When I was a kid my parents didn't have a lot of money, so instead of playing video games, I would design entire worlds on paper that looked very similar. Of course, I couldn't play them--the D&D aspect to this is pretty neat.
(I also designed my own cardboard Transformers that would actually transform! I was really proud of those. I remember I had little sliding bits, like revealing the robot's head.)
Heh. I used to make paper Transformers that transformed. They were at least as fun as the real toys, and a lot more portable. I may even still have them somewhere in a box.
Later I graduated to making Lego Transformers that transformed. When I bequeathed my childhood Lego bin to my older son, it still had some Lego Transformers in it. I had to explain to him what Transformers were, because this was before the Michael Bay reboot.
This makes me smile. I actually did this as well in the 80s. I was inspired by games I saw on my friend's computer, so I'd fold a piece of notebook paper into 8 pieces (or 16 if you use both sides) and draw "screens" that you could move between. I'd tear off a small piece of paper and draw the player's character on it. I'd design the game during class-time, then I'd have my friend play it at recess. He'd move the character around and I'd change things around to the correct screens when he moved from screen to screen.
In fact the first product I ever sold, was a maze I drew at age 5, to my aunt for $1.
I wrote a blog post about ADHD called "Why I Feel Like A Failure, Even Though On the Outside, I'm A Success..." I think it might resonate with many here: (http://www.erica.biz/2012/failure-success/)
I would ask that you please not be dismissive or stereotypical of what is a real medical issue that some of us have had to deal with our entire lives.
And here's a different, more controversial point. We used to have psychiatric disorders called hysteria and homosexuality. Now those have been reclassified out of existence. No one knows which of the current disorders will meet with the same fate. It's not impossible that while the help you get from your treatment is real (and the problems you face are real), ADHD is a poorly defined disorder.
I think jasonjei and you are on the same side of this issue. He was a normal kid that didn't want to be mis-labeled, and you have a real condition that deserves consideration. You should both be opposed to the lazy parents/teachers/doctors who extend ADHD diagnoses far beyond its real scope to medicate normal kids into compliance.
So if Ritalin helps people to achieve their goals, great, but I don't think it implies that they had a medical issue when they were unable to complete those tasks.
(Looking to see if you'd written a followup, I instead found your 2006 post about Adderall. Of course that's a different drug, but the older post is interesting for both the contrasts and similarities to your later Ritalin assessment.)
He is not dismissing people that REALLY has the issue, he is dismissing the fact that people has been throwing this around a lot, without any need.
He wasn't a problem at all, and his language was awesome! Sort of like C3PO on steroids.
Also, there were many locks and keys and items (think Zelda). A door might have a strange symbol on it, and you needed to find the key with the corresponding symbol to advance. Or you needed to get the lava suit to get past the pit of lava.
This is what I did during class in elementary school, and challenged my friends and brother to beat them. Now that I'm 26, I still do the same thing, but with computers and in 3D.
Our textbooks were full of mini maps like these around the edges.
I'm looking forward to your new game. :)
My uncle loved to spend LOTS of time drawing stuff like this and making games similar to this one (although less RPGey and more puzzley)
Sometimes he did it with whatever paint software was available on the machine.
I never understood why instead of becoming a artist (he draw really well) or a game designer (he loved to design games) he went to become a prosecutor...
Also, another fun variation my uncle taught me: make your maps with matches, and use paper balls as characters (or coins, or beans, whatever), with matches you can simulate doors, opening and closing them, and have a more freeform roleplay thing, like simulate for example a space ship, and then a accident, as a asteroid hit the ship, and you then throw a heavy coin in your matches and see as they make a hole on the thing, and then the players try to survive in the ship full of holes, broken walls and stuck doors.
By the way, my uncle is still alive, is that we don't have time anymore :/ (also living 600km apart does not help either)
First, "all the research" means "all the psychological research". Recent scandals demonstrate that psychological research has the approximate value of astrological forecasts:
http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
Second, one would want to compare video games with whatever a 5-year-old would be doing instead. Looked at that way, obviously a well-designed age-appropriate video game might represent an improvement over its alternatives in some cases.
