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Comment by ptek | Hacker News Reader

A workmate (I do labouring and was doing traffic control that day) brought her teenage son a PS5. I don't know why parents would purchase consoles for their children as you don't learn any transferable skills (I guess you could be a streamer).

I'm not saying being a sadist and give the kid a second hand laptop with *BSD because then the kid will want nothing to do with computers, especially if the laptop is cheap and doesn't have a working driver support (This is where Linux is better from my personal experience).

This is also why I like HTML, I got a free internet CD with Netscape Navigator in 1996 when I was 12 and the three working examples (two with Netscape Navigator and one was a html email with Netscape Mail and News client) I had, I was able to play around with and create and learn basic HTML until I got a modem in 1998.

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> you don't learn any transferable skills

Actually, playing video games is an activity that let you practice real-time thinking. Other activities with real-time thinking include music instruments, sports and social interactions. By real-time thinking, I mean an activity that requires you to think and act within short timelapses. It appears also that activities involving real-time thinking can be quite fun, and few course in schools involve real-time thinking.

Now, learning new languages like html or how to fine-tune LLM can be quite fun. Learning how to draw nice pictures, or how to write nice books can be quite fun too. It's nice to let children explore different activities (or free internet CD if we speak about 1996) so that they can find the ones that resonate with their inner motivations.

> I don't know why parents would purchase consoles for their children as you don't learn any transferable skills

It's plausible that parents may just want their children to enjoy some leisure? To not feel like every experience in childhood should be preparation for labour?

As a child, I was disappointed when I got a BBC B instead of a Megadrive. But I definitely learned more, and some of my leisure time was programming in BBC Basic.

Weren’t there like 10 years between the BBC and the Megadrive?

Yup. It was a very old computer for the time. You should've seen our cars.

Parent comment has big “alpha grindset” energy. Like they hadn’t considered the concept of “toys”.

In my own anecdotal experience, if you are a computer gamer, you miss out on all the "console exclusive" stuff. Stuff like Gran Tourismo or the latest Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy or whatever. I can't really remember. Then when it is a game everyone plays, it tends to be something where the console gamers can't play with the PC gamers so it's like

"Hey I just got the new counterstrike!"

"Oh that's awesome! I have that too! We should play sometime!"

"Yea what's your PS5 handle?"

"My what?"

"You don't have a PS5?"

"Nah I have a PC"

and yea.....

That is my anecdotal experience though, and it was always bolstered by the benefits of PC gaming - cheaper games, ample mods, lots of sales, and the biggest game library of any platform. Plus better performance. And I could text chat on my keyboard while playing Quake 3 back then haha. Sadly text chat in games has died off as an art, in favor of voice chat and all the problems voice chat comes with. lol.

Edit: And of course, the PC is a tool, the game console is just a dumb appliance.

Well it plays all ways. PC misses out on the console exclusives, consoles miss out on the PC exclusives, consoles themselves have different exclusives and don't interop. For people getting into gaming when they're young, a big influence is probably what their friend group is playing on, which in turn is probably inspired by whatever their parents decide to let them on. That or whatever games is latest hotness.

When I was young Minecraft forcefully evangelized my friend group, which had previously been more nintendo/xbox, into PC gamers. The origins of a lot of my current interests and career go back to the initial questions of: Why is minecraft running at low FPS? How do I set up a minecraft server? It's a little different nowadays, when some of the biggest multiplayer titles are cross-platform.

Moral of the story: make friends with PC nerds.

I never had much time for consoles and I don’t feel like I missed out on much. Popular games come and go. The joy of doing whatever I can imagine with my PC is more than enough consolation.

I also learned HTML in 1996 (when I was also 12), in part from a cover story in I wanna say PC Magazine. I had a modem and had access to an unlimited AOL account thanks to my school’s computer lab teacher not doing a great job of hiding the password for the account (she also trusted me and my best friend quite a bit…trust we only abused insofar as we stole AOL from the county, back when it was still hourly and not unlimited for everyone), but it’s a similar story.

But you know what got me interested in computers to begin with? My Super Nintendo (and I guess my NES before that). So I rebuke the idea that video game consoles don’t teach transferable skills (what the fuck that is supposed to mean) and that they don’t unlock wonder and excitement about technology in lots and lots of people, especially kids.

There are many people in tech industry who began to learn about coding precisely because of video games. Age of Empires II was essentially the first gateway to my career.

It was my gateway to a lifelong love of history and cultures.

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