But outside the tent pole AAA shoot-em ups, what does the "best 100 video games" look like? And what does scene construction, story arc and so on mean when you can do anything ?
Dwarf Fortress, if your children can manage to play it, has a steep learning curve but is a weird and wonderful simulation of a fantasy environment with immense depth. My college roommate played an immense amount of Dwarf Fortress and had minor fame among other DF players for the magnitude of his projects. For the years that he played that game he would play it non-stop - literally non-stop there was always a computer in our apartment running Dwarf Fortress 24/7 as dwarves worked on his instructions creating enormous monuments and castles. He always had crazy stories about what his dwarfs had done and how his fortress was developing.
Minecraft and Factorio are pretty popular but also pretty different from the shoot-em ups. At least, Minecraft can be, there are mods and variants of Minecraft that are basically fighting/FPS games.
Factorio touches on a key concept in programming. I think of it as gamifying the idea of scaling your code. You get a system working, you build a bigger system, you find a bottleneck, you remove it. You keep repeating this cycle, looking at your metrics, until you realize your factory is a mess of spaghetti that you can hardly keep running - so you refactor...
Sandbox/Building games like Minecraft, Terraria, Kerbal Space Program, Cities Skylines, Factorio are sort of 'up to you' to do what you want. It can allow for a lot of creativity.
There are story focused games if you want something like an interactive movie, while also exposing you to new ideas and sometimes cultures. Examples are God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted series (good combination of story and puzzles), Detroit Become Human, Nier Automata.
You can also punish them by making them play the Dark Souls series.
Do note that some of these games are quite violent/gorey but I assume you'll have your own tolerance filters you can apply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1xdE_6C_JU
Also if you are early innings Nvidia GeForceNow free tier can save you some money if you don't have a high end PC with the latest graphics.
0ad is also interesting as its like Age of Empires but easily moddable. Modding might be a good segway into long term interest in computer science.
A game in the Civilization series takes several hours to finish (or get far enough that you don't care to finish) and you might want to at least play a few times and get through some of the learning curve.
Of course, one can get a good feel for Pac-Man in 30 minutes, although if you want to get good, it'll take a lot longer.
It sounds like you're more looking to broaden horizons than for mind expanding games; broadening horizons would be more of trying lots of different things, and mind expanding would be things like Tetris Effect, Portal, Rez, Polybious Geometry Wars, Tempest (maybe), Katamari Damacy, Audio Surf, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Tetanus on Drugs (if you can find it), SeaMan, Odama (gamecube), Toe Jam and Earl (I never figured out wtf was happening in this game, but clearly drugs were involved), maybe A Boy and His Blob, the reverse level in Marble Madness, LSD: Dream Emulator for PS1 (I haven't played it, but it looks wild). Etc
Anecdotally there are well regarded games, like Red Dead Redemption 2, that have very well done setting, graphics, story, etc. and I found it boring. I also have grown a dislike for medieval setting games lately so I won’t likely spend $70 on Elden Ring. I’m not going to over analyze that, it just doesn’t appeal to me. I imagine many other gamers have strong opinions about certain genres, etc. as well.
Open worlds and being in control of decisions tend to work well because it gives a space where they are in control instead of adults bossing them around all the time.
The exercise of defining what a game is, is also philosophically useful, because there are a lot of things called games that most definitions will exclude, and there are types of games that feel less like "video games" specifically and more like "computer-assisted games" or "interactive stories". Nobody has great claims to these definitions and they should be held loosely.
Retro game content creators will happily make best-of lists to follow up on - and being an older generation, while they have definite preferences, they also have the depth of knowledge to back it up.
* Portal 2 - Great story and puzzle game. The first one is fantastic too and is between 1-3 hours in length on the first time.
* Zelda games - Decent story, good world building, heavy puzzle. I have a history with these games and have loved them for literally as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are playing these games with my dad.
* Firewatch - Very heavy story, simple game play. I loved the story for this game and the art style was fantastic. This was the first game I saw in 4k and I was blown away by how crisp it was.
