Kids and Text Sims

[digamma]

I had a cool experience a couple of weeks ago on a plane trip with my first grader. We were on a father/son trip and as usual he was on his iPad playing various sports games. I was doing some work on my laptop but also had FBCB open on my computer. I sub-consciously clicked on it at one point and clicked yes to watch the tournament "selection show."

My son happened to look over at this point and was like "ooh, Daddy, WHAT IS THAT?!?!"

Now, I should say that my son is maybe a little unique, and by that, I mean he's exactly like us. He loves sports games on the ipad but loves playing them to see who wins seasons and championships. And if there's one thing he loves more than anyone else, it is tournament brackets. He would do that all day and every day if he could.

So, I started playing a little and showed him what I was doing. He started asking more questions and playing along a little bit. FBCB may be a bit unique because you can take a high level approach, and also because there are fewer players to track. The last hour of the flight absolutely flew by. At the end, he was like, I can't wait until we go on another trip so we can do this on the plane again.

Well, we are going on spring break this weekend and he's already asking if we can play that basketball game with the tournaments on the plane.

I know I remember reading posts from Bucc back in the day about playing OOTP with his son. How about others? It would be cool to hear some other stories.

[Easy Mac]

I'd just love to be able to play video games with my daughter. She's 7, and she asks to play, but she's so bad and gets frustrated at the drop of a hat. She can't even get past like the first quarter of Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 without dying 3 times. Just lacks the hand-eye coordination or something. Which is weird, because she can hit the crap out of a baseball. I try to encourage her, but she just wants me to do it, then jumps in and dies within 3 seconds.

I wish there were more games geared towards young kids for the x-box one. The only thing she can come close to competently playing is Monopoly. Even Guitar Hero on the easiest level flummoxes her.

[Young Drachma]

OOTP went over extremely well with a then-10 year old, especially once he got the hang of using it. He especially thought it was cool that we could create an entire country around this league and then sim seasons like crazy. Not even getting into the granular, just lots of simming seasons and seeing who won and then expanding or moving teams every few years, etc.

[PilotMan]

My youngest (13) and I have fun playing tabletop SOM. He's interested in OOTP, but he doesn't have the love of stats for it, nor the game. I really think he's just doing it for the time with me.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Oh that's absolutely been a thing here.

He took an interest in tabletop and "hybrid" (tabletop / dice&chart games that I had largely shifted to the computer with Excel, dice rollers, etc) games first. That probably started somewhere between 7 & 9. Watched a fair bit of various games, asked questions, rolled some dice, learned to references the charts, so on & so forth. Learned some basics of game theory & design when I was working on a dice&chart pro bull riding game. Got into FTTM on the tabletop, which added more learning about mechanics since he wanted to make homebrewed cards.

Somewhere between 10 and 12 he started getting into text sims on his own, playing rather than watching. An early ChampMan might have been first, I'm honestly not sure. Through the middle school & high school years he's played a ton of TEW, a good bit of FOF:TCY too. He's probably matched me in total hours on TEW, if not caught me outright ... and I had quite a headstart.

Most recently during spring break (he staycationed here at home) he spent a couple of very late nights getting to know my nearly 40 year old copy of Sports Illustrated Basketball Strategy which he dug out of the game cabinet down here in the batcave.

I think among the most interesting things about his relationship with text sims & the tabletop is that he really treats them similar to my own approach: "they're games". It's not a big delineation between board/text/XBox to him. He doesn't shy away from any over the other, he plays what he wants as the mood strikes him, flows easily from one genre to another.

[Arles]

My oldest (11) is completely into Minecraft and wants to learn how to design and develop games. I've helped him learn some high level design tactics, but I find it works better if I use games he likes (Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddy's) and then show how those concepts are in our sports games at Grey Dog. That's really resonated with him.

[Arles]

As an aside, I thought it was really cool when Jon's son showed some interest in Bowl Bound a while back (and he was trying to get his license to work). Adam gets this stuff all the time with TEW (tons of younger people playing), but it was nice to see a kid who's in a culture that's been inundated with the XBox/PS4 world show some interest in a PC sports sim

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Arles

... and then show how those concepts are in our sports games at Grey Dog. That's really resonated with him.

The carryover for that kind of thing is all over the place really, eventually is can really start to click.

I've seen/heard Will be playing something like Fallout (XCom probably a better example though), miss what looked like a gimme shot, grumble about "failing a roll".

[Balldog]

I hope some day my boys get into! They would mock me when I was playing Motorsport Manager every night cause I wasn't actually racing the cars. However, our 7 year old is now obsessed with Castle Story so I have been giving him a hard time because he isn't just telling the people what to do and they execute based on their leveling...same concept but simpler


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[Julio Riddols]

I've been playing the hell out of Terraria with my boy.. First it was Minecraft, but Terraria is more enjoyable for me and he has kind of taken to it because my enthusiasm to play with him is much higher for a game I actually want to play.

I use it to encourage him to work hard for things he wants, because in that game you have to do a lot of shit to get into the good stuff. We haven't even gotten half way through the game yet and we've probably put in a hundred hours or so in the last few months. We've been prepping for a boss battle for a good week now, just digging out the underworld so we can kill the wall of flesh and move into "hard mode".

He's getting really good at reading so it won't be long before I introduce him to Final Fantasy 3. He's a big fan of RPG lite games like Angry Birds Epic, so I think it should be a smooth transition. From there, I hope to groom a future coop partner.

[Eaglesfan27]

My daughter is 8 and she loves games like Minecraft and Roblox, but she also loves to "play" NBA 2k17 with me. This mostly consists of us going into practice mode and her dunking it over and over with Embiid or Simmons.

She is also very good at Mario games and loves them all.

Edit: One of the first games we played together was Ni No Kuni on the PS3. She loved that game, especially the kitty king.