing with virtual blocks", but all you can offer are blanket statements. Can you point to a study that compares playing with blocks and playing video games and shows that the first option is far better than the other one? As for the particular statements: > development of motor skills Video games also help with developing motor skills. "The findings demonstrate a positive influence of computer games on psychomotor functioning" [1]. Although this study tested adults, here's a similar one with children [2]. > physical exercise Moving blocks with fingers offers as much exercise as using said fingers to press buttons or move a mouse. In any case, both activities offer negligible exercise compared to sports. > development of a reality-based sense of consequences What kind of consequences? That blocks will fall if they are not supported? 4.5-month-old infants are aware of that already and at this stage it's unlikely they played with blocks [3]. > ability to feel embodied cause and effect Unless they step on a brick bare-foot, playing with blocks won't improve the perception of causality any more than interacting with everyday objects in children's environment [4]. The only behavior on that list that is remotely related to blocks is "holding a block in each hand and banging the blocks together" - hardly a unique purpose of blocks. > chances for ad-hoc social interaction with other kids This is not an inherent property of playing with blocks, but rather of all potential group activities - including video games. Besides, online video games offer something that blocks cannot: a possibility of interacting with kids from other countries and cultures. > truly open-ended possibilities for play unconstrained by the imagination of the video game creator In theory, yes. In practice, you're heavily constrained by the number of pieces you own. The pieces themselves are constrained by their designer and manufacturer in terms of shape, size, and color. Compare this with gigabytes of RAM which can hold millions of virtual blocks and their properties. 1 - http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-4546-9_43 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-4546-9_4... 2 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0193397394900043 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01933973949... 3 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/001002779390002D http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00100277939... 4 - http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itf09cogdevfdcae.asp http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itf09cogdevfdcae.asp

I've been waiting forever for someone to write the ultimate eloquent screed on medium irrelevancy, so I could link it in response to a thousand conversations including this one. It would cover things like: • How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices; • how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not; • how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets; • further, how talking to friends is talking to friends, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • but also how there are also structured leagues that kick out creepy people, both for soccer and Starcraft; • and, most importantly, that "playing on the computer" isn't an activity. The simplest and most useful metaphor is that the computer is a place, like "school" or "the park" or "a friend's house", where your child goes and all sorts of activities happen. Those activities are not better or worse for happening on a computer; they're exactly as they were when they weren't happening on a computer. Ideally, parents would treat the computer, the medium, as an irrelevant distraction to finding out what their child is up to. One is not "chatting on Facebook"; one is just chatting with friends, or with a kid in my class, or perhaps with some random person who started talking to me. That information, the important information, gets buried under the medium.

