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Comment by ohyeshedid | Hacker News Reader

If they're enjoying it, and do so regularly, are they really playing it wrong?

What’s the typical age at which we expect people to decide if they’re doing something for fun - or if they’re doing something to create? Does it matter if it’s inside the sandbox (e.g. SimCity) or outside the sandbox (e.g. Dreamweaver)? What if the sandbox is also a tool for exploitation of the user (i.e. microtransactions?)

To share my own example - beyond SimCity and not-really-understanding-how-to-make-Age-of-Empires-maps when I was 10 years old - I don’t think I can say I was really using computers constructively until I was 12/13 when I was at the point where I actually understood what I was doing with my cracked copies of Macromedia and Adobe software - so if I’m using myself as a benchmark I wouldn’t stress too much about grade-school kids being newbs…

…just please don’t repress them. And introduce them to the concept of creating their own things outside of closed platforms.

How do you distinguish between creating and honing a skill? Some of the best engineers I know were top-level video game players in their youth. Video games taught them how to get really good at something.

Very similar parallels myself. From living on Simtropolis, go struggling to make custom maps for Halo CE on PC, on to making texture modifications with cracked Photoshop 7.0.

Then around 12 I became way more social online, started making custom skins for InvisionFree message boards and spending more and more time in the CSS Zen Garden... and the rest is history!

Like playing with LEGO: building following instructions vs building your own thing. Is it wrong following instructions?

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