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Comment by namelessoracle | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with "the problem solving skills" section of your argument. But not the reading one. Getting good at reading is almost purely exercise. You do it more, you get better/faster at it, which has gains that show up in all kinds of fields be it tech, medicine, whatever.

Old school games had basically an entire novel embedded inside of them worth of text. 10 year old me wanting to read all of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger got an easy novels worth of reading in. Getting 10 years old to WANT to read is HARD. Anything that encourages that is good.

Modern games dont have that text, and even when they do they have voice acting to get around it. Games like Chrono Trigger and old school Final Fantasy are rare and dont get made as much anymore unfortunately. Its all gambling boxes.

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> Modern games dont have that text, and even when they do they have voice acting to get around it. Games like Chrono Trigger and old school Final Fantasy are rare and dont get made as much anymore unfortunately. Its all gambling boxes.

What sort of games have you been playing?

Modern games come in every possible variety, and as soon as you look outside the likes of Fortnite you're swamped in story-heavy games, if that is what you want. The Atelier games, for example. Certainly those have voice acting, but not everywhere—and if that's a problem, pick the Japanese VAs.

I like text-heavy games and agree with the GP that they are not nearly as common as they used to be. Voice acting is almost universal and most games require subtitles to be enabled to have much of any reading.

Sure, are some games like Disco Elysium, Pathfinder Kingmaker or other D&D-style games, which are big walls of text with minimal voice over, but let's be honest, those games are targeting middle-aged people, not 10 year olds.

The games kids are playing today involve very little reading.

If I go on itch.io right now and pick something at random, the likelihood of it being both made by a teenager and involving written storytelling is quite high. Likewise a huge hit of the last decade was Undertale and it had the kind of success where I recall seeing kids draw the characters in chalk on the sidewalk. The evidence indicates that writing never went away, it's just not upheld by large productions(and even then, Nintendo regularly eschews voice acting).

To me, there's nothing sacred about text, it's just a medium.

One game that improves problem solving skills is Space Engineers.

Soooorta?

Stationeers does much better.

That’s way too taxing on my brain! :)

Give it a try! Start by looking at the Stationeers Venus series in YouTube, perhaps; that doubles as a tutorial.

Obligatory Disco Elysium mention, but it still proves your point, because it is considered so unusual by today's standards.

Though Disco Elysium is now almost-totally voice acted as well.

For what it's worth, I ended up reading and skipping the dialog more often than not. There's just so much text that having to wait for the narration felt interminable. It's great voice acting, though.

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