My kiddos more or less stick to "Minecraft", "Cities: Skylines", and "Roblox": fine by me as a parent, as they are creating full 3d environments in "Roblox Studio" and even fiddling with professional tools like "Blender", importing their models into the latter two titles-- just to give the flavor. But at the same time, it'll be fun to see if I can increasingly pull my kids into some more modern games on these new platforms.
On this very topic, I was pondering the other day about the question of, in terms of technology, when was the best time to be born? I think I've narrowed it down to these three periods, in order from best-to-worst.
- Circa 1970: This meant that you got to be dazzled by the 8-bit micros as a child, programming your own games, while as a teenager you were able to experience the golden age of microcomputing in the 80s. You're hitting retirement age right at the early doors of robotics and Machine Learning-- lots of time to tinker.
- Circa 2010: Children born around this time-- such as my two kids-- got to create their own videos, levels, 3d models, sound effects, music, and entire worlds with gratis tools, and share them with their friends in real-time. I can't even imagine having this stuff when I was a child. Soon, these kids-cum-teenagers will even be able to hook up Machine Learning algorithms with some simple instructions.
- Circa 1980: Born in 1981, I got to experience 1980s micros and the birth of the IBM PC as a child. Then as I moved into teenager-dom, I was there-- online!-- for the de facto birth of the World Wide Web. I published my first web site in 1995, and was one of the first probably thousand people to ever play Deathmatch over the internet proper, via QTest hours after release. I've preserved some of my old web site content from the 90s, and it's obvious I was a true first-generation script kiddie.