out of touch? more like saving her from the absolute garbage fire that passes for ‘games’ these days. she’ll actually learn what a good game is. this dad’s doing god’s work.
Game design has come a long way since the '90s. Heck, even the N64 controller is awkward and weird with only one joystick.
Counterpoint:
The reason they will be out of touch is that they will have better impulse control and better spending habits than kids raised on modern games with their FOMO MTX and gacha bullshit.
So basically, actual ‘nerds’ are rasing another generation of ‘nerds’, except this time, nerds 2.0 will probably actually be more socially intelligent than the brain dead zombies being raised on fornite, roblox and tiktok, who have negative attention spans and cannot fathom the concept of doing any actual thought-work, when chatgpt can just do their homework for them.
They’ll also be more tech savvy, like being exposed to or having to learn at least some of how emulation works, which kinda de facto makes you understand things like a file structure, which an increasing number of kids (now adults too) raised on modern mobile UIs… have no clue about.
Oh, they’ll also likely just be generally more literate.
You’re not kidding about file structure. I haven’t got a fucking clue how to do it with phones. Every thing is just “in here somewhere” and it’ll pray the search feature can find it when I eventually locate the file browser.
I miss my PC
With android the default file thing is integrated with cloud. The version of files that was local only like a real operating system is in there somewhere but not something a user can access on demand. So it’s literally not ‘in here somewhere’ anymore.
I had to find a third party tool on f.droid.
Due to circumstances, I’ve had to emulate more on phones. You very much can figure out the file structure so long at its Android (and 9 times out of 10 shit is just in the download folder). I swear my wife’s iPhone is a little black box, though.
IIRC modern iOS ships with a file manager. The black box used to be even worse!
IIRC modern iOS ships with a file manager. The black box used to be even worse!
you mean to tell me the patient zero of enshittification was fucking trash? No, really??
The whole fucking movement happened the second they rolled out the fashion adverts for fucking ipods that required itunes to scatter your files into a zillion folders for no fucking reason and people went “yeah, I don’t give a shit about owning my device or data”
Then came the walled garden, then the shitty apps, then the perpetual surveilance machines.
Now I literally cannot avoid having a phone since work , citizenship and banking two factor authentications are mandatory and on my phone. Fuck sake.
Walled garden i remember from the 90s.
iPhone bitch here
Yeah we absolutely have a file manager!
And where might I find the files saved by an application?
“Files”
Most apps aren’t visible there on an iPad. When connected to a computer other folders are visible instead but I was never able to get all of them.
Do yourself a favor and install a FOSS file manager system, if you can / its not too much trouble on your particular phone.
Basicslly every phone OS goes out of their way to make their particular file browsing app batcrap overcomplicated and unintuitive if you want to do anything other than exactly what they want you do do.
Which is usually sync everything on your phone to their cloud and your account.
I am running a sort of jerry rigged, half baked, de goodled android, … basically I have torn out, replaced or disabled everything I can without root, but left in play store and core g services so i can actually still use it for common apps… done the best I can to lock down everything to its bare minimim privelege set, never use a big ole shared account for anything, everything is a separate, old school email account.
You’re in a virtualized container that only exposes some directories, also those directories are mostly hidden from you, also within this container you generally don’t have any permissions to them, and also every application completely obfuscates it’s folder access via some file access API.
It’s crazy to me how hard consumers got fucked right from the start on phone software and how normalized we are to it.
It’s mainly done for security reasons, but yes it is not the most friendly way of doing things.
I agree with you, though… it’s definitely good for the general population as a whole. Tech savvy peeps should have the option to…be, but most folks should not have root access.
If it was primarily done for security then it was a massive fucking failure. But I believe that security was a secondary concern.
What reason do you think? Also what makes you think it was a failure? Seems pretty successful to me.
The app store and permission model hasn’t stopped malicious code from making it onto users devices. So if security was the concern, I’d say that’s a failure. But I think the primary concern was control. Control by manufacturers (And eventually, thereby states) of what people see and do on their phone. Make sure they have to pay for access to features. Easily surveil what they do.
