My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid.
I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything. Everything works for them and is layed out. For example, when I was young I had a lego technic motor, but the wires sometimes got oxidatid or just broke, and I had to fix it. My son has a new lego set, and the motor always works, except when the wireless remote runs out of battery.
Same with gaming, it always works, while in the past even getting a game to run could be a challenge on its own. And when he gets stuck in a game he watches a YouTube. No hours of frustration and endless searching and figuring for a solution.
I see my kids don't have much of these challenges, everything works for them.
Don't know how this will affect them on the long run. Now it's only my observation.
For older kids, I think bricolage and manual labor can bring some of this attitudes you talk about.
The digital world is mostly done. Everything, from social networks, to videogames is studied to avoid frustration, be addictive, and generate a dopamine rush. When not, like competitive gaming and so... the skill gap is too big and the entrance barrier too high
Manual labor cannot be so easily simplified and automatized. Yes, you need to perform a task and, if it's common enough, you'll have a Youtube tutorial at one click reach. But that's not so easy in the real world, because you'll eventually find obstacles and unforeseen problems. Usually, the uploader is a skilled guy for whom, some situations, are not even worth mentioning, but will be a problem for a newbie.
Furthermore many basic manual task are not to be found in Youtube, because they're too specific. Yes, you can find a tutorial on how to hang something to a wall, but you need to hang an object of an specific shape, between two walls corner, where some other object is an obstacle.
In those cases, you're mostly on your own, but the task is achievable
My teenager plays a game called Celeste (among other pretty difficult games). I grew with 80s and 90s games and Celeste looks like I would not bother (or possibly even be capable) to learn it, but he did over several painful and repetitive hours.
So it could be that the children are both ok and broken in new ways, like our generation was.
This is an important point. I don't think it's fair to assume today's kids won't play Prince of Persia because they lack perseverance or because the game is hard. It may just as well be because the game is bad.
I played Prince of Persia as a kid, the game is amazing for its time. But game design has evolved in these 30 years, and it shows. When we were kids we didn't have better games to play so we had to persevere with PoP.
Nowadays, if you want hard platforming you can play Super Meat Boy or Celeste and fight with your ability to perform the required movements, not with the clunky controls.
If you want to explore an unknown world you can play Hollow Knight or Ori and enjoy a much larger and more developed setting.
Neither of these games are easy, but they have much more well crafted learning curves for example. PoP simply drops you in a dungeon and you have to die there until you manage to get the timing of the jumps, while Celeste has an "easy" first level and constantly ramps up the difficulty.
Celeste is a masterpiece. It's well worth the investment in beating the base game, though I did quickly give up on the significantly-more-difficult B- and C-side content.
If you're interested in understanding some of why Celeste is so important to a lot of people but don't feel up for playing it yourself, these two video essays are a great watch:
This doesn't counter anything the OP said. No one is claiming the new generations aren't both ok and broken in new ways. Pointing out that you have a teenager that plays a somewhat difficult game doesn't add much to the discussion. Also, the fact that you won't even try the game and yet have made a judgement about how difficult it is says more about you than anything else.
And in fact, I don't think anyone would be surprised if that very same teenager looks up YouTube videos about how to beat the most difficult parts, find all the secrets, and so on.
Even less like the hard old games, Celeste comes with an assist mode:
> Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience.
If you want to counteract this tendency, consider getting them into (competitive) sports. Nothing will work right away, they will have to „grind“ (train/practice) a lot, failures are all but certain; but hard work and perseverance get rewarded, and the successes are all the sweeter. As a young guy who has had a modern and easy childhood not unlike the one you describe, many of my most cherished memories come from competing in a sport.
Sports and musical instruments - if you can keep them motivated/interested, the results of focused practice can’t be ignored.
To some extent I only realized this late in life myself. I don’t play a musical instrument, schoolwork through undergraduate never required really hard work and as an athlete I was a lackluster football player who never really put in the time to get better. But as an adult, computer programming and crossword puzzles were things which I applied myself to and was astonished to see how much better I could get at them by putting in the time and effort. (That being said I am an awful teacher - as an autodidact myself, I often - unfairly - feel that others aren’t putting enough effort in.)
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy specifically calls this out. It's brutally difficult from the jump, and his narration talks about how videogames used to ask a lot of their user. They were unforgiving challenges with no guarantee of obvious success. My brain instantly flashed over to TMNT on the NES and just how hard that and Battletoads were.
If you haven't played Getting Over It, it's a tremendous meditation on failure, and Bennett's narrations as you struggle are brilliant from a philosophical standpoint. He talks about how the challenge and failure and difficult ARE the point for a certain class of gamer and how that's the game he wanted to build.