* Chrono Trigger - Heavy story, classic SNES RPG. Square absolutely killed it in the 90s and this is a fantastic example of that.
* Final Fantasy 7 - Heavy story. Such a great game for so many reasons. Fairly long (40-55ish hours) and requires some strategy.
RPGs in general have a decent track record of good stories. There's a lot of good stuff out there, and playing games with your kids is great. My dad did it with me and those are some fantastic memories. Definitely one of the things that made us so close and we still talk about games on our weekly calls.
I'm reminded of this video, where a game-playing husband discusses his non-gaming wife's attempts to play games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7f3JZJHSw
Part of the problem his wife ran into was that she lacked the 'literacy' for games that her husband (who had played games growing up) had, and so wasn't able to perform basic interactions which he had experience with.
I think deep discussions about a topic require familiarity with the basics. - What kind of discussion can you hope to have or appreciate if you don't share fundamental understanding? You can probably ask what they found fun, or what's cool about it.
> what does story arc mean when you can do anything?
You might be able to appreciate Liana Kerzner's Lady Bits series. e.g. in this video, she discusses what 'agency' means in terms of games. She considers that there's the player's agency, the writer's agency, and the (diagetec?) agency of the characters in the story.
According to Metacritic, it looks a lot like Zelda, Mario, and Grand Theft Auto (among other notable games): https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/...
Whether that expands a teen's mind I'm not sure but I certainly enjoyed it as a teenager.
Before this game, my world was pretty simple and easy to understand, after it I had a lot of questions and wasn't really sure about anything.
I don't know if it is still that great. I think the technical community is definitely smaller now, and the game itself is more of a game than it was back then. However, I still think it is really cool, and definitely different from all of the shooter games.
Factorio.
And if they can handle something more hardcore, Unreal World and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
The Witness - a masterpiece of puzzle and level design, definitely expanded my mind. Nothing in that game is frivolous. Might be a little confusing at first, but if you explore and experiment its rules will become clearer to you.
The Outer Wilds - a technical masterpiece and a game where you can beat the game very quickly if you know what to do, but you have to put in about 10-15 hours of exploration all across a solar system to gain the knowledge of what you need to do in order to beat it. An excellent creepy, puzzly, and deadly mystery. Also a little different than other games in that instead of collecting trinkets and doo dads, what you're collecting is pieces of knowledge at different locations that can help you figure out mysteries at other places, and see some incredible landscapes that interact with each other and change over time.
Persona 5 Royal - The combat can get a little samey in this game, but the style, soundtrack, and world is amazing. Also love how you have to decide what activities you spend your free time on, as you can only do a few at a time.
Danganronpa series - Bonkers murder mystery graphic novel that's very creative story stretches across multiple games. Figuring out who killed who can take some lateral thinking. It uses pink blood so it doesn't seem super gory but the deaths are kind of dark if you think about it too much. It's a pretty mature game. Phoenix Wright games can give a similar experience but are much more wholesome and more appropriate for younger audiences. Still about solving murders though.
Civilization series - masterpiece of 'just one more turn' gameplay. I don't play it too many times in a year, but whenever I do sit down to play it again, I tend to lose a weekend to it. And it might lead them to go "hey that Terracotta Army is pretty cool, let's look that up on Wikipedia and find out more about it"
Baba Is You - clever puzzle that requires you to change your thinking entirely to solve its puzzles, as by pushing together and breaking apart words of sentences (as if they're blocks) you can change the rules of the level in very surprising ways. You really need to think outside of the box to solve these puzzles.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - a huge world to explore that just barf a bunch of icons on the map and tells you to go there to do some minigame thing like Ubisoft does. You see something that looks different and interesting in the distance? Go there, and you will likely be rewarded. Also tons of interesting physics puzzles that require some brain scratching to figure out.