Security is very often the excuse for control.
Your confusing different parts of the system here, and showing a lack of understanding of the security and privacy concepts involved.
Stopping malicious apps is not the point of the permissions model or of the file structure. It’s meant to restrict what malicious apps can do, not prevent them from being installed. It applies to side loaded apps just as much as ones from the play store. Malicious code ending up on users devices does not make that system a failure, as that was never the aim.
As for spying, the permissions model makes that harder as apps can’t just access all the files made by the other apps. These kinds of mechanisms also exist on desktop Linux via flatpak and snapcraft for similar reasons. Mandatory and discretionary access control is important for both security and privacy. The two are not at odds here, they are in fact very much aligned.
The app store part is separate and not at all what was being discussed. That is meant to stop malicious apps from getting onto devices. In the case of Apple this is definitely also about control, but android has always allowed third party apps and sideloading.
Google’s own services and Apple’s own services are part of the OS and potentially have access to things others don’t so can very much engage in spying. That could be said of any Android manufacturer with their own ROM. You can do whatever you want if you made the ROM, android permissions model be damned.
I haven’t got a fucking clue how to do it with phones.
In a certain way, probably me neither. I use ls, df, md5sum, cp, mv, rsync, tar, gzip, gpg, vim, touch and mkdir in Termux (terminal emulator for Android). For example, say I am replacing MP3 for FLAC. I really like to keep the timestamps of when I added the specific song, but I can’t find any better way than
touch -r oldfile.mp3 newfile.flacBut I also use FX File explorer for certain tasks, as it thankfully keeps timestamps. I absolutely hate how moving photos in Google Photos updates the modified timestamp to the date of when the file was moved. Why?
And I also have an ancient version of ES File explorer, version 4.0.2.3. Before it enshittified.But I am not sure whatever that is installable from within the device, or it’s old enough to require
adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block app.apklike some other old apps I use.Anyway, I have no idea what’s going on with iPhones and files, or whether that’s a non-existent concept there.
Yeah the nerds usually find themselves in very powerful social circles if they survive school. Circles of emotionally mature experts with strong careers.
Kids’ needs are of course very important, but abandoning engaging hobbies in favor of some phantom desire to fit in is dumb.
Yeah the nerds usually find themselves in very powerful social circles if they survive school. Circles of emotionally mature experts with strong careers.
You’re assuming they’ll be hired and promoted by emotionally mature people.
Apples and oranges.
'90s equivalent to “them goshdang tiktoks and fortnites” isn’t Half-Life and Ocarina of Time, it’s Television. The Simpsons or DBZ. Or those awful “classic” animated shows from the '80s that were designed from the ground up to be toy ads. “Impulse control” my ass, most of y’all were glued up to the TV screen like a moth to a lamp and only got consumption impulses out of it. Calling young people “brain dead zombies” is such an “old man yells at cloud” moment, look at yourself.
There’s more culture than ever being created now thanks to the incredibly lower barrier to entry. There are more incredible microtransaction-less indie games made in the last 10 years than the exhaustive library of most gaming consoles back then. Celeste, Outer Wilds, Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tunic…
The existence of slop is a constant across generations, and clinging to an idealized past is such a foolish endeavor, and will cause you to lose out on so much relevant cultural discourse happening right now. How many classic video games from the '90s might a queer kid growing up nowadays look up to? How many?? How many had, oh, I don’t know, a goddamn female protagonist? And don’t say that Samus counts. What a lame-ass culture to let our daughters grow up in.
I mean, as a 90s kid, and tech dork… yeah, I largely did drop TV almost entirely, in favor of console and pc gaming, and exploring the early public internet on a 56k modem.
I would imagine most tech dorks of the era did as well?
Like, as soon as I learned how to block ads on the internet, then later on youtube, as well as uh, obtain audio visual media without cost… I did that regularly, never looked back, began to actually not be able to stand TV due to ads everywhere all the time.
