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I've told my child, 7, that when he completes the original Super Mario Bros he can get a switch and play mario-kart. He consistently gets to the end of 8-2, so he's damn close, and he loves the game! Though he has a slight preference for Kirby, also on the original NES.

Most of his friends seem to be obsessed with Minecraft, and Ultimate Chicken Horse, to the extent that when he had a friend over I overheard him saying "Mario is old, but it's still fun!" in Finnish.

So I guess there's hope for me yet :)

5 comments

> Most of his friends seem to be obsessed with Minecraft, and Ultimate Chicken Horse

It's really difficult to compare creative multiplayer games like Minecraft with Super Mario Bros. I think it's perfectly natural for kids to prefer to play games they can actually play together. Especially sandbox games that allow people to play the same game with drastically different play styles. When I play Minecraft with my kids, I'll go hunting and scavenging with my son and we'll use the resources collected to build out and decorate a village with my daughters. They all have learned about redstone enough to start automating some of their own builds. This is all vastly more engaging than taking turns watching each other play a single player game.

Agreed, completely different games.

When he plays minecraft he alternates between trying to build things he knows, or just wandering around and placing dynamite everywhere to blow things up.

Wait 'till he discovers beds in the nether...

I never knew this, until I thought to impress my son when fighting the ender dragon.

Lesson learned xD

> This is all vastly more engaging than taking turns watching each other play a single player game.

I’m not sure about that. Taking turns playing Mario was just as engaging at the time.

It’s only when you know you can be playing too, that the waiting and cheering loses its lustre.

I entirely agree, something special about multiplayer sandboxes that spark something that cannot be sparked otherwise.

Next level would be to play Rust together. Organizing boxes at home while parents are out to gather resources when raiders arrive. Back to our roots.

I've always likened Minecraft to a digital version of LEGO.

It’s not the same without the daily risk of your dad stepping barefoot on a pointy combo and nearly crashing into the TV.

I think there must be something similar in accidentally setting off that massive TNT bomb and exploding all the constructions on the shared server.

Yeah, minecraft is more of a toy than a game in a lot of contexts

And I thought I could be harsh in enforcing silly rules. Let the kid play modern games with his friends you monster.

He does! I guess I wasn't clear, he's got an XBox for minecraft and stuff, but I ignore it because I'm not interested in those games. So he plays that by himself, with his friends, or with his mom.

I just happen to have a NES classic for myself, and that's what he chooses to play with me.

I think having three consoles is crazy, but I have promised him the third when/if he completes Mario.

Minecraft is really great - I would stop ignoring it and play it with your kid. My two "non-gamer" daughters play it several times a week together. They have done so for nearly 10 years.

My son was ruined after we started using mods. The ones he sees on Youtube are all paid things on the MS store, but now he believes I can just magic them out of my hat.

On the plus side, we have a great deal of fun playing hide and seek with the morph modpack.

His friends all play minecraft on the Switch, but they don’t have mods so he thinks it boring.

Don’t show him Roblox

Too late. Some of the games on there are actually kind of fun though.

Now that he’s accepted that I’m not going to buy any Robux it’s ok.

Just curious if other people feel the same way? My kid is right on the edge of the Minecraft-Roblox divide and I don’t have a strong opinion either way (he’s almost 7)

Thinking about your kids „safety“ (that’s a strong word, but consider gambling, violent content, scammers, etc.), Minecraft is definitely a better choice for a child. Get him into Java Edition rather than Bedrock edition and most of the mods are free, there’s a lot of tinkering he can do with it and practically all of the games content single- and multiplayer is absolutely child-safe.

Roblox is a lot more open-ended with what it lets it’s users create, which leads to a lot of violent and not safe for children content, mixed with some pretty aggressive monetization. I don’t have a child, but if I did I’d rather let them play Call of Duty (one of the older ones without microtransactions) than leave them alone with Roblox.

