Oldskooler Ramblings

A lot of old gamers continue to beat the dead horse of “The games were better when I was a kid!”  While there are a ton of reasons why this is just nostalgia rearing its ugly head, there is one very strong reason this is true in some cases:  Since the graphics and sound of early home computers were so terrible compared to arcades of the day, game designers had to focus on actual game design and not just excuses to blow shit up.

I bring this up because my eight-year-old son Max and I just finished playing Archon for the last 90 minutes.  We didn’t even play it on one of the “cool” platforms, like NES or Amiga, but rather on one of the ugliest ports: The IBM PC.  Terrible sound, horrible graphics, and yet none of that mattered.  In 3 minutes I was able to explain the basics, and then 90 minutes later we were still laughing at each other for some crazy battle.  The entire time, I couldn’t get over how basic game design still reigns supreme, 25 years later.

To gear up for finally playing Half-Life 2 (and all the other goodies in the Orange Box), I’ve registered my original Half-Life with Steam and started playing through the original HL, moving on to Opposing Force, and finally Blue Shift. I wanted to get reacquainted with the setting and atmosphere before I took the plunge. Yes, I am that thorough. While such practices always result in much good-natured mocking from my friends, I doubt any of them are surprised.

To try to bone my skills back up to where they were a decade ago, I occasionally take a break and play Half-Life Deathmatch. It was during one of these sessions that Max, my 8-yr-old, saw me playing. After the requisite talk about “the blood and gibs aren’t real, it’s just a game, you would never do this in real life, right?” etc., he watched me get into a particularly hilarious crowbar fight with an evenly-matched opponent. We were both howling, and then he asked the inevitable question, “Can I play?”

Could he? It’s a mouse-and-keyboard FPS with an ESRB rating of “M”. The required skill level and content are years beyond him. And yet, he’s a pretty well-adjusted kid; whenever he sees something in a movie he can’t handle, he knows to close his eyes and/or cover his ears until it’s over. He knows when things are fake and when they’re real. He’s intellectually curious; all this last week I’ve been teaching him chess because he saw a set-up board somewhere and wanted to learn. Not bad for an eight-year-old.

Hell, he’s the son of the co-founder of MobyGames. Why not?

I installed Steam on his machine and registered my copy of Blue Shift to his account; like Half-Life, everything popped up as being registered and in ten minutes he was going through the Hazard Training Course. 20 minutes after that, we were playing HL Deathmatch against each other, in a private local LAN server hosted on his machine. And about 30 minutes after that, he pulled something so clever and so beyond his sum of experiences that it completely floored me. I’m still in awe over it. It’s why I’m posting this entry. See if you can follow along:

One of the sneakiest weapons in Half-Life Deathmatch are tripmines. You stick one to a surface (usually a wall), and a few seconds later a laser comes out of it, sensing the other side of the room. If anything crosses its path, the mine blows up, usually taking the offender with it. On our first map, I was cheerfully placing these all over the place, and he quickly learned what they are and how to use them.

That’s not the cool part. The cool part is, on the second map we played, there is a large area with munitions you can get to by swimming in a small canal with a very strong current. The water in the canal is murky and you can’t see into it until you’re actually down there swimming in the water. The current gets stronger along the way, to a point where you can’t fight it and are swept into the giant room with the munitions. About ten minutes after starting the map, I dove into the canal to get to the bigger room. I swam until the current started to sweep me towards the room… and it was at this point I saw a tripmine placed in the canal, unavoidably in my path. He had not only hidden a tripmine in murky water that you can’t see into until you’re already in it… but had placed it after the point where it still might have been possible to swim out of the way. I had about 1.5 seconds to take that in before it blew me to bits.

Let’s review: Eight-year-old, with no past history of playing any FPS, online or not, accomplishes in less than an hour something so sneaky and clever it takes most young adults a few days of playing, against many other people, to pick up.

I was pwned by my eight-year-old son. In a clever way, not a young-kid reflex twitch way. Holy mother of crap!

My eldest son Sam, you’ll recall, is autistic. (Technically, it’s PDDNOS, which is a fancy way of saying “we don’t know” in an official-sounding capacity.) He has many issues, such as being lost in his own world for periods of time so long that he’s simply unavailable. Up to about a year ago, he would spend between 50% and 80% of his time in his own world, which makes it difficult to teach him how to read, how to write, how to behave… anything, really. Especially since, when you try to pull him out of his world and back into ours, he gets frustrated and angry. So naturally he’s fallen way behind his peers in school by several grade levels, and will most likely live with us for a few decades instead of going to college. I’m ok with this; I came to terms with it many years ago.

Once in a great while, there are moments that can floor you. For some unknown reason we haven’t discovered yet, there are a few times each week when something happens and he’s running at full capacity, for just a few seconds or so. For that brief time, when all synapses are firing, a mental window opens up and you can see that, yes, there really is a regular kid trapped in there. Sometimes they’re subtle, like using a slang phrase with perfect intonation at an appropriate time (autistic kids can’t empathize, so this is major); other times, it’s a fleeting moment of understanding, usually unspoken, about something you both saw or heard. (Laughing at the same slapstick routine at the same moments is a personal favorite.) You can never see those moments coming — there’s no warning or triggers we can notice — but for a parent, they are worth everything in the world. If I could sell every piece of software and hardware I own to predict when that window will open up, I’d do it without hesitation. If I could live completely without technology to force that window to last longer, I would start the Amish pilgrimage this very second.

