[fecklessyouth]

>It's 2014, I thought the sillyness about being addicted to video games and computer was over. Apparently not.

It's never going to be over, as long as young children have access to technology.

HN seems to preach a perverse gospel about this subject: that you should never limit a child's technology access, because not only will nothing bad come out of, but in fact, it will make them more capable. It will turn them into developers and engineers!

I'm guessing the reason HN thinks this way is because they themselves got into technology in the first place through such avenues: dicking around as a kid, sometimes with the help of their parents, sometimes contrary to their wishes. If THEY had been restricted, they wouldn't be where they are today.

But this reason suffers from selection bias. While people like yourself (unless I'm misreading you. In which case, substitute the stereotypical HN user for yourself) may have used videogames and computer access as a spring board for your career, I'm willing to wager that you are minority among videogame and computer-saavy youth.* You are a bigger majority, however, on HN, and in the tech world in general, so such reasoning becomes canon without being subject to enough criticism. Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here.

*I don't have any statistics on hand to support this. But since the videogame industry is as big (and growing) as it is, where are the rising mountains of developers and engineers that supposedly spring from it? Why aren't girls, who spend comparable time with technology, catching the wave as well?

My little brother has been addicted to Minecraft for the past 2 years. I keep waiting for him to "discover" something else as a result of it. To get into programming, or design, or architecture, or something more constructive. Hell, even building things in Minecraft would be more productive than what he does now: go on PvP servers and throw snowballs at people--for 12 hours a day, if my parents let him. He's tried programming lessons a few times, but he usually gives up, because learning a new skill is harder than playing (even difficult) games. He lacks the trait of perseverance. And he's not going to learn it by playing videogames.

[graeme]

>Plenty of technologists were gamers, but not all gamers become technologists. It's just that the former dominate here.

I was a gamer, and didn't become a technologist. I had no idea what a computer program was!

(If that sounds silly, consider all the things you see every day without understanding)

Mostly, my gaming experience was a write-off. It stunted my social development, blocked me from doing more interesting activities, and contributed very little to my well-being.

I may have learned some strategic thinking from games like Starcraft, which I think has carried over to entrepreneurship. But oh, how I wish I could get that time back.

Or, I wish someone had shown me a terminal and what it could do. One glimpse would have been enough.

[_delirium]

As a kid I actually didn't really associate "gamers" and "technologists" for some reason. Now I hear people equate them more often, but in the '90s I tended to think of them as distinct groups with only some overlap. Obviously that may reflect only some peculiar social groups at my particular schools.

The kids who had high-level characters on Everquest, attended all the game cons, were in line at midnight for new releases, etc.; were mostly not the same people as the kids who were active in the local BBS scene, played around with installing Linux, were making silly LAMP websites, etc. Not zero overlap, but just in terms of social groups and interests they were clearly identifiable as different clusters of people. Overall the gamers were not as correlated with math/science interest either. At least as I remember it, the "computer nerds" tended to be more often the same people who were also in math club, AP science classes, etc., while gamers were less often represented there.

[norswap]

At any rate, forbidding is not the solution. It only cures the symptoms, not their underlying cause. Better to learn to your kids to enjoy the good things in life responsibly.

And even if your kids play more than you would like, so what? As long as it does not detract from other aspects, it should be fine. Talk with them about it. It seems to me that the best way to make responsible adults is to treat children like responsible adults to begin with (with some caveats, of course).

If any activity starts to become detrimental, there's the time to start acting... Not on a vaguely defined fear that it might lead to something bad. That's trying to exert a level of control on another being's life that simply cannot be achieved, and it often backfires badly later in life, when the activity becomes available without imposed restrictions.