For another take, Super Hexagon provides that same "this is impossible but I'm getting closer to possible and that feels good."
There are also a lot of games out there that are just bad and difficult for the wrong time wasting reasons, and there is also a ton of selection compared to back then. Kids are probably showing rational behavior in picking the 'best' experiences. Old NES games and such were hard either to get more quarters out of you in an arcade and because they didn't have much space to program games, so they made them hard to increase the play time and 'satisfaction' feeling.
Also when I was a kid, early childhood I just couldn't really play the harder games, late childhood I could play the hard games. When they're just too hard you stop playing. Also different kids have different strengths and they will gravitate to games that play to their strengths. I have below the mean reaction times so I just did bad in reaction time platformers and eventually gravitated towards games that weren't hard because of reaction times, like RPGs, strategy games, installing linux on my computer and troubleshooting it and what not.
There are also new 'hard' games out there that demand a lot out of their players, and be careful if your kid gets obsessed about them. Like many esports games.
I remember another proof of that: MKIII. Second hardest level made me swear so much I'm probably excommunicated in multiple religions. I had to build muscle memory to even have a chance, on my Sega Mega Drive II controller. And for the Fatalities, the timespan and combination of keys (that you had to discover yourself or find in some obscure gaming zines) was so hard it was an achievement to do one.
I think it's unfair to actual games to call Battletoads a challenge. It's a trial and error puzzle with more in common with kaizo rom hacks. Battletoads and Double Dragon, basically the same thing but with a human-friendly difficulty curve, almost feels like an apology from the developers.
> I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything.
> Don't know how this will affect them on the long run. Now it's only my observation.
I realize that you're only talking about your own kids, but I have a feeling that many people on here consider this to be some kind of general rule for all kids, akin to the "back in my day" rhetoric of the generations before us.
I think it's good to consider that your kids will likely live in a world where this attitude is actually a very effective one:
* Instead of spending days trying to solve some problem yourself, download an app that solves it for you in minutes.
* Instead of coming up with a very well informed opinion about everything relevant in today's politics, listen to trusted others who have taken the time to form opinions on the matter.
* Instead of trying to "earn" that promotion by working 80 hour weeks and "keeping your head down" at your office, apply for a different job elsewhere that offers better pay and work/life balance.
As most of us here are programmers, we all know the benefits of greedy algorithms vs brute-force solutions. Yes, sometimes a brute force solution can be very satisfying, but taking "smart" shortcuts in life really does pay off, whether we like it or not.
And before you tell me that I'm probably one of those millenials who doesn't do anything and thinks everything will just be handed to them: well.. yeah, that's kinda true. I've never worked at a single job for more than a year, I've never really put more effort into my education than what was strictly needed to pass (and sometimes less), and now I'm a data engineer at Apple.
There is always a generational tendency to point out that the next one has it easy or that they are weak because $OBSERVATION. I would like more folks to counter that. I’m a millennial but absolutely love how Gen Z is incredibly adept at navigating the always online culture, calling bullshit on dated traditions around work ethics and so on.
You can look at change and either pat yourself on the back for being better for having overcome challenges they didn’t have to. Or you can see what other generations bring to the table and work with that.
I would hate to work with a person who subscribes to these strategies. Someone who can't form their own opinion and looks for the easy way out above all else.
Suddenly anyone in the future with the ability for critical thinking and problem solving beyond "do they have an app for that?" is going to inherit the Earth.
> * Instead of trying to "earn" that promotion by working 80 hour weeks and "keeping your head down" at your office, apply for a different job elsewhere that offers better pay and work/life balance.
I think the reason the "head down" strategy doesn't work so well now is at least partially because it's still the dominant approach. Some time after it becomes the exception, it may become the path to success it once was.
My biggest problem with this: this effect does not affect only children. I see students learning to program giving up at the first syntax error; some don't even care about reading compiler messages and trying to fix them.
The first successful code I wrote was the following:
10 input a
20 input b
30 print a+b
I was around 12, without manual or online help and it was trial and error for an entire weekend until I got this right. Very few people I know today used to tech would have such perseverance.
> My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid.
This is really good. In the meantime my Chinese parents who believe video games are evil and whoever make them are moral monsters will only agree that I try something similar for my son over their dead bodies.
Hmm I see the exact opposite. If I wanted to know how something worked or how to build something I had to go to a physical library and hope some dusty encyclopaedia had a minimal entry, and if I needed supplies it would be a specialist catalogue.
