games
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
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I chipped in with some friends to get my buddy's kid a gameboy knockoff thingy that has roms of thousands of old games from like nes to ps2 on it. We did it specifically so the kid could have screen time without f2p and mtx skinner box stuff.
Yeah. I wish i had been around more for that (he's 8 now and last i saw him he was 4) and also had means to gift him stuff. His mom at least doesnt get him micros.
You should reach out to him and introduce him to emulation and older games. The benefit is that you can obtain a lot of roms at one time and the system requirements are very low. If you get an HDMI adapter and a controller you can deprogram him out of freemium games.
I'm planning to donate my current laptop to my younger cousins as a "SteamOS-like" machine and a HDMI adapter when they're old enough and load it with a bunch of games running at 1080p under Vulkan. I could introduce them to pokemon romhacks and shit.
Someone needs to make a prepackaged Linux iso with like, every remotely popular rom and pc game through ps1 era pre set up. It would only be 100 GB or something.
There are already ISOs like that running Batocera out there if you look around.
Never heard of it, thank you 
You wouldn't have to do that, a torrent tracker would work just as well. There is a "gamer box" Linux iso and it's called bazzite.gg which you can install on your steam deck which can go up to Nintendo Switch games if its optimized enough.
Are there any where you can get ROMs through the package manager? That would be cool af
I've done that with old laptops. Loaded it up with minecraft and some other kid appropriate games so they'd have fun games that are "safe" from a super-exploitative skinner box perspective.
He's 8 and i dont get a lot of time with him because we dont live close, and i also dont have a lot of knowledge about that stuff myself. (I can emulate via pc, but he doesnt have one literally at all. Just an Apple tv and a switch).
He does have switch online so i could maybe at least introduce him to old Nintedo games via that? I just saw the last of him ill see this visit but maybe ill try that next time i visit or if he visits me. Could do a lot if he visits me by emulating via pc and with my large steam library.
I think back to Charles Entertainment Cheese's children's casino when we talk about this kinda thing. It was only better back in the day because they didn't have the infrastructure to make it worse.
Honestly at this point it's better to just buy them a PS4 and some old school kid games and remasters then have them accept this as a normal part of recreation. Like my weird paranoid theory is that all this f2p shit targeted at the young is to create a sense of acceptance towards extractive capital infesting every aspect of their daily lives, intentionally or not.
Yeah as I said elsewhere in the thread I wish I had the means to get him some better quality games that dont have this bullshit or at least only minimally do. So far the best solution that ive come up with thats realistic is showing him the old school stuff he can access on Switch online. But he'll probably still just do that with me and keep doing Fornite on his own lol.
They ruined Lego Star Wars?
Wall.
anyway yeah the fucking YouTube games as well - pure attention grabbing cancer. I remember back in the day there were YouTube malware ads where you had to swat or shoot a fly or something, and that was considered unacceptable. Those no longer exist. Instead we have built in Angry Birds.
The console/PC Lego Star Wars is still pretty normal, it's only on phones that you get the crazy predatory stuff (usually)
I’m gonna teach my kids to pirate games
I will say in defense of this (but only a tiny bit) that for some people collecting things and unlocking things can be fun, and these types of games have a nearly infinite amount of things to collect and unlock. So in some ways getting all the bonus this and currency that and hoarding it like a dragon can be fun for some people.
I think it's bad for kids to be exposed to it like that though. Definitely treatifying their developing brains to such a level can't be healthy
Oh yeah. I love completionist stuff in games. But the degree these games take it too and for games for kids
The problem is you can pay to unlock them or to accelerate your progress, which cheapens any achievement of doing it via grind anyway. Everyone will just assume you bought everything
More of a problem in multiplayer games where there’s a “keeping up with the joneses” effect pressuring kids to keep up with 40 year old dudes who just buy everything. That leaves a kid with 3 options: drop their entire allowance to keep up, grind with no life, or accept falling behind.
All 3 of these options suck
Don't conflate collectathons with skinner boxes. These aren't designed so you can just gather things to your heart's content, they are designed to keep you playing (including by limiting what you can do on a given day) and to pressure you into paying money by making the free returns from playing unrewarding and frustrating. Usually the reason for all the currencies is to obfuscate exchange rates, so at least a few of them can only be obtained with real money, and none of the currencies are meant to merely be collected like a high score.
Back in my day we had 1 coin, and nobody knew how to "spend it". 
spoiler
Eventually we found out 100 coins redeemed for a 1x1up, nowhere was this explained in the tutorial level.
Kids deserve better games
I'm 100% serious they also deserve their own safe places online and a bunch of other stuff they've lost thanks to the vice grip of big tech.
(controversial opinion) This is why I'm a fan of things like gamepass because it offers a different option for publishers to sell their game other than f2p, even though there's still games on gamepass that have f2p microtransaction bullshit in them.
The game industry is so bad with this shit and desperately needs a big change. Hearing devs say that using things like gamepass allows them to design without f2p microtransactions made me hopeful, but I think a majority of games on the service have some kind of mtx or expansion that they're selling still 
There's monetization on Apple Arcade? I thought the whole point was that most of the games were "plus" versions of mobile games just without the microtransactions. I wouldn't be surprised if companies were double dipping though, and doubly unsurprised if Apple was fine with that.
Turns out these are just like "repurposed" f2p games or something? Like they were originally f2p but they just haphazardly took the micros out so youre just left with grindy disasters lol