How I've noticed children play videogames! (Also Wrestling!)

Hello friends!

This is a thread I've put off writing for a while because I was doing ACTUAL REAL LIFE research on the topic. Startling, I know.

So a week or so ago, on either UPF or the Bombcast, I remember the guys talking about how they imagined children to play videogames. I found it really entertaining, and I couldn't not chip in with it.

So I'm a school teacher. I work in years 3-4 in a British school ( I believe that's second grade for Americans? Ages 7-9, it varies). I interact with about 40 children every day in my class, and many more just in the general school. We speak about games and wrestling quite a lot, and here's what I've noticed from my time being with them, and talking about them.

-Kids like all games. Naturally, they tend to gravitate to things like Call of Duty depending on their upbringing. I've noticed a lot of liberal parents don't mind their children playing videogames, because to them, they're not...real, I guess?

-Minecraft is the be all and end all with the kids. They fucking love it. I can't explain enough about how much of an enormous impact something like Minecraft has on the class structure. When I give the kids "Quiet Reading" time, (20 minutes for them to read independently while I get my shit together), I frequently see children reading "Minecraft Manuals", which are like £10 little books that show how to build certain things, or examples of houses people have made, that have been curated into a book. As someone who used to take the game walkthroughs for Ocarina of Time I got from Nintendo Official Magazine to read as a kid, I totally get why these are exciting. I've had kids come up to me and want to tell me all about their minecraft stuff. Every other Friday morning, I let the kids talk about Minecraft as a whole class. If people have made things they're proud of, I give them the chance to explain it to people and tell them how they managed it. It sounds like a doss, but as a lot of the children who play Minecraft can be quite shy (and a lot of autistic children play it), it's a grand opportunity for them to get their voice be heard, practice vocabulary, and learn to talk in front of other children!

-They also love youtube. They watch something called "Yogscast" and something like "Diamond Pick Axe Guy". I played Minecraft when it was in early Alpha so I don't know much about it past how you put a block on another block. but after a year with these kids, I consider myself an expert through osmosis. It's frightening.

-When it comes to how parents deal with games, it can be a mixed bag. They know I'm a pretty young dude (25, Male) so a lot of them come to me to ask for advice and such. This got to such a point that I called an after school meeting one day after my classes were finished. I basically said that any parent who wanted to come could sit down, and we'd all discuss the kinds of games their children were playing, and in a cool open forum, I'd kind of give them my opinion and advice as to what I think about them. I'm obviously no expert, but I play a lot of games, and most kids play games that I'm familiar with, so it's easy. Like I said, a lot of kids play the aforementioned games, which I explained the merits and downfalls of (Minecraft was lauded as an avenue for creativity, lateral thinking and basic programming) whereas FPS War games were decried, but not entirely, I explained that where as I played a lot of things like Duke 3D, Doom, Wolf 3D as a kid and I turned out alright, that if they were allowing children to play games rated far too high for their age, they should keep an eye on what they're playing, as visual fidelity these days could be quite damaging for some of the more sensitive children.

Something I remember laughing at was how obsessed one of the kids was with Avatar (As in the James Cameron movie) game. I said the only thing they need to be worried about was developing was weird taste. The parents laughed at that one.

I guess that's about everything I can think of for now. Oh also, kids fucking love wrestling.

-Seth Rollins is a cool guy but shouldn't have betrayed his best friends

-John Cena is cool but kind of a dork (Non altered quote from a boy in my class. Kids going places)

-AJ Lee is what some of the girls aspire to be like. Cool that she's a role model.

-Kane is stupid and one of the kids thinks his bald head is dumb

One of the kids did the DDP self high five to me the other day, so that's great!

If you have any questions, comments etc, please feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer them as soon as possible, as I've undoubtably missed a bunch of stuff out. Excuse the crap formatting as it's my day off and I'm half doing other things. Much love friends!

I love all types of games including the traditional shootey and stabbey kinds, but it actually gives me great joy that a generation of kids is growing up around a game that encourages creative thought in building things rather than repetitive positive feedback from destruction.

Why aren't you showing them true life lessons with the Dark Souls series?

That was pleasant to wake up to

First of all, you sound like an awesome teacher.

Secondly, it still blows my mind just how much children these days love Minecraft. From a getting more people interested in programming aspect, I find this exciting. There are plenty of good ways to teach programming using Minecraft, and thus make it exciting for children, which is a win win if you ask me.

