this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.
I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.
I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.
It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.
I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.
It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.
I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.
My 6 year old has never played or seen a video game.
I take her to the beach, playdates at the park with friends, we go mountain biking, etc. Hearing your stories makes my flesh crawl
I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.
I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.
My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.
I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.