And yep, I am still calling anyone who watches ads for anything, anyone who buys into incredibly exploitative business models that waste your time, money, or both, yep, I’ve been calling them idiot consumer zombies since the 90s, consistently.
You are right that there are more non bs indie games now. That is great! That is good.
Are more games more diverse now?
Yes! Also good.
… But I’ve had basically the same opinions on all this since the 90s, I am not rembering an idealized past, I am one of the nerds thats been this way the whole damn time.
They call Gen Z the digital native generation, but this omits the ubernerd Millenials such as myself (and others from other generations) who forged the way, who were early adopters from a young age, who were digital visionaries that forged the path before the ecosystems got to be more user friendly, more accessible, more mainstream.
Like uh, without potentially doxxing myself, of those indie games you list?
Yeah, I know a few people on one of those game’s dev teams, personally, met them online when I was first like like 13, back when multiplayer games had server browsers with private custom servers, some of those also had their own websites and forums, all we had for voice comms was ventrilo… I met these people way back, have regularly voice chatted and gamed with them for… 20 years?
I myself have been modding (as in making mods) for that long as well, I literally taught myself how to code so that I could do it, before I got out of high school, before any high school offered coding classes, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and flash games on Newgrounds were all the rage.
Not to try to gatekeep nerddom with some kind of official checklist you have to measure up against, but I think you are considerably underestimating the potential nerdiness of a lot of really dedicated nerds from that era, and thus writing them off as ‘old men yelling at clouds’… when we’ve been yelling at those same clouds since we were kids, then we went on to actually implement the changes we deemed necessary, as best as we could when up against the corporate and financial behemoths constructed by Boomers.
My public high school in Southern California had programming class in the late 1970’s. Nerds been nerding for a bit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta yell at some clouds, now where did I leave my onion belt…
You do realize that is/was extremely uncommon, right?
Not to argue against your nerddom, I’m sure you are, and of course nerds have been nerding for quite a long time, but uh, you won the time and place birth lottery to be a Boomer born into prime recruiting territory for Silicon Valley, IBM probably directly paid for that class.
Programming, actual courses in writing code… beyond maybe basic HTML… were basically unheard of in US public k-12 schools untill like, the late 2000s at best, more like 2010s.
You were in the right place at the right time to be able to recieve formal nerd training in a public high school in the 70s.
Yes a privileged place and time.
Nerds v Normies?
With respect
Never discount the sheer volume of text and dialog contained in the average mid-90s JRPG!
4 CDs of text to be read!! Though I’ll gladly replay the 2 CDs of Chrono Cross for the beautiful graphics, music and characters.
I am 50+, remember paying quarters to play Pong and Space Invaders.
Built my kids a game box using Batocera Linux and ROMs from the 80s and 90s (Atari2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc)
I was thereby able to show them the True Magic and Wonder of Computers
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Calm down, Bill Gates
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And you’re lucky there is this entire Lemmy.World instance running on Linux for you to get this worked up over them about.
r/usernamechecksout
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The only part being true is my life is fucked, rest easy friend I don’t care about strangers online
You are fun! Happily to be blocked :) but why is everyone mad at you? Jks no one’s mad they just tapping a screen breathing air and have no real concerns about you or I. But what did you mean to get the minus points?
Why, tho? Is it because it’s not basically an advertisement for some large language model?
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Why do you like Windows so much, then?
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“FUCK LINUX” is, like, tooooootally something a Microsoft hater would say, am I right, guys? /s
I point out the flaws
This also contradicts what you initially said.
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Yeah, if she plays an N64, she won’t be exposed to any popular series from today, and will instead play things like Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Smash Bros., and Pokémon.
Yeah but (with the exception of Pokémon) the graphics have moved on a bit
Stop this slander
The N64 Pokémon games aren’t that bad
When I was young my parents encouraged me to watch Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, and Abbott & Costello. These are easy things for children to watch because the physical comedy is universal.
