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Playing With My Son The Message Medium

Playing With My Son

An experiment in forced nostalgia and
questionable parenting
Theres a classic Steve Martin bit from A Wild and Crazy Guy
I got a great dirty trick you can play on a three-year-old kid Whenever
youre around him, talk wrong. So now its like his rst day in school and
he raises his hand, May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?
Im not sure if its a great idea to take parenting advice from 1970s standup
albums, but this always made sense to me.
If you have a kid, why not run experiments on them? Its like running
experiments on a little clone of yourself! And almost always probably legal.
Its disappointing how many people have children and miss this golden
opportunity, usually waiting until theyre in their teens to start playing
mindgames with them.
Before my son was born in 2004, I was prepared. Id brainstormed a long
list of sociological and psychological experiments with friends and
coworkers, ready to unleash my inner Milgram on my unborn ospring.
My original plan was to raise him thinking he was living in a computer
simulation, but sadly, my wife vetoed it. And any other potentially harmful,
but funny, life-altering scenarios.
But I managed to sneak one in anyway.

I was born in 1977the same year the Atari 2600 was released and a year
before Space Invaders. I was lucky enough to be born into the golden age of
arcade gaming, and played through each subsequent generation as I grew
up.

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Playing With My Son The Message Medium

My son Eliot was born in 2004the year of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and the
launch of the Nintendo DS. By the time he was born, video games were a
$26B industry.
I love games, and I genuinely wanted Eliot to love and appreciate them too.
So, here was my experiment:

What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in
chronological order?
Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon.
After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics. The
next year, the SNES, Game Boy, and classic PC adventure games. Then the
PlayStation and N64, Xbox and GBA, and so on until were caught up with
the modern era of gaming.
Would that child better appreciate modern independent games that dont
have the budgets of AAA monstrosities like Destiny and Call of Duty?
Would they appreciate the retro aesthetic, or just think it looks crappy?
Or would they just grow up thinking that video game technology moved at
a breakneck speed when they were kids, and slammed to a halt as soon as
they hit adolescence?

On Eliots fourth birthday, I started him with a Pac-Man plug-and-play TV

game loaded with arcade classicsGalaxian (1979), Rally-X (1980),
Bosconian (1981), Dig Dug (1982), and of course, Pac-Man (1980) and three
sequels, Super Pac-Man (1982), Pac-Man Plus (1982), and Pac & Pal (1983).
Until the moment he picked up the joystick, part of me secretly dreaded
hed have no interest in it.
In the days leading up to his birth, Id jolt awake in a cold sweat from
nightmares of raising a six-year-old athlete, begging me to go outside to
play football or baseball or some other dreaded physical activity.

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Playing With My Son The Message Medium

Crisis averted.

Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

Eliot's obsessed with playing Pac-Man on our TV.

It's like watching myself in 1982.
1:21 PM - 12 Jun 2008
3 RETWEETS 23 FAVORITES

He got better quickly. Six weeks later, he was beating my high scores in Dig
Dug and regularly getting to higher stages of Pac-Man and its sequels.

Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

Eliot got to level 5 in Pac & Pal, an obscure

Japanese-only Pac-Man sequel from 1983, all by
himself. Pretty badass. http://bit.ly/pacnpal
2:21 PM - 5 Aug 2008
1 RETWEET 7 FAVORITES

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Playing With My Son The Message Medium

I picked up another plug-and-play TV gameMs. Pac-Man, Galaga, Mappy,

Pole Position, and Xeviousand we played through the games together.
When we got bored of those, we hooked up my old Atari 2600, and we
played through my collection of lo- gems like Asteroids, Kaboom!,
Adventure, Combat, and (yes) E.T., but most didnt hold up well.
It was time to move on to the next generation.

Four months into the experiment, with Eliot not even 4 1/2 years old, wed
jumped to the 8-bit era.
I loaded up an emulator and we started working our way through the NES
canon.

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Playing With My Son The Message Medium

Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

Eliot and I are working are way through the canon.

Beat Mega Man 2 last week, and just finished off
Ganon in Legend of Zelda. Next: Mario!
12:26 AM - 30 Oct 2008
8 FAVORITES

At rst, he sat on my lap and we took turns playing. Usually, hed take the
controls, but Id step in for the tricky parts.

Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

Eliot and I finished all six Mega Man games on NES.

2 and 5 were great, and the upgrades in 6 were a
nice twist. The rest felt phoned in.
7:34 PM - 31 Oct 2009
1 RETWEET 10 FAVORITES

By age 5, he could beat some parts of moderately-dicult platformers like

Super Mario 3.

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Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

Eliot just finished Super Mario 3's World 1 in its

entirety by himself. He's only five! I'm a proud dad.
6:47 PM - 24 Jul 2009
4 RETWEETS 22 FAVORITES

By age 6, he was beating entire games on his own. He nished The Legend
of Zelda on his own, and then nished the very dicult second quest with
some mapping assistance.

Andy Baio

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Eliot just beat the first Zelda, entirely by himself. I only

helped by showing him a map of Dungeon 9. That's
my boy!
4:11 PM - 30 Aug 2010
5 RETWEETS 16 FAVORITES

Wed nished Super Mario Bros. 1-3, Mega Man 16, Castlevania 13, Rygar,
Contra, and Duck Tales.
It was time to level up again.

