wshaffer

I had Younger Nephew over for a nice long gaming session today. I picked him up from his house, and he spent most of the half hour drive explaining to me that he knew that there had to be a "big plot twist" coming in Mass Effect 3, and speculating what it would be. Some ideas: We would discover some Collectors were still around, and they would help us fight the Reapers. The Illusive Man would turn into a giant monster and there would be a big boss fight with him. Or "I'll break the glass and he'll go flying out into space and I'll hang on tightly to a rope."

I suspect that some of his ideas are better than the actual twist ending of Mass Effect 3. Even if I'm not sure that a big boss fight with the Illusive Man would really constitute a "plot twist".

He also speculated about various plot threads from Mass Effect 2 that might come into play in Mass Effect 3. He remembers a heck of a lot more of the plot from Mass Effect 2 than I initially thought - there was quite a bit of time in the early days when I was pretty sure he was in it for the gun battles and nothing else, but he clearly has a good grasp on the story now. It's fascinating. I don't know if he always had this all in his head but couldn't articulate it at the time, or if he's refreshed his memory on the plot points somehow. (Perhaps by watching some Mass Effect 2 videos on Youtube or something.)

While in the car, he also improvised a long song about noogies and wedgies, and how the only way to avoid the coming noogie epidemic (yes, he literally used the phrase, "coming noogie epidemic") was to go bald.

This child used to be rather taciturn. He's become quite talkative. Although, on the drive back home, I used a lull in the conversation to attempt to ask him about what he does with his life while not playing computer games. After dutifully answering a few questions about summer camp, he said, "Could we stop talking about this? Because it's confusing. And you'll just be bored anyway." I assured him that I was curious, but I was happy to stop talking about it. "So, which other characters from Mass Effect 2 do you think will appear in Mass Effect 3?" elicited a much more enthusiastic conversational response. (I shouldn't be surprised, really. It's not like he can talk about the game with anyone else in his immediate social circle. Why waste valuable conversational time talking about summer camp when you could be talking about Mass Effect 3?)

Anyhow, we played for a good few hours, and were reunited with the characters of Mordin and Grunt from Mass Effect 2. Younger Nephew loves Grunt. Loves the Krogan in general. But really loves Grunt. Like, practically every line of dialogue Grunt gets, Younger Nephew gives me this wide-eyed look of, "Isn't he the best!"

Especially for the line: "I don't need luck, I have ammo!"

Played Mass Effect 2 with Younger Nephew today. We're getting close to finishing it. I'm going to have to decide what to try him on next. Mass Effect 3 is probably inevitable, but I understand the ending is disappointing. Then again, Younger Nephew might not care provided that there are suitably epic explosions.

Although his grasp of storytelling has grown by leaps and bounds. He has particularly latched on to the idea that certain scenes are setting up for or hinting at future events. In some cases, quite perceptively - he was very clear on the idea that when he intervened in the fight between Miranda and Jack, and sided with Jack, that that was going to cause problems between him and Miranda later. Other connections seem more dubious - he explained to me that it was obvious that the Illusive Man was a bad guy (something he has been insisting on from quite early on) because "his eyes are blue, and the Collectors...sort of bluish! It's obvious, really!"

He was also very emotionally engaged with the game events. He admitted to being "terrified" by the mission on the derelict Reaper ship, and almost decided to bail on it and come back when he had better weapons. I encouraged him to try again and he got through it. He was delighted by the character of Legion, telling me, "I don't know why, but I really like this guy!" (I really like Legion, too.) He was super-dismayed by the interlude in which Shepherd leaves the ship and you have to play as Joker. ("Aw, I'm Shepherd! Why do I have to be this jerk?")

I'm also really intrigued by how much he remembers of game events that he didn't seem to be all that interested in at the time. When we picked up the character of Jack, he didn't really seem all that interested in her. But today he suddenly informed me that we had to go "find the girl that we rescued from the prison" and do her loyalty mission. And when we visited the lab where Jack was experimented on, he turned to me and said, "No wonder she's a psychopath!" (He was a bit upset by Jack's tendency to swear. To be fair, I'd forgotten how salty her language could be. Younger Nephew turned to me at one point and exclaimed, wide eyed, "I only know two swear words, and she just used both of them in one sentence!" But he also told me that he knew those words because his brother had taught them to him. I want this on record so I won't be blamed if he uses those words later.)