As I got older my love for them remained, but also it gave me a love for media from any age. So long as it’s done reasonably I think this sort of thing can be quite enriching.
I experienced something simmilar. Authors, comedians and actors were mostly from our or neighbouring states, and man were they brilliant. In my case it was rather a kind of comedy, that was heavily relying on spoken word, but those guys really knew their craft.
This is the responsible way to raise a child on video games IMO. Modern games have predatory practices like microtransactions.
The look on her face says everything to me though.
Plenty of fun normal games, especially indie games.
Only if you teach them. My son is playing casual games on Steam and emulated games.
While my son’s friends were talking about new Call of Duty/Fortnite updates. And they’re like 8yos.
Jokes on them. I hack games that have micro transactions and DLCs and make them entirely free. Even games I have paid for. My child hasn’t seen an ad or a micro transaction yet.
Can you elaborate a bit more on that? Most of the games with dlc or microtransaction stuff that I play have it all verified with some sort of online system (steam, mostly). What games are you hacking, and how?
steam does not verify much by itself, its not made to be a strong security system. look up goldberg emu, cream api, etc. they work if the DLC content is not really downloadable, but already baked in just locked away behind a check
and if the content is something to download, most of the time you can grab the clean steam files from a website of a russian counterstrike community and drop the files into your game install folder and then use the aforementioned tools.
This.
Well, what about this: Early exposure to the shithead practices of modern gaming can enable children to more easily identify what’s good and what’s just trying to take money from them.
I dunno.
You could argue the other way around - growing up with decent and non-predatory practices makes you less tolerant of when companies try to extort you because you already know what “good” looks like.
I’m sure the corpos would love nothing more than kids getting exposed to predatory practices from a young age so they grow up feeling those things are acceptable and normal.
Drag thinks we should expose kids to a safe environment most of the time, and to little bits of predatory design in contexts that make them easy to identify. Like a vaccine.
“Dad, how do I put armour on my horse?”
“You need to grow up and get a job and a credit card for that.”
“That sucks, I hate Oblivion! I want to go back to Morrowind!”
“It’s okay buddy, I pirated the Oblivion remaster. Let’s play that instead.”
Most kids aren’t discerning about those kinds of things.
That’s why I slam that shit home all the time. Robux are a scam. YouTubers are just selling to you. If it has ads it’s not worth watching. Just repeat that every day to the kids and they’re good to go.
The message they will take away is “the things my parents approve of” and “the things that are really cool and fun” are disjoint categories. IDK, I’m not a parent, I don’t want to deal with that. Just thinking about my own childhood here, and the kids of people I know.
yeah the problem is this doesn’t line up with the horror stories I’ve personally witnessed. Sudden, massive credit card charges. The problem can occur when kids aren’t spending their own money, they’re using their parents’, some way some how.
Regardless, kids are already surrounded by ads in every corner of life trying to convince them they need XYZ in exchange for money. I’d rather work to make the kid’s environment less consumerist, to give them a vision of how life could be.
If you give your kid access to your credit card you’re a fool. Those are parents who perhaps needed to learn some extra lessons in life.
The second the kid goes to school, they’re faced with every single fad anyway. It’s insanity. Everyone wants a croc, a Stanley, a labubu. My kids see the ads built in to the YouTubes, and they see it from friends, and I do my best to explain to them what’s happening.
And if they earn some money, or get birthday money, and they want to burn it on some nonsense, I explain to them what’s happening but ultimately give them some autonomy. And when the next thing comes along and they can’t spend money because they have none, they either learn or they don’t.
The problem is that kids dont make or have money. Its like burning their hand the first time, they need to attempt to pay for their own lives fully at least once to really understand it. I think its fair to restrict these types of things to mature rated games as a general rule.
