Its the damn phones and tablets. This abundance of cheap software has really messed up kids attention spans. Computers are a distraction in class and need to be delegated to special times. How do you keep tech out of kids hands out of class?
Anecdote: I grew up on N64 and an era where software was a lot more difficult to come by. As a kid, I'd look forward to buying a floppy disk packaged in a plastic bag held up on a cork board at my local computer shop.
When I got a game on the N64, I would be laser focused on completing it.
I recently purchased a N64 for my niece and nephew who are 8 and 10 respectively. When I was 10 I got Ocarina of time at the beginning of the school year and spent an entire year laser focused on solving every puzzle and completing the game.
Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (and being kids to freakin PHD academics) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
They must try "every new app", see every new thing on Netflix/Hulu/whatever. Maybe i'm just exhibiting old man syndrome but it really shocked me. I clearly remember being that kid yesterday and doing my best to beat the game. I guess the fact that the N64 only ever had about ~380 games in its entire lifespan made a difference. Each title was a special event. Today there is just so much software for the kids to play with.
> Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (...) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
Have you considered that they might just not find games interesting? Even if they like playing some games, they might not enjoy the game the particular game that captivated you for so long.
Even in your own generation, there were many kids who would have got bored of sitting in front of any computer game for 10 minutes. There's absolutely no reason to extrapolate your experience with your nephews out to an entire generation.
Yeah you are probably right about that but they play a lot of mobile games so my assumption was that they like it at least somewhat? Maybe they are just bored. The PHD father is also a musician on the side so he got them into guitars and drums at an early age but they are wishy washy on that as well. I don't have kids so there is probably something obvious im missing and im probably overthinking it too much. Like I said, im probably suffering from old man syndrome.
I wanted to provide some more missing context since you brought this up and maybe this can spur some interesting discussion. I have been finding that they prefer simpler games like Mike Tysons punch out which really surprised me since I consider the mechanics of that game pretty basic. I got them Super smash brothers, Zelda, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, super mario 64 and most recently Starfox 64 which they don't even want to take the time to go through the training properly, they get frustrated when they can't move the ship properly and have to press the C buttons to speed up or slow down. They love the easy wins and spectacle of super smash brothers though which is the game they play the most as in every other day. It kinda worries me because it would be one thing if they were striving to excel at smash, that would be cool but they aren't even doing that, just messing around until someone wins. Maybe you are right?
If it helps, I'm older than you and grew up on 8-bits and then progressed to the Amiga. I played games, but even as a kid, my real interest was always programming - I'd usually rather be coding something than playing a game (for me, that is far more mentally stimulating).
I do have very fond memories of certain 8-bit games, but apart from Elite and the Freescape games like Driller and Total Eclipse, they're mostly platformers. I liked some of the classics on the Amiga, e.g. Dynablasters, Monkey Island, etc, but again I far preferred platformers.
However, that was just for that period of time - when I went to uni, I got interested in "real computers" and especially distributed computing, and I missed out on a whole generation of games. Even now, I've still never played any of the Zelda games even though the top-down 2D games would have interested me when I was younger. Even more surprising to me is back in the late 90s, I thought I'd buy Myst on the PC because it seemed like I'd enjoy it because I liked Monkey Island on the Amiga. I never managed to play it for more than about half an hour, it just wasn't interesting to me at that point of time.
Ironically, professionally I'm actually a games developer even though I still don't play a lot of games any more. I'm in that industry because I love programming and experimenting with rendering techniques, and working in that discipline always keeps me on the cutting edge of the current technology. But modern games? Mostly meh, IMHO.
I still do play some modern games, but mostly if they're story based or appeal to my retro side. Things like the Drake and Last of Us series on PS3 that have a great story, or VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy which tap into the retro feelings even though they're much newer. But it's more about an original mechanic for me now - so things like Portal, and I even remember sinking over 80 hours into PixelJunk Eden (a really obscure PS3 game that barely anyone has heard of) which was maybe 10% of my total playtime on all the PS3 games I owned.
Anyway, I agree there might be a problem with your niece and nephew if they are just mindlessly doomscrolling and doing nothing else with their lives. But as long as they also have some hobbies they enjoy, it doesn't really matter if they intersect with yours. Maybe ask your grandparents what games they spent their childhoods playing and see if that's something you'd have wanted to do as a child... I'd guess it probably isn't, or else you wouldn't have spent all your times playing these games.
Anecdote: I grew up on N64 and an era where software was a lot more difficult to come by. As a kid, I'd look forward to buying a floppy disk packaged in a plastic bag held up on a cork board at my local computer shop.
When I got a game on the N64, I would be laser focused on completing it.
I recently purchased a N64 for my niece and nephew who are 8 and 10 respectively. When I was 10 I got Ocarina of time at the beginning of the school year and spent an entire year laser focused on solving every puzzle and completing the game.
Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (and being kids to freakin PHD academics) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
They must try "every new app", see every new thing on Netflix/Hulu/whatever. Maybe i'm just exhibiting old man syndrome but it really shocked me. I clearly remember being that kid yesterday and doing my best to beat the game. I guess the fact that the N64 only ever had about ~380 games in its entire lifespan made a difference. Each title was a special event. Today there is just so much software for the kids to play with.