I know this isn’t what you’re getting at, but reading your story made me think about how it is often the other way around with parents as they grow old and their children grow up. Watching your children, and everyone’s children, carry forward what you no longer can, and feeling pride in their accomplishments. And the children, now adults, playing harder and better by knowing they’re playing for everyone who came before them.
OK, I’m glad you replied with this, because I think maybe I was zooming in on the wrong thing. I was kind of thinking of “protecc smol” as being the Parent Thing but maybe a better babysitting anecdote would be something like this:
When I was a teenager, perhaps about two years older than my nephew is now, I was playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES, with the secret code I will remember until the day I die (down R up L Y B) unlocking even higher speeds than the already unusually high speed of the game. I generally played it on max difficulty, max speed, and I was trying to beat it with every character under those conditions. At some point, my mother, who was younger then than I am now, walked up behind me and watched the game for a while, and then declared that what was going on on the screen was “incomprehensible,” and left.
When my nephew plays Isaac on his Switch, he’s unaware of a lot of the regularities of the game that allow me to predict things before they happen, but he partially compensates for that by having what seem to my now-older eyes to be superhuman reflexes. I’ve been mostly successful at avoiding giving him advice… part of the game is figuring stuff out for yourself. But occasionally I’ll ask a fake question like, “I wonder if the super secret room is north of you right now,” and kinda nudge him a little. At some point, I realized that his ability to YOLO items he’s never seen before [1] and just transform his play style in an instant, react to enemy behavior successfully even though he doesn’t have the experience to anticipate it, etc., is probably not so different, as perceived by me, to how my mother perceived my own youthful high CPU MHz all those years ago, and thus the wheel of time continues to turn.
Is that more similar to what you’re talking about?
1: for anyone who doesn’t play, the version he’s currently playing on console doesn’t document what items do, at all, and a significant number of them significantly change what the optimal tactics are, and you just have to deduce and memorize that stuff, or repeatedly check a wiki, for 700-some vaguely mnemonic little pixel art icons. (This feature was recently added to the Steam version, though.)
I know this isn’t what you’re getting at, but reading your story made me think about how it is often the other way around with parents as they grow old and their children grow up. Watching your children, and everyone’s children, carry forward what you no longer can, and feeling pride in their accomplishments. And the children, now adults, playing harder and better by knowing they’re playing for everyone who came before them.
OK, I’m glad you replied with this, because I think maybe I was zooming in on the wrong thing. I was kind of thinking of “protecc smol” as being the Parent Thing but maybe a better babysitting anecdote would be something like this:
When I was a teenager, perhaps about two years older than my nephew is now, I was playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES, with the secret code I will remember until the day I die (down R up L Y B) unlocking even higher speeds than the already unusually high speed of the game. I generally played it on max difficulty, max speed, and I was trying to beat it with every character under those conditions. At some point, my mother, who was younger then than I am now, walked up behind me and watched the game for a while, and then declared that what was going on on the screen was “incomprehensible,” and left.
When my nephew plays Isaac on his Switch, he’s unaware of a lot of the regularities of the game that allow me to predict things before they happen, but he partially compensates for that by having what seem to my now-older eyes to be superhuman reflexes. I’ve been mostly successful at avoiding giving him advice… part of the game is figuring stuff out for yourself. But occasionally I’ll ask a fake question like, “I wonder if the super secret room is north of you right now,” and kinda nudge him a little. At some point, I realized that his ability to YOLO items he’s never seen before [1] and just transform his play style in an instant, react to enemy behavior successfully even though he doesn’t have the experience to anticipate it, etc., is probably not so different, as perceived by me, to how my mother perceived my own youthful high CPU MHz all those years ago, and thus the wheel of time continues to turn.
Is that more similar to what you’re talking about?
1: for anyone who doesn’t play, the version he’s currently playing on console doesn’t document what items do, at all, and a significant number of them significantly change what the optimal tactics are, and you just have to deduce and memorize that stuff, or repeatedly check a wiki, for 700-some vaguely mnemonic little pixel art icons. (This feature was recently added to the Steam version, though.)