[Nition]

In 1997 I typed up a letter to Maxis in Microsoft Creative Writer about how much I liked their games and wanted to move to America and work at Maxis when I grew up:

https://i.imgur.com/1eHcead.jpeg

Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning that it'd be cool if you could print out an image of your city in SimCity 2000, as you could in the previous SimCity game. That was enough to get me only this letter from legal as a response:

https://i.imgur.com/Y2wGcRt.jpeg

I did grow up to become a professional game developer though!

[Nition]

Since there doesn't seem to be any record in the Internet by the way, this is what printed cities looked like in SimCity 1 (these are my own scans of some printouts from 1996):

https://i.imgur.com/E9QgkCp.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/i3MYCZv.jpeg

[stevage]

> "it may be a little hard to understand"

Presumably they are implying that if they read creative suggestions, they open themselves to the possibility of being sued if they ever implemented anything similar to what was suggested. Doesn't sound too complicated to explain to a kid.

[Nition]

I always thought the catch-22 was funny where they say they saw that I was suggesting an idea ¾ of the way through the letter, so they chose to return the letter without reading it.

[guerrilla]

> catch-22

That's not really a catch-22. It's just a contradiction.

[Nition]

What I mean is, they have to read the letters to check whether they're ones they can't read.

[guerrilla]

Fair enough. I think I cracked the case though: they probably have someone who isn't "them" read the letters though, a third party like another law firm or some contractor that offers that service specifically.

[bigDinosaur]

Someone has not read a book even if they read the opening paragraph, so the solution is likely far simpler.

[notpushkin]

I suppose the legal department wants the wording of that paragraph to be very specific. It’s not only there for the kid, it’s for the court as well.

[RyanOD]

Love that they took the time to draft a kind letter and let you down easy. Maxis cared.

[Dylan16807]

I can't tell if you're joking or not about the form letter there.

It's such a terrible response for someone that was not in fact suggesting a new feature for the franchise.

And even if it had been, rejecting the entire letter for one sentence is still bad.

It's polite. Being polite is pretty much expected here.

[RyanOD]

I wasn't joking. I don't think that was a form letter. I think someone took the time to write a personalized, thoughtful letter to a wide-eyed 10-year old.

The world needs more of that.

[Dylan16807]

If it had to be a rejection letter that can't respond to anything specific, it's reasonably thoughtful under those constraints.

But it really didn't have to be that.

[postalcoder]

Creative Writer is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. What's the state of kids software nowadays?

[Nition]

Pretty terrible in my experience. The good stuff for kids mostly moved to tablets and phones, but no keyboard and mouse is a limiting format, and you have to sift through a hundred bad apps to find the good one. Not much that runs easily on modern PCs comes close to the old magic. Though Tux Paint is actually very good, retaining the sense of whimsy that most modern software lacks.

It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing. Like in the 80s and 90s people were trying to make things that were fun and interesting and probably based on their life experiences. And now they're trying to make things that are the best distillation of whatever was most successful before. But that makes it feel dishonest, corporate.

Even Microsoft in the 90s could still make stuff that felt fun and unique. There was a counterpart to Creative Writer called Fine Artist that was equally good.

[ndespres]

>>It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing.

Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.

The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.

[nogridbag]

This is a timely post. Just last night my 8 y/o asked if she could create a presentation on my laptop like they do at school. I have no idea what software they use at the elementary school.

I've let her play around with Google Docs before. But what I really wanted was something like Creative Writer that is more kid friendly. I used Gemini (sorry) to suggest some software and it suggested "Book Creator" which is intended for schools/teachers. I signed up as a fake teacher and added my kids as students and they did create some really creative books, importing images, and adding their own drawings. But it's still missing that kid-friendly vibe like Creative Writer.

[Nition]

Check out Canva. It might even be what they're using at school already. It doesn't have the simplicity and fun of the old stuff, but it's intuitive to use even for kids. A lot of features where they're broken convention in ways that actually make more sense than the standard, for example resizing images keeps the aspect ratio by default instead of stretching.

[california-og]

I made a paint app for toddlers recently, exactly because I couldn't find anything fun & useable & educational:

https://glyphdrawingclub.itch.io/mr-baby-paint

[veltas]

Can't see the images as imgur has geoblocked the UK.

[recury]

The 2nd image:

https://pasteboard.co/2aYWHRlnuFuM.jpg