I don’t know how many times I’ve had that discussion where the person on the other side of the debate thinks that all video games are about killing space aliens. OK. I do know how many. It’s a lot.

Most of those people - a few of Dylan’s teachers, for example, not to mention many of his friends’ parents - have no idea that games as rich as Age of Empires or Ultima Online or Rome:Total War exist. As a result, when they do let their kids near a video game, they are stuck with rubbish like Super Smash Brothers because their tastes never evolve to anything more sophisticated. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To be sure, massive and complex games have their own risks as we we discovered when we almost lost Dylan inside Runescape a couple of years ago. Expecting a ten year old to have the social skills to interact with hundreds of other players in an imaginary world or to have the economic skills run a trading business or to have the leadership skills to coordinate a team of adventurers battling a ferocious monster…well, we just expected too much of him. But one day he will have those skills. One day he will run a lead a raiding party in an imaginary world or start a successful business in a virtual economy or devise a strategy to defeat the toughest of dragons. One day - but not yet. He has to prepare for that day.

Many parents are down on video games because they think of them as mostly just mindless button pushing. The opposite is true. The real danger is that the best video games are too sophisticated for an impressionable young mind to handle. Certainly more sophisticated than any TV show their parents ever sat in front of.

So, it’s nice to finally, after thirty-something years, start reading positive articles about video games in the mainstream press. Sure, most of the articles are still about the dangers of seeing someone’s pixelated bottom in Grand Theft Auto but that’s why the rare few positive articles like this one in the Wall Street Journal are such a pleasant change.

One the best articles I have read in a while, though, is this one at Huffinton Post entitled Why Your Kids Should Play More Video Games. Imagine being the mother who tries to prevent her teenage son from learning Shakespeare so that he can get ahead in a baseball game:

Last week my son raced past me on the stairs just as I was coming up to tell him, as usual, to turn off the TV.
“I gotta find out what was Shakespeare’s most popular comedy,” he called out, by way of explanation.
“Is this for homework?”
“No. My player is writing his exams. If he fails he’ll be cut from the team.”

and then tries to forbid him from studying for that exam. If you are smart you will imagine yourself saying, like she did:

His eyes dart to the screen. “Can I just finish writing my exam?”
I check my watch. “Dinner’s going to be a little while. Why don’t you play some more?”

This article in Salon mourns the death of BASIC.

Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.

I was a part of that generation that started out with BASIC. It was great. 30 years ago.

About now you are probably shouting, like I did,

What about Ruby??

You can do exactly all the old command-liney stuff that David Brin is all teary-eyed about in Ruby> You can even write the same crap code that you could with BASIC. The book, Learn to Program, that I bought Dylan could easily have been based on BASIC - but it wasn’t. It was based on Ruby and it was all the better for it.
But Brin explicitly dismisses Python and the like - presumably because they are not BASIC-ey enough.

Personally I think BASIC belongs in the dustbin of history and if David Brin wants to teach his son to write crap code, he can teach him Perl. For the rest of our children, there is Ruby and Python and Squeak and Logo.

Dylan starts middle school tomorrow.

I remember it like it was just yesterday. Mrs Stevenson in her wizarding robes marching us down to the Junior Assembly Hall sounding exactly like Professor McGonagall - she might even have been scottish.

Such a long time ago and, at the same time, just yesterday.

I attended the PARC Open Forum today and heard Nick Yee share some fascinating insights about MMORPGS. Nick gave the presentation that I expected Raph Koster to give - also at PARC - a couple of months ago and he seemed to be really enjoying himself throughout. I know I was.

The talk covered enough topics to keep me blogging for weeks - and his own web site has heaps of good stuff - but there was one thing I wanted to ask before it slipped my mind.

Nick gave a fly-by overview of behavioral conditioning (The Skinner Box and all that) and made a comparison between the kill-the-monster-gain-a-level reward structure of most recent MMOs and the pass-a-test-get-a-certificate education system.

He suggested that the entire education system is centered around this behaviorist model of reward and punishment and that the Real World is not like that. For a lot of people, life after school is unsatisfying because they have been trained to expect continuous feedback and constant rewards for effort but they don’t exist in the 9-5 of shelf-stacking (or lawyering or doctoring). For these people, MMOs are comforting because they provide exactly that kind of feedback. (He also made it clear that people play MMOs for LOTS of different reasons).

My question to Nick is - was the education system designed for a population that thrives on continuous feedback and rewards or do we expect such feedback and rewards because the education system conditioned us to do so?

Just asking.

The numbness thing reminds me of when Dylan was about 6 and he lent his game boy to a little mexican girl and she erased the pokemon game that had taken him about 4 weeks to get to. While he was crying in my arms, Lane suggested that it was a good opportunity to teach him a lesson about trust.

No!

Comfort first. Analysis, lessons and recriminations can come later.

15 minutes, that’s all I’m saying.

Paul Graham says,

If you don’t have a college degree you can’t get an H1B visa, the type usually issued to programmers. But a test that excludes Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can’t be a good one.

I’ll second that.

Scott Adams proposes a plan to rid the world of religious extremism

I have often thought that America’s strict rule about not teaching religion in schools is responsible for the fact that the more fervant forms of christianity are more widespread in america than they are in europe. In english schools religious education is (was?) compulsory and usually took the form of comparative religion and the history of religion.

I expect that, if people knew more about the origins of their respective religions, they would be far less likely to adopt fundamentalist positions. A timeline that takes in the origins of the pentateuch, the early christian synods, the arian heresy, the filioque clause and the spanish inquisition would innoculate most kids against some of the wackier ideas that masquerade as religion.

Over at www.developertesting.com, I wrote about the Monty Hall problem and how I was convinced of the answer by an unused variable in my Java simulation.

Markus wrote a nice simulation in Squeak (dunno what it will do if you don’t have squeak installed but it makes a good excuse for you to go get it).

I am always on the lookout for ideas for a science project for Dylan. For me, the ideal kid’s science project has a hypothesis that

1. will almost certainly be wrong
2. can be tested empirically
3. can be proven mathematically

with extra credit if you can write a computer simulation of it. Dylan’s project last year was “What should you do if draw three cards to an inside straight in poker?”. He said you should raise. I usually beat him at poker