Anyway, if anyone has any game recommendations for an increasingly sophisticated young boy, drop 'em in the comments. (I don't think I can interest him in the Dragon Age games yet, sadly - he's remained resolutely uninterested in any fantasy games in my collection except for The Witcher 3, and he is in not old enough for that one yet.)

Played Mass Effect 2 with Younger Nephew today. He seems to be grasping more of the larger storyline, and is also pausing more frequently to make comments about the plot and the characters.

Also, after playing through a mission where he basically double-crossed everyone (partly unintentionally, I think) and was awarded with many Renegade points, he looked thoughtful and said, "I think maybe I want to be nice to *some* people."

Certain types of foreshadowing, however, are lost on him. He cleared out a room, and got to an elevator at the far end. Garrus said something like, "Wow, we're really out in the open here, especially if there's somebody in the elevator." And Shepherd responded with, "Good thing there's plenty of cover around." Younger Nephew had Shepherd stand directly in front of the elevator waiting for it to open, and was astonished when a bunch of krogan poured out and killed him off. "They just came out of nowhere!" he exclaimed. (After a reload, he pushed the elevator button, got into cover, and handily dealt with the hostile forces.)

I still do the code-matching puzzles for him, but he understands how they work well enough that he sometimes tries to help.

I think Younger Nephew and I have been sporadically playing Lego Star Wars II together for something like 4 years now. We've finally started to make progress on the story line in a serious way recently. Today we completed the entirety of Episode V. I might have to get some new games soon.

I find it entirely hilarious that when I'm playing Han Solo and he's playing Princess Leia, he repeatedly slaps Han Solo in the head and addresses him as "Dum dum". He also has absolutely no patience for Lando Calrissian's kissing of Leia's hand.

There are few moments in life that can match taking down an AT-AT by winding a cable around its legs with your snow speeder, and having your nephew look up at you and say, "We make a good team, don't we?" Thank you, development team for Lego Star Wars.

I drove Older Nephew over to his rehearsal for a school play this afternoon. Apparently he is playing Spiderman in a play about pirates? (School plays seem more interesting these days than I remember them being than I was a kid.)

He was reciting his lines from the back seat of the car:
"Yo ho ho! Yo ho ho!"
"Everyone's talking about Ho Hos. Don't they know that they're full of preservatives and cholesterol?"

That last was delivered with such genuine perplexity that I nearly answered the question.

My two nephews are participating in something called the "Pinewood Derby" as part of Cub Scouts. Basically, you build a little wooden car and roll it down a track. I did something similar when I was a kid, but it's all a bit slicker now. We started off the project down at the hardware store, where they had a guy with a bandsaw cutting out the shapes the kids had traced for their cars.

Youngest Niece wanted to ride in my car back to her house. "I like music in the car, not talking!" she declared. None of you will be surprised that I've given more than a little bit of thought to what things in my music collection are suitable for 4-year-olds. Unfortunately, I didn't remember most of those thoughts, so I threw on Katatonia's Last Fair Day Gone Night on the grounds that it's fairly melodic and doesn't have any screaming or swearing. (Well, not much screaming or swearing. I forgot that "Brave" is sung in a death growl and "Passing Bird" has a few f-bombs, but we didn't get that far into the album, so no worries.)

Youngest Niece declared "Yes! I like this song!" after the first few notes of this number, so I guess I didn't make a terrible choice:


She was of the opinion that it doesn't quite match up to the Frozen soundtrack, though.

We got to the house, and I helped Younger Nephew put his car together. What really got Younger Nephew excited were the transfer decals for decorating the car. He very patiently cut out tiny decals of flames, stripes, dragon claws, and a dragon tail for the back of the car, and I rubbed them all onto the car with a blunt pencil. Fortunately, he was entirely unbothered by any of the mistakes I made - those decals are fiddly. I got pretty good at them by the time we got to the last few.

