Kids and Classic Games

[Mercutio]

What happens when you show "Pong" to a 10-year-old raised on Playstation 2?

Read this, find out, and try not to piss yourself.

 

[i]

Wow. That page you linked to absolutely crushed the life out of Mozilla. What the hell kind of code is that website made out of?

 

[Mercutio]

Works fine in Firebird .7/Win32 and 1.4a/Linux.

 

[i]

I fired up Lynx ... worked just fine.

 

[flagreen]

I remember the first time I saw an electronic game. It was Pong and it was in a stand alone arcade type machine in a bar (where I spent the best days of my youth) and we played for hours on end. On quarter after another. That must have been in 1972 give or take a year or two. Oh to be 21 again! What I wouldn't give!

 

[blakerwry]

i thought it was pretty funny. And it ended on a high note!

 

[blakerwry]

btw, I still have my Atari 7800 prosystem... I cleaned off the controllers a few months ago when I moved... I wish that my jouse game still worked, I remember playing that and astroids with my father for hours...

hmm... sigh,....

 

[SteveC]

What happens when you show "Pong" to a 10-year-old raised on Playstation 2?

Read this, find out, and try not to piss yourself.

That makes me feel old.

I still have my Atari 2600 and NES. Both still worked, the last time I hooked them up.

 

[Mercutio]

One of my brothers had an Intellivision and a semi-portable TV with like a 9" screen. He was 13 and I was 5, though, so I literally never got to play it.
The stuff I thought was neat was... mind-blowing, like the fact that the Dealer's eyes in a card game followed the play of the cards, and the parallax scrolling in "Star Strike" (probably its first use in a console).

I never got to play, but I watched my two older brothers play on that little TV for hours. Watched.

Anyway, I was talking to a 16-year-old who wants to be a game programmer a few weeks ago (talked to me 'cause I have that oh-so-valuable B.S.C.S) and... he absolutely couldn't be convinced there was such a thing as an Intellivision. He thought it was a joke.

Console made by Mattel? With a little round disc instead of a joystick? Number-keys and overlays? Even after I showed him the games of my youth (I got into computers by the time I was 8 or so, and didn't know anyone with a Nintendo) at the Intellivision Lives site, his entire reaction was "Are these supposed to be better or worse than crappy Atari games?"

Sigh.

 

[blakerwry]

somehow i dont think that guy will make it as a game programmer..


btw, that should be joust and not "jouse" in my post...

I few years ago I downloaded an atari emulator and played joust at work. It was fun reliving the old days.

 

[Jan Kivar]

Tetris: Why don't the blocks explode or something? This game would be good if it had characters... They don't know that the idea of the new games evolved from Tetris.

I like the last line from the article, where they play Space Invaders:

Kirk: I'm sure everyone who made this game is dead by now.

:lol:

Cheers,

Jan

 

[Mickey]

Works fine in Moz 1.5 (even if that is cranky with Yahoo! Mail; 1.4 was fine with it *mumbles*).

 

[Mickey]

Oh, and the article was great. Now I *really* feel old. :lol: I have a friend that received a new Atari 2600, the entire Atari game library, and all the available controllers, packed in a large chest and given to him as a wedding present. He was in heaven.

 

[Buck]

Sadly, those kids wanted to kill more violently and blow things up more dramatically.

 

[flagreen]

I understand what you mean Buck. But when I was a kid and there were no video games we used to play "war" and "cowboys and indians" with our toy guns all the time. Yet I've never even owned a real firearm or killed anyone nor am I a violent person. These kids will be ok too I think.

 

[Buck]

I hope you are right. One thing I have noticed with kids these days, is that as they grow and enter their early teens, they tend to live in a fantasy world. Their life mimics their video games and television. Granted, when we were kids, we had great fun and pretended about many things, but reality was not as distant as it seems for kids these days. (I’m strictly speaking of the average kid in the U.S. In other countries, reality is all to real and depressingly cruel.)

 

[Fushigi]

I understand what you mean Buck. But when I was a kid and there were no video games we used to play "war" and "cowboys and indians" with our toy guns all the time. Yet I've never even owned a real firearm or killed anyone nor am I a violent person. These kids will be ok too I think.

I'm not so sure. Playing cowboys & indians or army or capture the flag are all team oriented games where you physically interact with the other players. Game-system gaming doesn't do that. Even a LAN party is abstracted as you're dealing with the person's representation and not the person themselves (even if they are just a few feet away).

I think the socialization that cowboys & indians provided makes the 'violence' affect us to a lesser degree whereas in a video game there's no emotion or social context for the violence; it just exists. So it can become more acceptable to the player to use violence.

 

[flagreen]

You may be right Fushigi. I think so much depends on whether kids recieve enough attention from their parents. Too many parents ignore their kids. Emotional neglect is crushing to young people.