My kids didn’t see an ad connected to videos until the youngest was about 7 (outside of a movie theater, at least). When they first saw them, they were flabbergasted about what they were or why people would just sit there watching them, and absolutely refuse to put up with them. I’d say they are better off seeing how things could be, so when they see how things are now they recognize how utter shit it is.
absolutely refuse to put up with them
This is amazing. Good job! I wish more people were like this. Apparently São Paulo in Brazil has no ads at all.
The look on her face says everything to me though.
lol, it wasn’t even attempting to be a good photoshop. Maybe your screen needs cleaning?
wow I got completely fooled hahaha
My little guy just started Mario Paint this week and he’s loving it. He’s not reading yet so a game with easy symbols and painting is age appropriate. Plus that fly game is getting him a lot of practice learning how to use a computer mouse.
Yes! On the SNES switch online thing? My 3 y/o has been loving it too, especially after finding the rocketship eraser.
Yep! Our favourite now is creating and saving our own stamps.
Shit this is what I’m doing. My kids are nuts about the niche indie games I play. My son has crazy good skills for Super Meat Boy and Super Hexagon.
The other one loves Mario games from the 3DS.
Is really super meat boy “niche” anymore, lol.
Yes. It was a big fish in a small pond when it came out, compared to where indies were at back then. And where indies were back then was a niche. I’d say it’s largely been forgotten compared to the most popular indie hits today.
Also: in the context of this meme, it will put my son out of touch with his generation. None of his peers are going to have heard of this.
Not really, all games age. But niche games also exist, it’s not fair to them to classify a classic as niche when stuff like shadowveil exists
today it’s probably less niche than the n64.
A real hidden gem
A well made game knows no age limits! My kiddo was super into the original mario when we showed it to him. I would have thought it would look dated, but he doesn’t know!
Today’s kids have the benefit that insanely amazing graphics in huge budget games is commonplace, pixel art is a popular visual style that has new games coming out all the time, and janky homemade graphics with visual glitches (essentially memes in game format) are also popular thanks to everything from garry’s mod recordings to platforms like Roblox where a million people make their own goofy little games.
So if I take my 3rd grader though some gaming history, starting at least from the NES era where you have decent resolution, smooth scrolling, and numerous colors, things are not instantly dated like we olds might expect.
I could fire up Super Mario Bros, TIE Fighter, Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Symphony of the Night, VVVVVV, or Elden Ring, and I honestly don’t think any of them would get a particularly positive or negative reaction based on visual fidelity. It’s just a question of whether it looks like the type of gameplay he is into. Even with the obviously popular chunky Minecraft/Roblox look, he’s draw to it because it’s a popular style that he likes. If I comment about how ooh they updated the Xbox version to 4K rendering, or look at the crazy stuff I can do with the draw distance in the Java version on Linux, he does not give any fucks. It’s the command line and the mods that let us do wacky things that are actually entertaining.
I did this to myself because I only played games that my gpu could perform and that was the reason why pretty much all of the games I play are pre 2010.
What GPU
Don’t remember which one I had at the time, but it barely played angry birds and my current one is an rx580.
Ah okay. Asking as my 1080 is still playing anything I want even though it’s 10+(?) years old
The 1080 was a factory freak. I used mine forever, I want to say from a 2015 build as well.
Same with my 1070. He’ll, even my wife’s 970 is running strong. Can either of them play at max? Unlikely. But my wife is able to play just about anything, if at the lowest setting.
I play everything at max :) I did upgrade my cpu and ram though.
That sick about your wife’s 970!
I mean I get like 40 fps in cs2 with all low and fsr on performance but on 1440p lowering to 1080 imoroved itby about 5 fps, I tested it with an another rx 580 and it is the same.
Why so salty about a dad sharing his interests and stuff from his life with his kid? She can play other games too.
Legit, it’s not an either/or. I ragequit Warioland on RA and took my frustrations out building and unleashing siege weapons in TOTK
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That’s not true people like feelgood videos and cute animals and wait hold up …
Enhance
Normal family values
Ah now I know exactly what kind of person you are, nevermind
God I tried. And it told me a lot out myself.