If my daughter wants to know how something works she can find a brilliant well-produced video on YouTube of an expert explaining it, and she can easily buy tools and supplies from anywhere in the world for esoteric hobbies.
From what I see the next generation are far more practical and hands on and involved in constructive and creative hobbies than mine was. When I see young people’s resumés today they are frighteningly practical and talented in advanced hobbies.
Sometimes I worry about how to keep up and compete with them!
> I see my kids don't have much of these challenges, everything works for them.
This is one of the reasons I recommend teaching kids C++ early.
Between build systems, ABI issues, compiler error messages, and undefined behavior it really builds perseverance and a great sense of accomplishment when your program compiles and runs correctly.
I am not aware of any other production language that gives that sense of accomplishment and requires that level of perseverance.
This comment hits the nail on the part just between eyes.
There is an effort we can put in teaching our kids c++ and even better if we can start them on leetcode at an early age
This will help them improve their problem solving ability and they will also get frustrated when they are not able to solve a hard graph problem.
But the hardest problem never is the problem itself, but the inability to keep on going when the problem seems very hard.
When kids learn how to handle that and when all the kids in the world know how to handle that, then surely we are looking at a future generation that will help solve all the hard problems that we are not able to solve like World Proverty, income inequality and global warming.
To be fair, as an old player of PoP back in the day, I still think the jump controls were pretty shitty in that particular game. Please jump when my optical nerves tells me the signal that I want to jump and I convert that into a physical action. Otherwise it feels like if I was playing a screen-captured game on a faraway computer through WebRTC streaming.
I think a key part of the puzzle of PoP was the precise controls it asked from you. Also I get a feeling they assume you read the manual, because there are a bunch of unintutive controls it explains in there. When I was a kid playing it, I didn't realize there was a manual: http://www.abandonia.com/files/extras/26916_Extra%20document...
I never felt the controls where shitty, it just felt like jumping needed some foresight and that was part of the fun, just like jumping in real life requires you to bend down your knees first before actually getting some air; even in modern games I get that feeling, like how in Dark Souls you have to time the parry and pressing the button does not instantly makes the shield teleport in front of the character.
I recall being as a teenager hearing of Linux and distros on the internet in the early 2000s and experimenting with different ones. Not sure what motivated me, but everytime things would break and I'd google and try fixing it myself so that the rest of the family could use the same one computer. Perhaps Linux can still function the same and help pose a challenge to kids these days too.
This is an interesting take. I was speaking with my brother about the Genesis game Shinobi (part 3). What drew me to it was that it was so hard. You had to concentrate and really get good at it if you needed to play the game and reach the (rather disappointing by modern standards) end.
Modern games which I've played are more like movies with a limited amount of interactivity. Maybe it's just generational but I do think there's a good amount of "dumbing down" in not just games but educational and other content in general.
Apart from that, I was tickled at playing this. I used to smuggle this game from friends at school on 2 5.25" double density disks. There was so much trouble to get games and play them. Damaged disks, the fear of getting caught by the school staff, "friends" who would give me games other than the ones we agreed upon. Hard to imagine a world like that in a world where I can type a URL into a browser and play the game.
Then again, it's much easier to branch out and build your own games now. .
I dislike Roblox since at that point you might as well open up Unity and ship your own game. That's how I learned to program in my early twenties, a bit later than most of y'all
Yes of course it was released ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIscoVqTwpY
And yes, I was working with Broderbund (from Paris) at that time, it was a great time! Translating 6502 Apple II code to Atari 1040ST 68000 code was funny...
I expected after finishing level 1 to see the “page 4 line 2 character 6” challenge room, where you were supposed to prove you owned the official manual.
When I was a kid we had it on floppy disk but never had the original book, and I remember diligently filling in a table of failures each time I drank the wrong letter and died. Eventually I got them all!
Because of this I remember level 1 extremely well :D
I'm not on mobile and I also cannot figure out where the action button is. One can get as far as finding the sword, but I have to idea how to pick it up.
i just tried it on mobile and i am very impressed.
the movement controls are very intuitive. they don't hit accurately but they work in an intuitive way. i tapped the four directions and four quadrants of the play screen. and the character responded as i expected.
i am with you though. i have no idea how i will use the sword when i get it.
Interesting. Only the four direction buttons work for me, regardless of num lock setting. eg 2, 4, 6, 8. None of the corner buttons nor middle button have any kind of effect.
This is when using Firefox on Linux, and using a standard 101-key external keyboard.
Hm, I couldn’t get it to work on my iPhone (not that I actually expected it to) - I could do some things but the controls didn’t seem to work consistently.
