The toddler started video games around mid August.
I pushed it off, initially until 3, and then said, eh, we can do another six months. I wasn’t too eager to begin. He doesn’t need them, and modern games for kids feel like the ratio of input to output is way skewed, to where each button press is a sugary amount of feedback. (I do think there are toys like Toca Boca Builders that hit the ratio better.)
So every week or two we’re spending 20-30 minutes playing original Nintendo games on the Switch. The subscription contains a hundred NES games from the 1980s. We’re talking often abstract imagery, minimal feedback, and punishing gameplay. I want him to work. I’m letting him press some buttons and see what happens, and he’s always eager to try any of them. He usually gets bored of any game after 2-5 minutes, and then wants to play something else. He’s three, that’s fine. I look forward to taking it slowly.
I’ve been thinking lately.
Sometimes the ongoing fatigue of children makes “thinking” a difficult proposition.
We are discouraged from changing our minds. If you support some person, place or thing, they have to lose or fail in a clear way for you to have an offramp. Otherwise you’re flip-flopping. I wish we didn’t work this way. I’m thinking specifically about supporting politicians, but I think it’s a lot of things. Our brain wants to simplify, to call something good or bad, useful or waste, or any other number of dichotomies. You structure your next label or decision or commitment off of your previous. One change of a label, without some external force, calls into question all others.
I wish we didn’t have this hang up. We change, we change inside, in unpredictable ways, and that’s okay. We start to become fractured when our representation doesn’t fit our interior. I feel this way sometimes. And it stinks. It’s okay to update our exterior to reflect our interior, even at later ages. It doesn’t need to be a crisis to change.
It’s like, similarly, I don’t really like the word “loyalty”. A call for “loyalty” always feels like it includes an unspoken demand to ignore something else. “Be loyal!” I’m supposed to hold a connection valuable in priority against other factors. I want to act not out of “loyalty”, but out of compassion, justice, and the clear needs of people for food and shelter. All are deserving of those things, and “loyalty” seems to carve out exceptions to the rule.
I dunno, am I being too strong here? Do you like “loyalty”? What are its good qualities that I’m ignoring?
Can you “Rock The Minute”? KFOX, my classic rock station, has a sixty second, ten question trivia challenge that occurs on weekday mornings around when I take my kid to school. I am addicted. I haven’t heard anyone win the thousand dollars, and I keep waiting. It’s a mix of rock music trivia, regional trivia, and then often one or two random questions about computers or random stuff. It’s brutal. Last time I listened the guy got increasingly morose as he clearly was not prepared. One guy, a teacher, got nine correct, and the DJ was super excited and surprised. So close.
Went to the last A’s game of the season, in Sacramento. It was a bad game, but now I own a “Sacramento A’s” hat, which will be valuable someday. Right?
Taskmaster and Bake Off are back! Fall TV is here, and in full wonderful swing. I won’t tell you who I’m rooting for, in case you’re not caught up, but he baked a wonderful rollercoaster this week.
I’m playing UFO 50 on my Steam Deck, and it is pretty nuts that this team put together fifty 80’s style games. I’ve tried out over 40 of them, and a bunch are bangers!
I’m reading “How Pac-Man Eats”, a game design book, and it’s intriguing so far.
I wrote a couple blogs recently, here’s one that got some unexpected traction on LinkedIn. "Games don’t teach skills, they teach context.”
My first real home project is building some raised garden beds. Lumber’s expensive, but it’s been fun to build. Who knows what comes next.
Latest mix as always, embedded here, from Spotify, a company with a CEO funding shitty defense tech. We always knew that Spotify was a problem, even as great as it is. It’s also been pointed out how various tech companies are stealing names from Lord of the Rings, like Palantir and Anduril, to support anti-human, anti-society, anti-compassion endeavors. Like, they missed the whole message of Tolkien’s books, or don’t care and just want to go wield some cool swords?
As always,
Randy
Personally, what matters is commitment, not loyalty. You commit to a principle, or to a problem, and your actions follow. You need sustained effort to do anything difficult, so you need commitment in order to do real things. Commitment is also how you show others that you mean what you're saying.
You might like Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". He tried to come up with different moral principles that people responded to, and "loyalty" was one of the basic principles that were more valued by (American) conservatives than liberals. Liberals tended to focus on "harm/care", where you mainly worried about whether people are harmed or helped by something.
This was a rich post, man! A lot I want to respond to here. I've been thinking about loyalty a lot lately too, and I agree with you that I don't really value it. I didn't articulate why as well as you did, but I'm in agreement with you -- loyalty is often asked to stand as a virtue in places where other virtues aren't present. Nuts to that.
That How Pac Man Eats book looks awesome -- very much my style.
And, I loved your post about playfulness in games, and how it acts as a teacher. You should write a book about this stuff! Haha