About a year ago we were able to find a medication dosage that finally started to make some progress; it keeps him just a little bit more in the here and now, about 30 more minutes a day, with less consequences (for us) when we try to pull him into our world. This is just enough extra time to get him reading at a 1st or 2nd grade level. His reading is stilted, spotty, full of 5-second pauses, and doesn’t flow well. But it’s reading, and when he’s not frustrated, it is functional.

After a lengthy battle with the children to get them to bed, I was about to retire for the day when I heard noises coming from their bedroom area. Thinking it was Max, our younger son who has a motormouth stuck at 8500 RPM, I went over to tell Max to pipe down and get to sleep. I froze when I realized it was Sam. He was reading a 1st-grade level book, out loud, to himself, in bed. This act alone is a monumental first. But what knocked the wind out of me was that he was reading when his mental window was open, and what came out was a perfect understanding and command of the meaning of the sentences, their tone, their inflection, cadence, everything. The delivery was stilted, but the comprehension was easily a few years beyond his peers (who usually read aloud in near monotone).

He eventually noticed me standing in the doorway, and asked me why I was crying. I told him I had forgotten how beautiful the view through his window was.

Can’t believe I forgot to post this:  Wednesday of last week, Max fell off his bike, landed directly on his right clavicle, and broke it completely in two.  Proof:

They don’t set bones like that unless they’re poking out through the skin.  It’s not a support structure (ie. he doesn’t need it to hold his shoulders up or anything) so he’s just walking around with it like that.  At least, somewhat like that — I’m hoping it heals properly.  He gets another xray next week, and we’ll see after that.

Poor guy!  I’m 36 and haven’t broken anything (yet)…

My son just sent his first email without any of us helping him.  Thanks to the wonderful world of spare parts, he has a computer in his bedroom, connected to the ‘net over the wireless LAN.  I set up email for him, showed him how to do it, then walked him through a few messages to his grandparents.

Completely unsolicited, hours later when he was supposed to be putting himself to bed, I received the above.  “Mom and dad   I love you boath”.  Needless to say, it brought a tear to my eye (even if he was avoiding going to bed).

Max is seven years old.  He can communicate to any other machine on the internet and search the knowledge of one million libraries in a few seconds.  He wears a device no larger than a few chiclets that plays music for 14+ hours.

No wonder they say kids are growing up faster.  I think it’s obvious they are.

While this isn’t technically true, I can definitely see how this myth was formed. My father ran on a 486/66 with a modem from 1995-2001. In 2001 he got cable modem broadband, but his 486/66 was so slow that it couldn’t process complex web pages much quicker than it already was, so he saw no actual speed benefit. So he went back to the modem, at which point I almost lost it (”How can you want to go slower?!”)

Later he upgraded to a Pentium 3 @ 450MHz, and could finally perceive the modem as a bottleneck.

Ironically, two years later, I did the same type of thing (downgrade powerful hardware): Through a telephone conversation mix-up, I agreed to reserve and purchase a Yamaha snowblower — and when I got there, I had reserved the wrong one. What I thought was going to be a $600 18- or 24-inch blower was actually a $1300 36-inch semi-industrial model. I was coerced into buying it because renigging on the reservation meant I would be charged $50 because these things were in demand in the middle of winter. So I bought it to avoid the fee, took it home, opened the box, took one look at it and knew I could never use it for my tiny driveway without being embarrased (it wouldn’t even fit in my garage with both cars), and proceeded to box it up and return it. On that day, a snowstorm began. As I’m returning this monster snowblower, I get a goofy look from the kid helping me; when I inquire, he says, “I’ve just never seen anyone return a snowblower in the middle of a snow storm!”.

Most people who criticize “the mass medication of our generation’s children” with Ritalin, I have found, don’t really understand Ritalin or what it targets. They think that you take an overactive child with ADD or ADHD and then feed them Ritalin so that they slow down and just sit there, drooling. (Mancow Muller, as much as I enjoy his radio show, is especially guilty of promoting this idea.) Well, that is pretty much the opposite of the truth; Ritalin is actually a stimulant. A humorous yet still somewhat accurate portrayal of what Ritalin does can be seen in the Simpsons episode “Brother’s Little Helper“.

We just got back from Sam’s psych appointment and had nothing but praise for the 7-day trial of Ritalin we tried with Sam. Sam was normally unresponsive, distant, couldn’t hold a conversation, didn’t look you in the eye… par for the course for Pervasive Developmental Disorder, which is what Sam is affected with. But on this Ritalin trial, he really opened up: He looked you in the eye, heard conversations from across the room and joined in them, wasn’t behind the entire class in activities… a complete turnaround. It’s not the miracle PDD cure (there isn’t one), but it made such a difference that we’re adding it to his regular daily medication and have renewed hope for his educational development.

Perhaps the best thing about Ritalin is that it enabled Sam to finally play with his brother — and not just for twenty minutes, but for hours. I almost cried when I saw that (and I think Melissa actually did).

Okay, once and for all: No, I did not intentionally name my children Sam and Max after Steve Purcell’s excellent comic series (or the Lucasarts game). But I am glad it worked out that way :-)

In a few years, they’ll be old enough to play it — I can hardly wait!