Mixed bag. Lots of scammers as well. Also lots of tears.

Oh nice I misunderstood and thought you forbade all games until he finished mario 1. I thought the poor kiddo couldnt play with his friends :(

We have a switch, a Wii, and a PlayStation 3. The Wii gets the most play.

>And I thought I could be harsh in enforcing silly rules. Let the kid play modern games with his friends you monster.

This, so much of fitting in with your generational peers is having shared frames of reference to whatever media you grow up with.

I guess I should have explained more - he also plays minecraft on the xbox, he just chooses to play NES games with me. I think those two consoles are enough, but I've offered the switch when he finishes Mario.

But I guess even outside the home he's been exposed to other consoles via his friends, and their parents. I'm certainly not holding him back and forcing him to play weird/old games alone!

>I guess I should have explained more...

Eh, I don't think you need to. The internet is crammed full of judgmental comments that people make based on a single sentence or two, often without any attempt at asking clarifying questions. People just generally need to take a breath and not assume the worst about someone just because they don't go immediately into a high level of detail about their personal lives in front of a bunch of strangers.

Does anyone have any advice to avoid this? I don’t believe it is healthy to have one’s cultural center oriented around arbitrary mass media.

Do I need to join some kind of religious cult?

Serious question (except for the cult part).

As long as the rest of world is accessing shared media, there is no way around this. Keeping these things from the kid will mean a lifetime of references and metaphors they don’t understand.

In general I think it’s harder than it was 20 years ago. The monoculture is basically dead. Instead of everyone having the choice of the same 3 TV shows on Friday night, there is an endless number of options on streaming services or YouTube, not to mention games, Twitch, etc. However, having something will at least allow them to to have a connection with a peer group who was in the same niche, and other things have grown big enough to transcend some of that, like Mr Beast and Mark Rober for example. I think a lot of people, even outside the core audience have seen the videos and know who they are.

This doesn’t need to be the center of culture, but awareness of it still helps round someone out.

To touch on religion… In the US, even if someone isn’t a Christian, I think it is still extremely helpful to be aware of the stories and traditions of Christianity. It is such a huge part of the culture and there are references all over the place that would be missed without this knowledge.

The only time these things wouldn’t be useful is, like you said, in some kind of small religious community they will never leave, or a cult.

easy, don't let them get a switch until they get through the original NES Mario

Honestly I think you just let it happen organically. You don't have to push them towards or away from specific media, just be supportive as they want to approach things. If they come home asking to play minecraft, or whatever new trend is being talked about at school, let them. Or if you want to guide things a little bit, let them play as long as you are playing as well.

People don't need 100% coverage of what's on trend for their generation to fit, but they do need some exposure. I'm sure we all remember the "my mom doesn't let me watch tv" kid from our youth that had trouble fitting in, but rarely remember which was the "I don't really like Power Rangers, but do like Ninja Turtles" kid because they still fit in.

Every day I fear becoming the Dad from this Onion article.

https://www.theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-...

I did that. I gave him a simple console from the 90s and a TI-86 programmable calculator when he was 6. Thankfully he mastered them before he was 9 and got exposed to python/minecraft.

Now he can learn anything due to having been exposed to the basics.

Psst, someone tell the poor kiddo about save states in emulators.

Practice the hard parts as much as you want.

It makes playing/experiencing all the ultrahard games a lot easier. Of course a lot of diehards hate that, but ultimately keeping old games relevant involves making them accessible and the save states help with that quite a lot.

Ditto with faqs and maps and cheats. What is nice about the old games is that you can direct-hack the roms and memory spaces a lot more easily than modern games, so it is an early entry into computer architecture and education within the context of games.

The Switch has many modern Mario games that support 2 players that are essentially the old games with better graphics (side scrolling, not like the other full 3d Mario games).

You should get a Switch so that you and your kids can play together. It's much more fun and social

Are you going to give him a map of Bowser's castle or will he have to learn that maze himself?