Ruining kids lives?

Xander · 11-06-2007, 12:50 PM

I was reading through "And Another Thing" by Jeremy Clarkson and he expressed that in his opinion kids shouldn't go round climbing everest or have every toy ever known not because it can turn a child in to a demonstrative nightmare who screams when you refuse to buy them a new Alienware PC each time an upgrade comes out but more because by the age of about twelve they've little left to do with their lives except work and wait till their dead. This kind of makes sense to me and I can see how it could cause the general nose dive in children's attitudes and aspirations.

I noted that the successful people of my kind of age are all heavily into computers or some emerging market. These were not heavy consumers they were innovators more obsessed with fiddling with old components than laying their hands on the latest and greatest pieces of preformed fully functioning all singing all dancing tech.

It seems as though attention levels have gone down with fewer kids developing a taste for the slower interests and more and more going for the quick fix. Even in the realms of role playing games you can see this trend. Games Workshop is consistently dumbing down it's rules and making everything faster so a game only lasts the same amount of time as a DVD. Instead of the RPG shops stocking the various different genres of roleplay they now seem swamped with a dozen dozen different trade-able card games which take about thirty minutes to play.

As a person who likes involved experiences with nuances to master and not just a fiddly control and the computer ramping up it's silicone reflexes to virtually clock speeds I find it increasingly difficult to find anything suited to me and yet if I had ADHD it seems that I would be well catered for!

Basically with children I see one strain of thinking reign supreme "I want my kids to have everything that I wanted when I was young". Now this is a fine and noble goal in concept but I think that it's being employed with naivety which I would find difficult to match in almost every other field of thinking. Sure if you can give your child everything they ever wanted and still produce a child who would give it all up for a good enough reason then yes you've mastered it but what about if you don't manage that fine pinnacle of achievement? If your child is given everything then where is the sense of value? If they have seen the view from the top of the Eiffel tower by the age of six then at seven that is something not unusual. Why, unless the experience was profound, would they bother again with the idea of "let's go up there the view will be amazing"?

So are the kids of today having their futures dampened by the parents heading off at the pass all those things which should be built up to?

Jennifer · 11-06-2007, 01:03 PM

For a long time, I think this has been a typical concern of parents. It's why we get the old jokes about, "Well, when I was *your* age...!"

It is just more prominent now in the United States (and maybe elsewhere) because our economy is built on disposable income. Lots of money is spent on acquiring ultimately useless things, things that will hold our attention for a few weeks at best and then get discarded. And the Sensory nature of many people means they want tangible things to focus on and toy with.

I think children with resources but without money are in the greatest position -- because they are forced to use their minds to imagine what is possible with what they've got. (Talk about exploration, creativity, imagination!) Too much stimulation/gratification makes us lazy fat cats with little motivation to do anything. The more we have, the more bored we become.

And I empathize about the "dumbing down" of games. I remember buying an D&D Basic and Expert set in sixth grade (1979-1980?) and the hardcover books the next year. I loved it so much... learning the system, figuring things out for myself.

But the goal now is marketing to the short-attention span generation, and to the highest number of people (to get market share). So games that are too complicated will be shunned.

I helped with a fledgling RPG from 1995-1997, and this was before AD&D went skill-based. It was a great game, it used percentile dice, skills impacted actions tremendously, and you could construct your character from the ground up. It also had a really neat alignment system (Giver/Taker), where your actions would slant you in a particular direction. So the game itself contributed to the exploration of personal morality. (The game designer/company pres was an ENFJ.... surprise?

)

The problem was that the game was too complicated for the average person. Once you learned it, it was pretty neat. But until then, it was a real pain to figure out. The game just could not get enough market share to last because of that.

Nowadays, the only complicated games that work are MMOs. Because computers deal with the hard system implementation and can be as complex as they like; the user's actions are simple.

cafe · 11-06-2007, 01:18 PM

I can't be the only one who really just wanted a stable home with two loving parents, no utilities getting shut off, not having to eat macaroni and hot dogs because we ran out of money before we got groceries, and to always have toilet paper as a kid, can I?

Xander · 11-06-2007, 01:33 PM

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