I was fully expecting this to be an emscripten to Web Assembly port but was delighted to see that this is built with Phaser[1] from scratch! Great job! Feels just like it did when I originally played it.
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My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid.
I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything. Everything works for them and is layed out. For example, when I was young I had a lego technic motor, but the wires sometimes got oxidatid or just broke, and I had to fix it. My son has a new lego set, and the motor always works, except when the wireless remote runs out of battery. Same with gaming, it always works, while in the past even getting a game to run could be a challenge on its own. And when he gets stuck in a game he watches a YouTube. No hours of frustration and endless searching and figuring for a solution.
I see my kids don't have much of these challenges, everything works for them.
Don't know how this will affect them on the long run. Now it's only my observation.
The digital world is mostly done. Everything, from social networks, to videogames is studied to avoid frustration, be addictive, and generate a dopamine rush. When not, like competitive gaming and so... the skill gap is too big and the entrance barrier too high
Manual labor cannot be so easily simplified and automatized. Yes, you need to perform a task and, if it's common enough, you'll have a Youtube tutorial at one click reach. But that's not so easy in the real world, because you'll eventually find obstacles and unforeseen problems. Usually, the uploader is a skilled guy for whom, some situations, are not even worth mentioning, but will be a problem for a newbie.
Furthermore many basic manual task are not to be found in Youtube, because they're too specific. Yes, you can find a tutorial on how to hang something to a wall, but you need to hang an object of an specific shape, between two walls corner, where some other object is an obstacle.
In those cases, you're mostly on your own, but the task is achievable
So it could be that the children are both ok and broken in new ways, like our generation was.
I played Prince of Persia as a kid, the game is amazing for its time. But game design has evolved in these 30 years, and it shows. When we were kids we didn't have better games to play so we had to persevere with PoP.
Nowadays, if you want hard platforming you can play Super Meat Boy or Celeste and fight with your ability to perform the required movements, not with the clunky controls.
If you want to explore an unknown world you can play Hollow Knight or Ori and enjoy a much larger and more developed setting.
Neither of these games are easy, but they have much more well crafted learning curves for example. PoP simply drops you in a dungeon and you have to die there until you manage to get the timing of the jumps, while Celeste has an "easy" first level and constantly ramps up the difficulty.
If you're interested in understanding some of why Celeste is so important to a lot of people but don't feel up for playing it yourself, these two video essays are a great watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRZyei6dBo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxo9JnB1iI
And in fact, I don't think anyone would be surprised if that very same teenager looks up YouTube videos about how to beat the most difficult parts, find all the secrets, and so on.
Even less like the hard old games, Celeste comes with an assist mode:
> Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience.
Deleted Comment
To some extent I only realized this late in life myself. I don’t play a musical instrument, schoolwork through undergraduate never required really hard work and as an athlete I was a lackluster football player who never really put in the time to get better. But as an adult, computer programming and crossword puzzles were things which I applied myself to and was astonished to see how much better I could get at them by putting in the time and effort. (That being said I am an awful teacher - as an autodidact myself, I often - unfairly - feel that others aren’t putting enough effort in.)
If you haven't played Getting Over It, it's a tremendous meditation on failure, and Bennett's narrations as you struggle are brilliant from a philosophical standpoint. He talks about how the challenge and failure and difficult ARE the point for a certain class of gamer and how that's the game he wanted to build.
For another take, Super Hexagon provides that same "this is impossible but I'm getting closer to possible and that feels good."
Also when I was a kid, early childhood I just couldn't really play the harder games, late childhood I could play the hard games. When they're just too hard you stop playing. Also different kids have different strengths and they will gravitate to games that play to their strengths. I have below the mean reaction times so I just did bad in reaction time platformers and eventually gravitated towards games that weren't hard because of reaction times, like RPGs, strategy games, installing linux on my computer and troubleshooting it and what not.
There are also new 'hard' games out there that demand a lot out of their players, and be careful if your kid gets obsessed about them. Like many esports games.
> Don't know how this will affect them on the long run. Now it's only my observation.
I realize that you're only talking about your own kids, but I have a feeling that many people on here consider this to be some kind of general rule for all kids, akin to the "back in my day" rhetoric of the generations before us.
I think it's good to consider that your kids will likely live in a world where this attitude is actually a very effective one:
* Instead of spending days trying to solve some problem yourself, download an app that solves it for you in minutes.
* Instead of coming up with a very well informed opinion about everything relevant in today's politics, listen to trusted others who have taken the time to form opinions on the matter.
* Instead of trying to "earn" that promotion by working 80 hour weeks and "keeping your head down" at your office, apply for a different job elsewhere that offers better pay and work/life balance.
