I was born at the beginning of the age of information. I welcome the content deluge.
I’m not a snob. I do not discriminate amongst the sources of content, gladly consuming books, television, movies, music, magazines, websites, wikis, and blogs. I like to think that thanks to technologies like ebook readers, blog aggregation, suggestion engines at Amazon and Netflix, and Tivo I limit my input to only the stuff that is “awesome” on the “Normal people” scale.
I remember the time when the flow of information available to me was limited to my father’s sizable library and a few hours a week of interesting TV culled from the 3 horrible channels of Soviet television, and really don’t miss it.
My 4 year old daughter is swimming in the sea of information together with me. We read books to her (the quality of children’s books these days is amazing), she watches dvd and tivo’d shows, youtube videos on a laptop. She really wants to play with a computer as well.
Unfortunately the only game that I have is “Plants Vs. Zombies“. We play it together usually as a reward for good behavior. She enjoys the “zen garden” part of the game, as well as the regular “zombie” part. This, of course led to the questions on the nature of zombies (uhh), their diet (brains), the nature of brains, and the absence of female zombies in the game (uhhh).
When Natalie was younger and I used to have a PC, there was a whole bunch of craptastic PC games (one even with a special keyboard, if I remember) that we used to play. These crashed often and were pretty retarded.
Now that I have a Mac, I’m looking for some better, zombie-free games suitable for a 4 year old. Finding good computer games is much more difficult than finding good children’s books. Do you have any suggestions?
Man, I wish there were more. My five-year-old son *loves* Plants vs. Zombies, and we had all the same tricky conversations. My wife wasn’t happy when he started asking to eat her brains.
I’d highly recommend World of Goo, Peggle, Bookworm Adventures (when she starts learning to read), Windosill (lovely, fun for kids to explore), and Machinarium (a little dark in places). Braid is fantastic, but awfully hard.
Aside from that, I’d just keep an eye on Jay Is Games for age-appropriate Flash games and the occasional Mac download.
Natalie can actually read and write a little. She watches a rather weird show called World Word where letters, when pressed together turn into talking animals and things. It kind of boggles the mind, but they never put together verbs, and stay away from things like “God” and “singularity” or anything that would involve Godel’s incompleteness theorem.
pbskids.org
Every time I go to that site when Natalie wants something with Elmo I feel embarrassed for the people who created it. That site has all the production values of bad Soviet cartoons, but not in a good way.
but plant vs. zombies is better for your 4 year old? Something tells me your 4 year old could care less about the sites production values.
Theres a lot more stuff on there besides elmo as well.
let it go man…
4year olds know crap when they see it. At least mine does. Besides, zombie- and mutant vegetable-related knowledge is very valuable in the crazy near-singularity future that today’s youth is facing.
If she likes the Zen Garden part of Plants Vs. Zombies, try Plant Tycoon. My friend’s daughters loved it when they were five and seven.
Our five-year-old boy LOVED Windosill, and found it surprisingly (to me) replayable. That game’s only about $3 and so worth it.
There are also the Humungous Games CD games, which are hardly state of the art, but she won’t know that. Freddi Fish, Spy Fox, Putt-Putt, and Pajama Sam are the characters. There are dozens of games and they are really well done. You will have to play them on a Windows computer, on an older Mac that still has Classic, or under Windows running in Boot Camp or Parallels or Fusion.
Word World, by the way, is a great show!
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