God of War - great story, feels like you're playing a movie at times, gorgeous visuals, super fluid combat (actually tried going back to breath of the wild after a playthrough of this and BOTW's combat felt pretty boring in comparison), and even some clever puzzles thanks to being able to throw an axe that freezes things that you can recall from anywhere.
Into The Breach - Clever tactics game, kind of like chess in an environment with mechs, that helped refresh the formula by telling you exactly what the enemy is about to do on their next turn, so it becomes a puzzle in figuring out how to minimize or redirect their targets/movements and/or who needs to be eliminated most this turn.
There is this other game I never see mentioned. It's kind of annoying, the latest release is not on steam. It's called capitalism lab. Pretty fun economy simulation game. The thing that sets it apart is they try to go for some amount of realism. I suspect a few months playing this game would amount to a better understanding of how businesses work than an MBA.
You should also know what you're signing yourself up for. Video games (especially if you haven't played many before) demand more of you in a way that a movie does not, and simply cannot. A movie will continue at 1 second per second whether you are distracted, confused about the plot, or completely engrossed.
A video game does not. Until you can do the action required of you to progress, you are not progressing. Period.
Can't figure out this puzzle? Try harder or look online. Can't hit those jumps? Tough. Your aim is bad? Practice.
I think that's the biggest takeway from video games, they set a standard for you to meet and they will not give you an inch until you meet them. Much harder to fool yourself into thinking that you can do something when the game keeps telling you otherwise.
> 1. best video games to expand teenage minds Expand them how. Through the actions of playing the game (e.g. Baba Is You), or by discussing the context of the game (Fortnite/Candy Crush/Farmville). Baba Is You is a great example of the kind of game that will challange you to think in new ways. Fortnite/Candy Crush/Farmville are a great opportunity to discuss manipulation, addiction, and preying on the most vulnerable.
And, where are they starting from? What do they currently play? What skills do they currently have? Whatever they're playing, get them to play something different. Have they try the FPS game, see what it's like to have to play aggressively and at 100 miles an hour (Doom, either the original or the 2016 version for this). Play an RTS game and learn to act now, not when you have the perfect setup (StarCraft II).
> 2. What does the "best 100 video games" look like Some parts of that list looks similar to the top 100 movies of all time lists. Genre defining movies and movies incredibly important for their time, but kinda boring now. Others hold up remarkably well and are much better as emulated.
> 3. "And what does scene construction, story arc and so on mean when you can do anything?" For starters, you cannot do anything in video game. You are actually restricted to doing only those things which the designers allow you to do, intentionally or otherwise. This is a virtual world that they have built from the ground up themselves. Games can and do have story arcs, many AAA titles have a story in them or have the story as the focal point of the game. The developers built this world, if they want you to experience an arc they can force you to. They can make you enter cutscenes, or force you to talk to certain characters and make certain choices before the plot can progress.
I personally dislike story and skip past the story as much as possible. If I wanted a story with moving images I would have watched a movie. *The* defining characteristic of the medium is its interactivivity, its ability to let you do anything within the reals of possiblity of the game world. Why should I squander that ability in order to read lines of dialogue.
So back to your question, what do they mean? They mean essentially the same thing as in movies if the game shows you a story. We've all heard "show don't tell" as advice for movies/show. Well someone will come up with a similar phrase, and I'm betting on it having the form "__ don't show".
Finally, I'll give you some of my own recommendations. Take a look at those tentpole games, they're the blockbusters and Marvel of the video game world. Then try some of these:
- The Witness (don't look up anything and if your using trial and error you're doing it wrong)
- Passage (by Jason Rohrer)
- Democracy (really internalize the idea of token gestures)
- Phasmaphobia (play it together)
- Doom (both the original and the 2016 version)
- Patapon (rhytm game, psp emulator needed)
- Monster Hunters Freedom Unite 2 (plan, adapt, grind, coordinate, psp emulator needed)
None of these need expensive hardware (except maybe doom 2016), and monster hunters has a newer version that's made for PC, but it'd reccomend the older one with emulation