On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 06:21:14 -0800, Ron Teitelbaum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
That's good. I think I posted this comment as much for you as for me. I
Yeah, I'm definitely in "thinking out loud" mode. It's good to see how
others think, too.
learned the hard way by trying to teach math to my daughter. It didn't
go well! So now I review homework, sometimes point out errors, teach
some
concepts later. It's not an easy transition to make, but it does work
better (some).
Ah. My kids are homeschooled so I have no outs there. It's still not so
much teaching as sort of get-out-of-the-way while they learn.
I played DnD when I was in grade school. We had an after school club
and it was really fun.
I'd guess you're slightly younger than I, then. When I was a teen, the
issues raised with D&D were virtually identical to the issues being raised
today about video games (and about comic books in the '50s, pulp fiction
in the '30s, etc.), with the added twist of a few self-proclaimed experts
insisting that D&D contained REAL SPELLS.
What concerns me is the level of violence in video games
today. I'm a bit out of touch with games. I saw a group of programmers
in my last job set up a game server, I can't remember what it was, and
they
spent a whole lot of time at it. It was really violent. So what I know
is mostly second hand.
Well, of course, games are not violent so much as pretend-violent. And
gamers tend to quickly break down a game into its numbers. Which is why
games like Katamari Darcy and Viva Pinata can be phenomenally successful
even among hardcore gamers, despite being opposed to the usual
dark/gory/faux-serious that demographic gravitates toward.
In his "A Theory of Fun For Game Deisgn", Ralph Koster re-imagines Tetris
as a game where you're a Nazi dropping Jews into a pit. It's an
illuminating discussion.
I read about violence and exposure to TV and Video
games and the evidence seems to support a very negative impact on
children, including violent activity, anti-social behavior and attention
disorders.
I've never seen anything that struck me as even remotely reliable.
However, I do think TV and games are completely opposite. Television and
movies are passively absorbed. Even in the best filmed entertainments,
which engage you emotionally and intellectually, you have no control, and
are therefore encouraged to accept what you see.
Games are meant to be beaten. Figured out. Controlled. Gamers expect to be
Cause rather than Effect. One of the best references I can make here is to
Adam Cadre's text adventure game "Photopia". It's the story of a girl who
dies in a car accident, told backwards. You can't change this; the
interactivity comes entirely from how you experience the character when
she's alive. It's a very moving work, perhaps the most moving game I've
ever played, and it pissed not a few people off because they had the
gamer's expectation that they could keep the character from getting killed.
http://adamcadre.ac/if.html
Anyway, this mindset (IMO) makes the player less susceptible to influence
than the viewer. It's precisely why it's so difficult to create a game
that rises to the level of art. ("Starflight" had a twist that completely
altered the player's view of the game mechanic, not unlike the
aforementioned Tetris/Nazi thing. But it's rare.)
I remember reading about increased hand-eye development but I question
the
benefit of that considering the down side.
Well, you can get those hand-eye development benefits playing any twitch
game, regardless of context, I'd imagine.
I suppose that if society of today requires a certain amount of
desensitization then if we can't
change society we should provide the right level of exposure.
As I say, it's done nothing to desensitize my son. Well, yeah, maybe it's
desensitized him to movie and game violence. :-) Real violence appalls him
and I think he thinks violence even on the level of, say, boxing is pretty
stupid.
OTOH, violence with survival value (say hunting or fishing) seem okay to
him (though we haven't done anything like that yet).
I'm happy that your son is well adjusted and doing well.
Heh. My children aren't well-adjusted. They adjust the world.
It makes me wonder if some of the negative impacts can not be
accounted for because of the lack of supervision in TV and video games.
Might be. There are six of us and we have one TV in the main room. The
computers are also in the main room. And, again, it's about knowing your
kid. My son, when he was two, we watched the movie "Phantoms". Eye-sucking
aliens didn't bug him at all. But there's a scene where Ben Affleck, the
town sheriff, describes how he left the FBI after accidentally shooting a
child. =That= freaked him out. So I learned: No Ben Affleck. No,
seriously, I discovered that in the context of the fantastic, anything
goes, but if it were realistic, you had to be very careful.
No substitute for knowing your child.
I'm not sure what that--doesn't the game go away at that point?<s>
Not really. I guess my point here is that you can use your properties to
build real things. Those things can be very useful in many different
ways. Say like a classification tree. Once you answer questions the
system could give you the name of the thing you found. You found
Caulerpa taxifolia. Or if you have your thing running around on screen
and trying to talk to you, it seems silly to ask you if it's alive and
talking. I guess I was trying, but not well, to show the benefit of
properties to construct useful things.
See my response to Todd as far as this goes.
You don't have to go far to see the quick return to the mean, in things
like the French Revolution, or the Russian removal of the Czar. I
really believe that we are in deep trouble when we isolate ourselves and
consume such vast resources.
I agree with the former. As far as the latter, I would argue that our
"vast consumption" is what makes things like the OLPC possible.
I like the OLPC project because I believe that projects just
like that one will help to even out world resources and could help to
bring peace. As humans maybe we can learn to share and manage the
resources so
that other species won't be wiped out in the process. After all it's
true there are limited resources, but considering we have a very nice
sun, there is still a lot to go around.
Our concern for other species--and even groups of men apart from us--is
made possible by our vast wealth; we tend to deplore our materialism, but
we neglect the positive things abundance brings. To a starving man, a
spotted owl is dinner. To a man without shelter, a redwood is a roof.
The OLPC rocks. I hope they mass market to first world nations. It has the
potential to change everything. Commoditize computing power completely.
I hope my children are able to benefit from and contribute to it.
===Blake===
_______________________________________________
Beginners mailing list
Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
