The fascinating world of gaming - how kids educate themselves online

This week an important milestone was reached in my family – my nine-year old son was proud to announce one of his Youtube videos has had more than 1000 views. I know that's peanuts by Youtube standards, but it is worth mentioning as this whole gaming 'career' of his turns out to be much more than child's play. Young gamers like him already know what an online community is, they know the rules of engagement far better than the spammers pestering everybody for upvotes and they WRITE! A lot.
These kids are educating themselves to be tomorrow's Steemians and they will be better than us.

Original content

As all of here know it's hard to come up with hard to come up with original ideas that stand out from the thousands of new posts that appear everyday. Imagine how hard it is for these kids making videos of the most popular games out there. You cannot just play. You also need to come up with something new or at least funny to say. So they have game theories! One of the games young kids cannot get enough is Five Nights at Freddy's and it has generated tons of theories. (On my son's channel I've found a video asking “is there another pizzeria”? Better don't ask – all I know is the game is about a pizzeria, but I personally hate it.)

Game wiki

This is the place gamers learn how to write. They're own form of Wikipedia, where anyone can create a page about their favorite character or about the plot or whatever. My son hates being told to write something, but when it comes to games I've seen him diligently tapping away for hours on some game wiki. One day he even made it to first place in the daily creators rankings, with more posts than the admins. He'd made some five-six posts just because he likes the game. (In our unschooling life, that counts as reading, writing and comprehension!)

If you know all the characters, there's a gamer in your house!

The budding writer

I had to read it as my son insisted. And I did read a whole novel written by a FNAF fan and posted on some wiki. OK, it was not a good novel, maybe not even decent, but it was a whole novel written obviously by a kid. Someone going by the name of Tyler. It's called 'The return to Freddy's: The dreadful truth'. Not a bad title, I'd say. There were plenty of grammar mistakes and typos, but what I found refreshing was that authentic kid mentality – 'because I say so'. I raised the subject with my son, telling him parts of the plot were simply not plausible and he looked at me like I was a little retarded. Do you really need to know why there was toxic gas in the pipes? It just was. Doh!
And there are plenty more of these fan stories out there, all written by kids. My own kid started to write a novel of his own some time ago, but gave up, unfortunately.

Good comments

There are plenty of posts here on Steemit explaining to new users how to write a good comment. Little games already know this. Even those desperate to get new followers subscribers know that it's bad manners to promote your own channel in comments. “Please subscribe to my channel” is a big no-no!

Fighting censorship

Or getting political, as my kid puts it. Well, it wasn't really about politics, but some video he liked got censored, although there was nothing inappropriate. So the little gamers unleashed a storm of protests in the comments, supporting their fellow gamer. (Good luck for when you grow up and try uploading a political video!)

Copyright matters

Another of the hot issues here on our platform – the use of someone else's material without permission. That's another no-no in the gaming community! Apparently, you need to make sure no part of the video you're making, including the music, is copyrighted. I suspect some of the gamers probably don't give a damn about copyright, but my kid takes this seriously.

Game creation

To become a star in this world the best thing is to create a fan game and, again, there are plenty of those on the Internet. To be able to do this, most of these kids educate themselves in game development and that's really amazing. My son isn't there yet. He only knows how to use Scratch and made a few little games on it. Some of them quite difficult, so I lost, I'm sorry to say. Real games programs are a bit too hard for him at the moment and as much as I'd like to see him learning new things, I'm not putting pressure on him.
All in good time, I guess!

And here is the video my son is so proud of:

Thanks for reading