The VAST majority of that old stuff, the stuff that I remember so fondly, was only fun because it was the best we had.
My first game was Yars Revenge. By today’s standards, it’s about 30 seconds of entertainment.
Even Super Mario Brothers, the pinnacle of games for years, had no save button and you have to pull off a long series of perfect play with only a couple of lives or get sent back to level 1. It was almost all single player taking turns.
Compared to even old current systems, there’s just no draw there and there’s no social aspects for them.
I think you’re missing a large piece of the puzzle here.
back between the 70s-90s you played games with friends in the room. you would mock and challenge each other to do better. That was the game.
ᵃⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ʲᵘˢᵗ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶦᵗ
Sounds like something someone who had friends growing up would say
I didn’t have any friends, but I had siblings.
ᵃⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ʲᵘˢᵗ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶦᵗ
thanks for making me lose the game 😠
Even Super Mario Brothers, the pinnacle of games for years, had no save button and you have to pull off a long series of perfect play with only a couple of lives or get sent back to level 1.
Maybe the original has this issue of being held back by overly punishing arcade inspired design, but I replayed Super Mario World recently and I think it holds up in this respect. You only need to get past the next checkpoint for your progress to be saved, and if you are running low on lives and don’t want to lose progress, there is the option of going back to previous levels to farm more lives and powerups. There are also semi-secret areas with buttons that put extra blocks into every level that make the game easier. For basically the first half of the game the only thing that’s really required to win is a small amount of impulse control, planning and patience, and it seems to deliberately work to teach you that stuff in various ways.
My kid is almost 6 so he doesn’t really know modern games. For now he is totally into lemmings and the incredible machine 2. It’s fun because I played those games a lot and can easily help him when he is stuck.
I was really surprised how quick my kids fell in love with Super Mario 3(Super Mario All-stars).
Their cousin played the Switch version and my introduction led them to try and 100% all the classic 2D Super Mario games.
I think Guitar Hero was a good investment for my kids, as they came to love all the classics I grew up on.
Ooh, I hope that works for my daughter when she’s old enough for it to be relevant. I’ve got a wall of instruments - some real, some game controllers, and some combination game/MIDI controllers.
You’re in for a fun evening. Let her pick up a peripheral and she might stick with it long enough to actually learn the real thing. That’s how Rock Band drums got me playing a real kit.
Excellent! I’ve got the drums and mic but I don’t keep those in a ready state at the mo’.
Being really good at guitar hero was the final motivating push I needed to actually learn real guitar. Today I enjoy being a consistently mediocre casual guitarist.
Playing the crap out of Guitar Hero with my friends ages ago is one of my most cherished memories, your daughter is in for a treat.
It could also serve as a cool way to bridge past and present since Fortnite now has a GH gamemode, made by the original creators of GH and RockbandOh that’s fun! My daughter is a few weeks old so we’re in for a bit of a wait, but we’ll see where we land on video games as she gets older. Being able to rock out as a family (+tribe) sounds wonderful.
I grew up playing games with my dad. I wouldn’t change a thing. I miss it dearly.
He never went easy on me in Soul Calibur.
Your dad is Nick Swardson? That’s cool
He never went easy on me in Soul Calibur
Dad aint raising no wimp! Get good or get schooled.
But seriously that’s really sweet.Yeah my mom was an old school namco head and we’d play together when I was a kid
You are just giving your kids more options, most don’t have that choice and can only play whatever launches for phones or switch.
Phones, tablets other portable devices are where this generation is at. There is a question of when you give your child access to brain rot materials. Assuming they are above 12 in this situation, they are already in touch with the general status quo of digital entrainment. The ego they will gain and cool points in the future is unknown but working in Education I feel students with a boarder background make for Better Humans. In the UK most public spaces like community centre or library, school will always have computer relics in a cupboard. A good Gamer will seek these out even if they don’t have a dad, which is maybe the reason they are there…
