You have a newborn child. Due to the mystical powers of the Infinite Improbability Drive and your deluxe voodoo crystal ball, you know three things to be true:
1) Your child is predisposed towards the exact same tastes in video games as you. Your decisions of what games they can play are the ONLY environmental factors capable of changing these tastes and opinions. Otherwise, they love what you love, and they hate what you hate.
2) You will somehow be their ONLY source of video games for their entire life (presumably, you will eventually have to divvy out these duties as you eventually become old / out of touch / dead, but assume for the sake of argument that you have infinite control here).
3) All "dead" online multiplayer communities have been resurrected! If there's a game you want your child to play, but it relies on playing online with others (like most MMORPG's), they WILL get the opportunity to experience the game at its peak of popularity.
This is your chance not only to relive your childhood vicariously through your offspring, but to fine-tune it perfectly so that he or she experiences only the games you give them, and only when you allow it. In other words, if you could play God and craft your life playing the ideal games at the ideal times, in order to produce the best overall appreciation (or skill) possible, what would that timeline look like, and what games would cease to exist?
You have the opportunity to let your kid(s) grow up in the 8-bit era, graduate to 16-bit, and work their way up to modern-day stories and graphics so that they can appreciate things the way you do. Or you could throw them right into child-friendly Wii games and either give them access to oldschool RPG's only when they're ready, or even just straight up pretend the 80's and 90's never existed. You can weed out the crap, or even force them to play games like E.T. and Superman 64 as punishment. You could even bring them up on one game alone, forcing them to train their entire lives to be the WORLD'S GREATEST at Street Fighter, Starcraft, etc.
*** (1) What would you want their VERY FIRST video game to be (1B: how old is your kid going to be when they play a video game for the first time)?
*** (2) Are there any games that YOU personally were never able to get into (because you were late to the party, etc), but would like to expose to your kids early so they can give it a proper chance?
*** (3) Are there any games (especially very popular games) you would rather your kids NEVER play, for whatever reason? (Assuming they have the same tastes as you, you could hide games that are only going to be a huge disappointment to them; or you could stop them from getting too addicted to WoW, Minecraft or Civilization by preventing them from ever playing those games in the first place).
*** (4) What is YOUR favorite video game, and under what precise circumstances would you like to introduce this game to your kid? i.e., how old will they be, what games will they need to have played beforehand, and if this is a game with any degree of player/story customization, what choices would you encourage them to make (i.e., play a Thief in Morrowind, or date Yuffie in FF7)?
*** (5) Describe anything else you'd do with your kid's life of gaming. (Make them play all the Final Fantasies in order? Give them official remakes or fan-made patches of games to play instead of what was first commercially available? Hold off on giving them any of the games you know they'd get hopelessly addicted to until after highschool / college? Torture them with nothing but awful games for years because you're a sick, sadistic bastard?)
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bokonon get your sense-making the **** out of this topic now - Cat1001
Brawl FC: 1461-9803-2942 /// X-Box Live Gamertag: AGGGH