Below I give you a photo of the two cars, which do an excellent job of expressing the personality of their creators:

I spent three hours or so this afternoon playing Lego Star Wars with Younger Nephew. It's pretty neat to observe the difference between the first time we gamed together, back in November or so: his hand-eye coordination is better, his problem solving skills are better (he not only solved some of the puzzles himself, but was much quicker to grasp what I was getting at when I suggested a solution to a puzzle), and his attention span was much longer. He's even more fun to play with than he was before.

He's also really into Star Wars.

I also got an interesting demonstration of the development of the capacity for delayed gratification: when his dad came to pick him up and we had finished playing, Younger Nephew wandered into the kitchen. I asked him if he was hungry or thirsty, and he asked if he could look in the fridge. I told him he could, and he opened the fridge, spotted a Cherry Coke Zero, and asked if he could have it. I said, "Yes, if your dad says it's okay."

His dad said, "Well, you can have the Cherry Coke now, or we can go get ice cream and you can have ice cream."

Younger Nephew looked very thoughtfully at the Cherry Coke for about 30 seconds.

"You get to pick," I said. "But I think I would go for the ice cream."

He looked thoughtfully at the Coke a bit longer, sighed, and said, "I think you are right." And put the Coke back in the fridge.

That was such a hard decision for the little guy.

I took Younger Nephew to the Hiller Aviation Museum today. Which marked a milestone for me in that I believe it was the first time I've taken one of the niblings out solo, without another adult for backup.

The air museum is a great place to take kids. (The place was packed today with adults being obediently towed around by enthusiastic 4-8 year olds.) Younger Nephew took great delight in the biplane flight simulator, methodically demonstrating to me how he could crash it into the ground, the ocean, a nearby building, and so on. He played with the helicopter simulator for a bit, before declaring that "helicopters are hard," an entirely accurate assessment given what I know about helicopters. We also got a surprising amount of mileage out of a weather simulator - it was a touch screen with sliders that let you set the humidity, surface temperature, and air temperature, and then it would display the weather that would result. After I explained to him what the three sliders were for, and showed him how to make it snow, that absorbed his attention for *minutes*.

They have a cockpit section of a Boeing 747 out back, and we sat in the passenger seats and traded stories about flying.

Funnily enough, the thing I told Younger Nephew that seemed to intrigue him the most was that when I was his age, there were no red or blue M&Ms. This prompted all kinds of questions: "What colors did they have?", "How old were you when they added red M&Ms? How about blue M&Ms?" and, most amusingly, "Did you ever have a dream where you were waiting for the red M&Ms and then you woke up in a giant basket of red M&Ms?"

I think this opens previously untapped realms of conversation with Younger Nephew. We didn't even get into the fact that Skittles weren't produced domestically in the United States when I was his age.

An afternoon of video gaming with Younger Nephew was a success. We mostly played Lego Star Wars, but we also tried out Lego Marvel Superheroes (which I think might actually have been my favorite), and Lego Batman. The Lego games are just about perfect for a kid and an adult to play in co-op mode. And I don't think I've ever seen Younger Nephew persevere at a difficult task as long as he worked at some of the bits of Lego Star Wars that he had trouble getting through. If Jane McGonigal is right about games building resilience, we built Younger Nephew some Jedi-level resilience.

Younger Nephew spotted my copy of Mass Effect 2 and asked if he could try it. I told him that it was kind of complicated game and that I'd have to read a lot of it to him, but we could try. After a couple of minutes of the prologue, he handed the controller back to me and said, "This game is too complicated!" He was absolutely riveted by the opening cutscenes, though. Someday, we'll play Bioware games together.

Took Younger Nephew climbing yesterday. It was a hoot. He did some bouldering for a bit while I spotted him, and then did some top rope climbing with me belaying. He had a bit of fear of heights, but he dealt with it very well - he climbed partway up the wall, and had me lower him a bit, and then climbed up a bit higher and had me lower him a bit...repeat until he got to the top. (He also asked me at one point if I could climb with him so he could hold my hand and not be scared. Sadly, that is just not possible.) He also spent a lot of time just running around Planet Granite looking at everything - I think the idea of a place full of nothing but surfaces to climb on was very near a personal vision of heaven for him.

Younger Nephew also treated me to an extensive description of how to play Angry Birds Go! Seriously, I think it was the first time I've ever heard Younger Nephew speak in paragraphs.