As most of us here are programmers, we all know the benefits of greedy algorithms vs brute-force solutions. Yes, sometimes a brute force solution can be very satisfying, but taking "smart" shortcuts in life really does pay off, whether we like it or not.
And before you tell me that I'm probably one of those millenials who doesn't do anything and thinks everything will just be handed to them: well.. yeah, that's kinda true. I've never worked at a single job for more than a year, I've never really put more effort into my education than what was strictly needed to pass (and sometimes less), and now I'm a data engineer at Apple.
There is always a generational tendency to point out that the next one has it easy or that they are weak because $OBSERVATION. I would like more folks to counter that. I’m a millennial but absolutely love how Gen Z is incredibly adept at navigating the always online culture, calling bullshit on dated traditions around work ethics and so on.
You can look at change and either pat yourself on the back for being better for having overcome challenges they didn’t have to. Or you can see what other generations bring to the table and work with that.
Suddenly anyone in the future with the ability for critical thinking and problem solving beyond "do they have an app for that?" is going to inherit the Earth.
I think the reason the "head down" strategy doesn't work so well now is at least partially because it's still the dominant approach. Some time after it becomes the exception, it may become the path to success it once was.
The first successful code I wrote was the following:
10 input a 20 input b 30 print a+b
I was around 12, without manual or online help and it was trial and error for an entire weekend until I got this right. Very few people I know today used to tech would have such perseverance.
That’s why it’s your parental responsibility to start playing games with your kid early, starting with the oldest consoles up to modern times: https://medium.com/message/playing-with-my-son-e5226ff0a7c3
If my daughter wants to know how something works she can find a brilliant well-produced video on YouTube of an expert explaining it, and she can easily buy tools and supplies from anywhere in the world for esoteric hobbies.
From what I see the next generation are far more practical and hands on and involved in constructive and creative hobbies than mine was. When I see young people’s resumés today they are frighteningly practical and talented in advanced hobbies.
Sometimes I worry about how to keep up and compete with them!
This is one of the reasons I recommend teaching kids C++ early.
Between build systems, ABI issues, compiler error messages, and undefined behavior it really builds perseverance and a great sense of accomplishment when your program compiles and runs correctly.
I am not aware of any other production language that gives that sense of accomplishment and requires that level of perseverance.
There is an effort we can put in teaching our kids c++ and even better if we can start them on leetcode at an early age
This will help them improve their problem solving ability and they will also get frustrated when they are not able to solve a hard graph problem.
But the hardest problem never is the problem itself, but the inability to keep on going when the problem seems very hard.
When kids learn how to handle that and when all the kids in the world know how to handle that, then surely we are looking at a future generation that will help solve all the hard problems that we are not able to solve like World Proverty, income inequality and global warming.
Deleted Comment
Modern games which I've played are more like movies with a limited amount of interactivity. Maybe it's just generational but I do think there's a good amount of "dumbing down" in not just games but educational and other content in general.
Apart from that, I was tickled at playing this. I used to smuggle this game from friends at school on 2 5.25" double density disks. There was so much trouble to get games and play them. Damaged disks, the fear of getting caught by the school staff, "friends" who would give me games other than the ones we agreed upon. Hard to imagine a world like that in a world where I can type a URL into a browser and play the game.
I dislike Roblox since at that point you might as well open up Unity and ship your own game. That's how I learned to program in my early twenties, a bit later than most of y'all
[edit]
Looks like there were many ports with similar looking graphics: https://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/prince-of-persia/scree...
I expected after finishing level 1 to see the “page 4 line 2 character 6” challenge room, where you were supposed to prove you owned the official manual.
When I was a kid we had it on floppy disk but never had the original book, and I remember diligently filling in a table of failures each time I drank the wrong letter and died. Eventually I got them all!
Because of this I remember level 1 extremely well :D
Use the Shift key to pick up the sword. And I think Space to attack and the Up cursor key to block when you get to the swordsman.
the movement controls are very intuitive. they don't hit accurately but they work in an intuitive way. i tapped the four directions and four quadrants of the play screen. and the character responded as i expected.
i am with you though. i have no idea how i will use the sword when i get it.
This is when using Firefox on Linux, and using a standard 101-key external keyboard.
Edit: figured it out, tap on the center and swipe to the left/right to walk.
Deleted Comment
https://princejs.com/?level=2&health=3&time=59&strength=100&...
You can change the parameters here.
1 - https://phaser.io/
https://jordanmechner.com/store/the-making-of-prince-of-pers...
My notes about it:
https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/making-of-prince-of-persia/