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I never owned a Super Nintendo or Nintendo 64Id moved on to PC

gaming by thenso many of these games were new to me.
We played through Link to the Past and Super Mario World, and discovered
some lesser-known gems together that became all-time favorites.

Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

Eliot and I beat E.V.O: Search for Eden, an

underrated gem for the SNES that plays like a 16-bit
uncle of Spore. http://bit.ly/aBvcwU
1:01 AM - 3 May 2010
2 RETWEETS 10 FAVORITES

By the beginning of 2011, wed moved on to the N64. The beginning of the
3D era on consoles didnt age well in my eyes, but Eliot didnt seem to
mind. We beat the brilliant Ocarina of Time and Majoras Mask, and fell in
love with the criminally underrated Rocket: Robot on Wheels.
By the time he turned seven, Eliot had collected every star in Super Mario
64.

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Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

Eliot just got the last of Mario 64's 120 stars. If you
ever doubt the power of the collecting game
mechanic, hang out with a 6-year-old.
5:08 PM - 26 Jan 2011
5 RETWEETS 13 FAVORITES

After that, we skipped straight to the 2000s. On the PlayStation 2, we

played through ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and the original Katamari
Damacy, released the year he was born.
The experiment was complete.

This approach to widely surveying classic games clearly had an impact on

him, and inuenced the games that he likes now.
Like seemingly every kid his age, he loves Minecraft. No surprises there.
But he also loves brutally dicult games that challenge gamers 23 times
his age, and hes frighteningly good at them. His favorites usually borrow
characteristics from roguelikes: procedurally-generated levels, permanent
death, no save points.
One of his favorite games is Spelunky, easily one of the most dicult games
Ive ever played. Paste Magazine called it a game with hard carved into its
very being. Ive never beaten it. I will probably never beat it.
A month after his eighth birthday, he beat Spelunky on his own.

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Playing With My Son The Message Medium

Andy Baio
@waxpancake

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Eliot just beat Spelunky all by himself! Thanks for making such
a great game, @mossmouth!
12:43 AM - 27 Jul 2012
15 RETWEETS 36 FAVORITES

But Spelunky isnt like other games. Eliot may have beaten the game, but
theres a second, much harder endingby going to Hell.
Tom Francis explains:
To complete Spelunky, you just have to survive 15 randomly generated levels and
then trick the nal boss into killing itself. To get to hell, though, you have to
perform a series of specic rituals in a specic order, using unique objects that
crop up in dierent places each time, and then defeat the boss in a particularly
audacious way to use his death as a stepping stone to the underworld.
Its one of the most dicult feats in gaming. I only know a couple people
who have done it. For Tom Francis, it was the hardest thing Ive ever

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managed in a video game It only took 41 minutes, but it took me hundreds

of hours of playand about 3,000 deathsto learn how to do those 41
minutes.
Three months ago, Eliot beat Spelunky the hard way. The games creator,
Derek Yu, thinks he may be the youngest person to have done it.

Derek Yu

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@mossmouth

@waxpancake That's the youngest I've ever heard of.

Eliot is the chosen one!
9:38 PM - 30 May 2013
3 RETWEETS 29 FAVORITES

After beating Spelunky, Eliot was ready for a new challenge. He asked me to
buy him a new game he found through YouTubeNuclear Throne,
Vlambeers action roguelike-like known for its relentless diculty. A week
later:

Andy Baio

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@waxpancake

After less than a week of playing, Eliot beat the

Nuclear Throne. Good job, kid.
instagram.com/p/uTPNcvMo1D/ /cc @tha_rami
@jwaaaap @mossmouth
1:32 PM - 18 Oct 2014
1 RETWEET 20 FAVORITES

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Derek Yu

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@mossmouth

@Vlambeer @waxpancake @jwaaaap Stop it, Eliot.

You're making us old people look bad.
2:25 PM - 18 Oct 2014
4 RETWEETS 21 FAVORITES

Nuclear Throne, like many indie games developed by a tiny team, has a very
old-school aesthetic:

And this, for me, is the most interesting impact of the experiment.
Eliots early exposure to games with limited graphics inoculated him from
the ashy, hyper-realistic graphics found in todays AAA games. He can
appreciate retro graphics on its own terms, and focus on the gameplay.
The lo- graphics in games like VVVVVV, FTL, or Cave Story might turn o
other kids his age, but like me, hes drawn to them.

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My hope is that this experiment instilled a life-long appreciation for

smaller, weirder, more intimate games in him.

So I gave my son a crash course in video game history, compressing 25 years

of gaming history into about four years.
At this point, youre probably either thinking Im a monster or a pretty
awesome dad. Maybe a little of both.
Thats okay with me. My son is amazing, he loves video games, and more
than anything, he loves playing them with me.
Ready, player two?

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Its about ethics in video game parenting.

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PUB LI SHE D I N

The Message
A Pandaemonium Revolver Collection by
@anildash @craigmod @fimoculous @ftrain
@jessamyn @jomc @page88 @pomeranian99
@quinnnorton @tcarmody @tressiemcphd
@waxpancake @zephoria @zeynep

WRI T TE N O N DEC 9, 2014 BY

Andy Baio
I make web stuff. @waxy, @xoxo, @playfic,
@supercutorg, Kind of Bloop, Upcoming.org.
Helped build @kickstarter. P.S. I love you.

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