A year into diving in to my children’s interests, and we got a deeper glimpse of what connections my oldest Finn has made. It’s been exciting for me to see more than the tip of the iceberg. 😊 Finn has spent a good amount of time playing and watching others play games. When he’s not doing these things, he is usually making up his own games in his head. He often tries to get others to play, and I find it challenging from time to time, as he’s got a whole world that he understands, and I/we don’t!
When he watches YouTube what I see is him interested in all sorts of aspects: game play, the storyline and game theory… sometimes he’ll watch a run of games that are pure entertainment (anything that makes him laugh). The types of games and gamers of interest have been all over the map. There have been times along the way where I’ve been fretful, like what is really going on? He’s had a recent dive into horror games, specifically the lore around them; I will not touch the horror genre with a 10 ft poll, so I *really* had to work at being okay at this. So he’s been content with all the games in his head; occasionally he’ll draw out the maps and then is underwhelmed by them. We’ve brought up roblox studio, but for some reason Roblox has not grabbed his attention.
I ran across a Scratch programming for kids book and did a little research. I passed it on to Michael our IT person, and last night he programmed a short game to show the boys. Finn was *elated*. He and Michael proceeded to collaborate on making it more like Finn’s ideas. Finn was so clear in communicating how he wanted it, and was patient with the whole process of coding his thoughts. His ideas were intricately detailed. He was surprised by how much thought went into his short game. There was so much there that he was drawing from, all from the games he’s studied. I’m not sure if this will be a blip of an interest, or an ongoing project that will be a big party of his path. Either way it’s been so cool to see this part unfold. ❤️