golemotron 11y ago
Good point. I think all the handwringing over computer games is society saying "This stuff is kind of new, maybe we should be cautious." Happens every time technology advances, particularly when kids are the users. The thing that is particularly bad in our age is that we're demonizing many realms of experience with the language of addiction. It's stupid. I hope we get over it.
maaku 11y ago
Except the argument doesn't hold water. There is a difference between playing with toy blocks or virtual blocks. The toy blocks develop physical skills, and teaches physical experimentation. The virtual blocks develops keyboard/gamepad skills and usually illustrates unphysical simulation. The toy blocks allow arbitrary social interaction with other kids, the virtual blocks constrain social interaction to the limits of the device or setting. I've been in that camp -- I got a degree from DigiPen before I decided to do something more meaningful with my life. But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play.
- derefr 11y ago
  > But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play That sounds like you were in the opposite of that camp, actually. If you embraced the idea of medium irrelevancy as a child, then you would default to ambivalence between, say, playing a sports game, and playing an actual sport. This would let you freely weigh the pros and cons of each, which would likely end up with you playing the actual sport. The medium may be irrelevant, but the individual activities are not identical, they're just in an equivalence class with one-another. Playing with wood blocks can be better or worse than playing with abstract-vertex blocks, exactly insofar as either of those can be better or worse than playing with jello blocks, or imaginary blocks, or building something out of real fired-clay bricks. What I'm getting at, is that activities done on a computer are not in a separate magisterium where their "computerness" is their one and only property. Ignore that they're on a computer; look at them for what they actually are, what they actually require and enable you to do, etc. Soccer is better as a real physical activity on a field. Scrabble (as my grandmother continually attests) is better as an asynchronous online mobile game. The reasons why have nothing to do with the "computerness", and everything to do with the required affordances and social goals of the two activities. I should also note that frequently there isn't an either-or distinction. I "hang out with my friends" strictly more than I used to, because I do the same amount of real-world "hanging out", and a bunch of additional low-engagement online "hanging out." This is especially true of the friends I have in other countries; 20 years ago, my relationship with them would be something like "I write them letters and see them once every three years." Now we talk all night.
zorpner 11y ago
This is absurdly wrongheaded, and perhaps one of the most misguided things I've ever read on HN. The medium, as the old saying goes and in many cases, is the message, and the way information comes into our brains fundamentally changes the context of the information, how we learn it, and how we're able to access it (for a trivial example, look at the connection between scent and memory). How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices; No. Muscle memory and spatial skills are based on physical manipulation with the hands and arms. One cannot develop good body awareness/proprioception without actually using their limbs (this becomes even more important as we potentially move away from finger-based controls for computers). how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not No. Control over the outcome and process of an artistic object fundamentally changes the object -- an appropriate analogy would be to an echo chamber where people manipulate art into forms they prefer rather than be challenged by it. Games can be art, but a process you engage with and alter is different from a process imposed upon you as a single vision by a writer. how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets No. Physical reflexes and adrenaline responses operate in different ways when someone is perceiving real operations rather than an obvious simulation. Virtual reality may overcome some of these issues but it will do so by narrowing the analogue, not by analogizing bullets and packets. and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; No. Humans use an incredible number of feedback mechanisms to interpret person-to-person interaction, ranging from facial expressions to pheromones -- the idea that these responses can be coded into text or emoji in a coherent way is absurd (particularly given that many of them occur at an unconscious level). The computer is not a place -- it's a manipulatory environment that currently engages the fingertips, the eyes, and occasionally the ears, three of dozens of sensory inputs that our brain uses to model the world. The brain is plastic in many ways, but it is not so plastic that these inputs can replace scent, visual responses to faces, physical action of the limbs, the skin's response to environmental factors such as cold or sunlight, and many more. Messages are never independent of their medium, and this is never more true than when those messages are human experiences.
- derefr 11y ago
  Did you read my response to maaku above? You're arguing against a bunch of strawmen points. I'm not saying that there is no difference between the two things; I'm saying that an "activity" is a concept that belongs primarily to the cluster in conceptspace representing that activity's goals and affordances, and you should evaluate an instantiation of an activity relative to other instantiations of that activity, rather than relative to other activities available in the same medium. Or, to put that more simply, I'm saying that you should treat e.g. Minecraft as an instance of the kind of thing that Lego is, compare the two based on their merits (with e.g. Lego on the motor coordination side, as you said), and only then decide what you want or don't want your kids playing with. The point I was trying to make is that, for example, telling a child to "turn off their computer and read a book" is nonsense if they were reading a book on the computer. Both things are books. In this case, there is no additional merit on either side of the ledger; in either case, the affordance is "text" and the interaction is "moving your eyes to absorb it." Likewise, it is nonsense to tell your child to "get off the computer and go play with your friends" when all their friends are stuck at home due to their own overprotective parents, and so the only place they can freely see their friends is on the computer. You're making an assumption based on the medium (that the computer is solitary and real life is social), whereas in the specific case-by-case evaluation at that moment, the opposite is true. Again note how I'm not suggesting the experiences are one-for-one replacements for one-another. Of course they're not. But the degree to which they're not is exactly the same degree that any other instantiation of the same {goals, affordances} tuple—any other instance of the same activity—is not. And one more alternate phrasing, for redundancy's sake: in the set {computer game, board game, card game}, the adjective "computer" doesn't magically make the first element more N-dimensionally distant from the other two than they are to one-another. You should do the same evaluation when comparing the merits of the computer game to the card game, that you would when comparing the merits of the card game to the board game. Don't bias yourself by assuming that anything on a computer is going to have the same merits and the same drawbacks. The medium is not the central cluster to which the activity belongs. It's just a property in the equation.

maaku 11y ago

Playing with blocks is a far better thing to do than playing with virtual blocks.

golemotron 11y ago
How do you know?
- maaku 11y ago
  Well let's see: development of motor skills, physical exercise, development of a reality-based sense of consequences, ability to feel embodied cause and effect, chances for ad-hoc social interaction with other kids, truly open-ended possibilities for play unconstrained by the imagination of the video game creator, ... I think the onus is on the person claiming virtual blocks are an equal or better substitute to prove it.
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    Nope. No hand-eye coordination or motor skill improvement happening when you use a mouse-driven computer interface to place blocks on a screen. No ad-hoc social interaction with other kids either, especially on public servers where lots of kids hang out. have you even played minecraft?
  - duckmysick 11y ago
    You're the one claiming that "playing with blocks is a far better thing to do than playing with virtual blocks", but all you can offer are blanket statements. Can you point to a study that compares playing with blocks and playing video games and shows that the first option is far better than the other one? As for the particular statements: > development of motor skills Video games also help with developing motor skills. "The findings demonstrate a positive influence of computer games on psychomotor functioning" [1]. Although this study tested adults, here's a similar one with children [2]. > physical exercise Moving blocks with fingers offers as much exercise as using said fingers to press buttons or move a mouse. In any case, both activities offer negligible exercise compared to sports. > development of a reality-based sense of consequences What kind of consequences? That blocks will fall if they are not supported? 4.5-month-old infants are aware of that already and at this stage it's unlikely they played with blocks [3]. > ability to feel embodied cause and effect Unless they step on a brick bare-foot, playing with blocks won't improve the perception of causality any more than interacting with everyday objects in children's environment [4]. The only behavior on that list that is remotely related to blocks is "holding a block in each hand and banging the blocks together" - hardly a unique purpose of blocks. > chances for ad-hoc social interaction with other kids This is not an inherent property of playing with blocks, but rather of all potential group activities - including video games. Besides, online video games offer something that blocks cannot: a possibility of interacting with kids from other countries and cultures. > truly open-ended possibilities for play unconstrained by the imagination of the video game creator In theory, yes. In practice, you're heavily constrained by the number of pieces you own. The pieces themselves are constrained by their designer and manufacturer in terms of shape, size, and color. Compare this with gigabytes of RAM which can hold millions of virtual blocks and their properties. 1 - http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-4546-9_43 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-4546-9_4... 2 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0193397394900043 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01933973949... 3 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/001002779390002D http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00100277939... 4 - http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itf09cogdevfdcae.asp http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/cd/re/itf09cogdevfdcae.asp