Finally, let's let the parents decide -- you know, the people who ignored all conventional wisdom and decided to have the child in the first place?
The nature of psychology lends itself to more fuzzy or fraudulent work, but by saying that psychological research is itself useless, you're also throwing away things like A/B testing, UX testing (including Apple's much-vaunted usability stuff), research into grief management, team-building research, research into cognitive recovery therapy after acquired brain injury, work looking into ameliorating sexism and racism, perception research for HUDs in fighter aircraft (my honours research), some pain management research, research into dealing with PTSD, research into crowd control and management...
... all this (and more) is apparently useless, simply because you've got a chip on your shoulder. Fuck I'm tired of people just taking pot-shots at a soft target that they don't understand and never bother to.
Would like to know how they did test, too - did they follow kids who played video games over a 30 year period to see how they turn out?
A friend of mine with two boys close to mine did this for his kids: He would go one day earlier to some close hike trail or peak, and would put some coins in the ground, different places, etc. The next day he would go with the boys with a pirate map looking for the treasure.
Boys (and could be girls too) love these things. My son for example can get completely concentrated when comes to fishing (even if it's with some made up rod, and fake stuff in there). Last time we went to lake Casitas (California). He was hooked (unlike for him) for an hour doing his fishing.
The other day we played Minecraft on the iPad together and he built a house, two beds, and put two signs over the beds. One for himself (he typed his name all by himself) and one for me (he needed help to find the "p" in "Papa.")
Most of the LEGO series of games are similar - LOTR has swords and bows & arrows; Pirates has swords and muskets (and in sword fights, IIRC, enemies fall down and break apart when they "die"); and Star Wars games have blasters and light sabers.
However, I must be totally stupid, but I don't get the rules, even after reading them twice, and looking through all comments on the post and on HN. I get the movements turn-by-turn. But how do you decide the outcome of encountering a ghost/spider/arrow with the dice? how do potions work? what's in the treasure chests? which other items can be collected? (in short, what am I missing?)
At the bottom of the whole map, he has a big list of these {N/M} scores along with characters.
If you could come up with a flexible system for the fog-of-war and organize parts of the map to work with the areas they'd cover, then let parents/kids share/collaborate online or offline to make their own adventurers.
If this were a Kickstarter project I'd back it in a heart beat
It was loads of fun. If something like this gets kickstarted as others have suggested, I'd recommend a kid-friendly way to build maps. Creation can be more fun than playing and also gives kids a different set of problems to explore.
I go down to our local newspaper, and buy newspaper end rolls for $1 each. These are the rolls of paper left over after printing. They are about two feet wide and probably 100 feet long.
Just today, I found a game for the iPad that lets him create his own platformers. He's excited to try it out tomorrow. It's called "My Doodle Game" https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-doodle-game!/id572842495?...
PixelPress also looks promising: http://pixelpressgame.com/
If anyone knows of other easy game dev tools for kids, I'd love to hear about them. I think it's good to keep the momentum going when he's having fun with something.
I love this approach, though, as it is almost something a kid could play by themselves or more easily create for one another and play together. It could even be played in the car on trips, reducing whining about playing with the ipad. (I didn't have ipads when I was your age!!)
http://planet-thirteen.com/Dungeon.aspx
"How to Host a Dungeon is a solo fantasy pen-and-paper dungeon-building game. The game follows the progress of an imaginary dungeon from the dawn of time through to an arch villain attempting to conquer the world.
The creation of the dungeon is driven by random tables and procedures as monsters, adventurers, civilizations, and arch villains interact in an underground environment. The player records these interactions, maintains the dungeon map, and makes some choices in how they play out.
The end product of the game is a complete unique dungeon map and history which stands as an interesting artifact on its own or can be used as the basis of a dungeon crawl role-playing game campaign."
