Andrew Elmore Works For You! 💽

i remember discovering this stuff when i was in middle school or thereabouts. i used to spend a lot of time playing games in emulators, i grew up playing chrono trigger and earthbound the same as people a decade or more older than me. i think the notion of graphical fidelity not mattering to them is really interesting, because i feel like it almost doesn't matter to me either? my own internal sense of whether a game "looks good" has nothing to do with how high fidelity the graphics are, and i always attributed this to like, conscious effort on my part to reject the assumption that photorealism was good or an ultimate goal of computer graphics, but maybe my experiences with old games and indie games when i was young had something to do with it.

I've experienced this with my son as he grows up, and it's brilliant. There was never any distinction between anything, just games waiting for us to play them. As a teenager he's now more than happy to spend his own money on experimental indie games with unusual art styles, because it's still just games to him, and it seems I've at least shown him that games can be pretty much anything.

Mine are the same. 7 and 4. They like Super Metroid, they like Sonic Mania, they like Minecraft, they liked Forza Motorsport 5, and they don't comment on the graphics at all. When I was 8 and a Spectrum player and I first saw an Amiga screenshot (of Crazy Cars II or something), I joined the power race at that exact moment lol (now I don't care either)

Fun ages for games. You might also try Hohokum with your oldest, a nice chill experience that's pretty easy to play with each other. Machinarium was a surprise hit with my daughter around that age as well. Like introducing a new vegetable to dinner, it's fun to get them to try different games on occasion just to see how they engage with it.

That's rad. Retro games are rad! It can just be difficult for younger people to get into if they've only played modern games. On that note, I will always be thankful to my older sister for bringing home a copy of the original Silent Hill back in the 2010's. That experience showed younger me the value in old games.

I've thought about this pretty much since my wife got pregnant. He's about to turn 3 and is on the cusp of playing games. I made a RetroPie with NFC cards so I can hand him something physical over time and not just pick ROMs from a giant list. Hopefully I can make the older games feel more significant, though judging by your kid's reaction - older games are still cool (and they always will be if we share them😁)

Link to his RetroPie post: https://cohost.org/copySave/post/168459-nfc-retro-pie-my-so

(Seriously can't wait to start playing games with him!)

My kids are getting older (19, 17, 11) but that had been my experience when they were younger; everything was this weird flat space, especially with Virtual Console blurring old & new. But I think that's how I experienced fiction at those early ages; I generally had no idea whether what I was reading was from that year or decades before; it was on me to piece together what I could and maybe suddenly realize stuff. That said, 2 things stand out at me from when the kids were younger. 1) "what do you like about that" always led interesting places when I asked them to elaborate. Like REALLY fascinating observations about how they perceived what they were doing, what they were being asked to do, even just their perception of 2d/3d spaces, but also how meaning gets constructed. Very seldom gave me a good sense of their actual TASTES, but tended to lead to insights about how they thought. 2) In Middle school, my daughter got really interested in horror games but didn't want to play them herself, and her siblings were too young to watch. So she started asking me to get up at 5AM with her to play through horror games while her siblings were asleep. She made the decisions and solved the puzzles and I drove, which freed her to speculate and discuss and pontificate and gave an incredible vehicle for her to kind of work through ideas (and anxieties and hopes and jokes etc) in this weird dawn half-awake state.