It's incredible. It's mostly the boys that play it, but I know a few girls in my class who play it aswell. I know it's a great tool for autistic children to develop better spacial awareness.

i work in secondary school in wales/england and can chip in on kids aged 11-16

11-13 year olds are similar to your kids, love minecraft and call of duty, gta was massive for a few months, and they start to get into fifa. they can't get enough of youtubers. watching people open card packs on ultimate team is like crack to these guys. i saw a girl with a pewdiepie bag once.

14-16 are much more into fifa generally, one of them asked it i played fifa and i wrote my ultimate team on the board while on supply, some of them took pictures of it on their phone. they all have stories which they tell each other and i'm confident that 90% of the time it is bullshit. i sometimes have a little laugh to myself at some of the stuff they come out with. i mentioned that i was playing x-com to a few of them, and one of them came back a few weeks later and thanked me, saying it was incredible.

a lot of girls can be caught playing candy crush etc on their phones.

i once wore a giant bomb t-shirt on non-school uniform day but nobody recognised it.

That's awesome. As much as I dislike Minecraft and the flood of Yogscast-alikes, I still think it's great that kids today are into that stuff. I was the weird kid for even having a PC, let alone playing games on it. While everyone else was talking Mario, I was talking Wolfenstein 3D. (not being a hipster or elitist... it sucked at the time, being an outcast among outcasts. Now I'm glad it went that way, as I played so many great games that I would have never heard of if I was playing what everybody else was playing. Ask me anything about fucking Skunny Kart.)

@fallen189: Cool write up. Thanks for sharing. You sound like the kind of teacher I want my kids to have in school.

The real education begins here!

@fallen189: Do you know what they play Minecraft on? PC or the consoles?

Also this. I wonder how these kids are going to start turning out in fifteen, twenty years, if Minecraft serves as a basis for their interests so much? Are we going to see a ton of brilliant engineers pop up?

This might make me sound like a dick, but it's also great that Call of Duty isn't going to be the major game that every kid has nostalgia for.

I think it's actually Xbox 360 and tablets believe it or not. Kids don't have laptops or PCS anymore, its all about tablets!

You seem to be a great teacher. Using the things that children love to express themselves is great. I wish more educators were more inclined to take that approach.

Also, I like that you took the initiative to educate parents on how they should view games. So bravo to you.

That was an unsurprising but interesting read nonetheless. Wished that we had Minecraft when we were younger since it's such a great social building game as well as letting children express their creativity (autistic children as you mentioned especially who from what I've read, are a fan of it.) That plus the redstone system allows some basic programming that could push their interests in electronics or programming which is in inevitably what the future would want.

Granted, we had shit like LEGO or those awful Sticklebricks but it's not the same for a number of reasons.

I've no fucking clue about wrestling. All I knew was that when I was in school, most of my classmates were more interested in collecting stickers and chucking them into those big paper books for whatever fucking reason.

I work with kids every day as well and have noticed a LOT of the same things. I work mostly with a higher age of kids (10-14) but also have a lot of interactions with kids as young as 5. Universally Minecraft is THE game for EVERY age. Also I have noticed 99% of the kids play the game in creative mode and that is it.

I tend to also hear a lot about Halo and Call of Duty, but as of late I have actually been hearing kids talk about PC games. Also the 3DS is still a very popular system, mostly for Mario Kart and Pokemon.

I have two younger brothers, ages 8 and 10, and they play Minecraft like crazy. I have tried introducing them to games I really loved and within 30 minutes they would get bored and go back to playing Minecraft. I would definitely agree that Minecraft is destroying the next generation of "Gamers". They also like Pokemon but not as much as Minecraft, I mean they would rather play that Pokemon mod on MInecraft than a real Pokemon game of any generation.

Seconded.

And it's really brilliant to have a sort of Minecraft show-and-tell, allowing kids to gain pride from their digital accomplishments. I'm 30, and for most of my life gaming was (and sadly still largely is) unanimously considered a waste of time at best. Like watching cartoons, except it can sometimes turn your darling child into a murderer too.

So it's incredibly refreshing to see someone nurturing the unique creativity that those kind of games foster in kids. I can only imagine that you are really on the forefront of what's to come as game-enabled devices get ever more ubiquitous. If you haven't already, you should try reaching out to other teachers to share your lesson plans regarding this stuff.

Cheers, mate!

That's what you guys say, right?