3 Responses to “The Eternal Question”

1. Nick Says:
   November 29th, 2009 at 1:33 am

   My housemate’s 9-year-old son has been playing that very same game in our living room for the past couple of weeks, standing a few feet away from the very large TV screen, moving his body only the bare minimum amount necessary to play, completely oblivious to anything and everything around him. He takes breaks only when an adult forces him to (which happens when it’s time for him to go to school or to bed, when an adult wants to watch TV, or when the toddlers petition the adults to help them get a turn watching TV). He won’t even eat or use the bathroom unless an adult interrupts his play and forces him to do so. Personally, I never try to make him take a break; I’m too curious to see how long he can play uninterrupted before he keels over.

2. Ace Says:
   November 29th, 2009 at 2:42 pm

   Does he have a Friend Code for Mario Kart? ;)

   No, seriously: there’s enough I could say about the type of behavior you document above (which Jack also exhibits), and about kids and video games in general, that I could easily fill a whole entry of its own about it. The salient point I’ve noted specific to the game in question, though, is that NSMB Wii effectively has no natural stopping point except (possibly) for the final level of the last world. Checkpoint levels occur at the half-way points and end points of worlds, making young players immediately want to see what lies beyond them once they’re conquered. Extra lives, meanwhile, are ludicrously prevalent throughout the game- and if by some chance you should happen to run out of them and be inconvenienced by the 5-second long Game Over screen, you also get infinite Continues; it loads up five more lives automatically, with no real penalty except being returned to your last save point, which is never more than three stages before where you died. If you’re playing with multiple players simultaneously, you never even get the Game Over screen (except perhaps in the bizarre hypothetical instance that all the players manage to somehow lose their last life simultaneously.) It just restarts whomever’s out of lives with five more.

   This sort of programming seems tailor-made to enable precisely that kind of behavior. If there were less free lives and no continues, or fewer save points, or limited continues, or even a stiff penalty for continuing, I think a lot more kids would naturally take breaks on their own, as they ran into something that was above their current skill level and got frustrated with it.

3. Neuro Says:
   December 1st, 2009 at 6:44 pm

   Nick’s account is scary to me. It’s somehow even worse that the kid is standing while playing (is that necessary to the game play?), probably because it calls to mind any number of horror movies.

   Then again, I did play quite a bit of Yars Revenge when I was young, and I guess I am (mostly) OK. [cut to the alternate universe in which Nolan Bushnell was killed as a teen, and find me in 2009 as a billionaire inventor and benefactor of humanity].