Young children and video games

[casperes1996]

Thank you so much. I currently work at IT Support and I'm honestly so tired of it. Especially the long nightshifts that can be 14h long and at nights you are all alone and it's all on you, which can be very stressful.
Day shifts from 8-16 are okay, but it's the weekends and nightshifts that I highly dislike. Sucks to get yelled at in the middle of the night or early in the morning. What kind of a person goes to work at 4am and calls IT Support and just starts yelling?
There's one guy that constantly calls and yells at everyone, but he doesn't even tell you what's wrong or which computer he has problems with. He just yells and throws stuff (I am dead serious) and the last time I asked him what is exactly wrong and which computer he just screamed that it doesn't work and told me to go f* myself and hung up. So I am pretty motivated to change my life no matter how difficult it will be. Unfortunately I have to self-teach myself, because I often work nearly 200h per month. I asked my boss to give me less work and less hours but I got more. September isn't looking good either.

I already have some sort of experience with Unity and PHP and MySQL and I took Python classes at the university. When I was working at one gaming company as a programmer I decided I will never want to become a programmer and went for IT Support. It's getting worse day by day.
So I'm very motivated to (re-)learn coding.

Thank you so much for your reply.

I mean, getting yelled at isn't fun regardless of whether it's night or day. I almost prefer working nights myself, but for me it's a super tranquil thing of just sitting down with some coffee, writing some code, checking in the changes to git, debugging tests that don't go through and that's it. Most communication when it is night work is done via text, nobody screams or throws tantrums. And for me it's a choice to do it at night

You probably know the saying:
"When IT doesn't work, they ask what you're there for when there's problems anyway. When it does work they ask what you're there for since it works and you're not needed"

To me it sounds like it might be a good idea for you to not just try and get into programming g(though I recommend that too) but also just immediately start looking for other work within the field you already are in. It doesn't sound like a healthy work environment, so if you can quickly find some IT work at a better place while you (re-)learn programming that might be better for you.

I recommend staying far away from the games industry. If your experience with programming is with a video game studio then you've gotten a bad first impression. Video game companies are notorious for treating their workers worse than any other programming gig out there in basically all possible ways. From the work environment to the pay it's all worse.
Games make for fantastic hobby projects because they're a lot of fun to play with and they can often get people interested in computing but unfortunately the industry isn't really great.

We are quite on a tangent from the thread topic at this point though.
If you want to get some pointers on (re-)learning or anything though you can PM me or ping me if you start a new thread. If you read the developer forums here I've also already given a lot of thoughts on good ways of approaching learning, recommendations for resources, etc. and offer tutoring when time permits me to and give folks the opportunity to add me on Discord (or join a server I've set up recently explicitly for this) if they'd like faster turn around time for code-level help

 

[ackmondual]

Yeah, there doesn't seem to be any "set age". Gotta go with what you know about your child.

My father had a rule of "no video games on weekdays" which seemed harsh, but TBF, I didn't really have the grades to convince him otherwise :\ I grew up with video games with neighborhood friends and they turned out just fine when we started at 6. However, this was on NES. Didn't really have to worry about child inappropriate stuff like realistic violence, gore, sexual content, politics, ads, and IAP.

I've seen one family let their kids game on time controlled phones when they started at 6 to 8, and continue into high school. The adult has to use an app to grant more play time for video games (I presume you can still make emergency calls). At another household, a utility shuts down all electronics after 8pm. Just make sure they don't get addicted. It's not unlike too much TV, too much internet, soda, food, etc.

 

[heysushil96]

I don't think there's a fixed age for that (has there been any research done on this?). Anyway, my neighbor's kid is 3 years old and he plays with me sometimes. He can definitely play some older games like Super mario, Excite bike, etc. He even plays NFS but totally sucks at Hollow knight.

 

[clementishutin]

I started playing with super mario but it was for a limited time.
I was allowed to play 2 hours on weekend only.

 

[cosmichobo]

I think that parents should control the time that children spend playing games. It is also important to what kind of games they play. A lot of violence in games is always bad for children

No proof of this - with regard to tv or video games. In over 70 years of research, no conclusive decision.

Sure, I wouldn't let my 7 year old play COD...