Everyone’s got their own way of enjoying games. I relish the challenge of smashing difficult bosses, my husband turns everything to story-mode, easy difficulty and breezes through so he can do the story and enjoy it.
When it comes to enjoying things together, it sounds like you’ve got it nailed. I can’t wait to get a controller into my son’s hands and see what he likes. 🥰
I noticed this too with my son, though I think I found the solution: he needed to see me modeling the thrill of victory in overcoming a challenge. I got him to watch me (exaggeratedly) struggle against some moblins in ToTK and celebrate when I won after a few deaths. That made his eyes light up and want to take on the challenge too.
That said he absolutely still prefers Minecraft on Peaceful mode lol
I've had some very similar experiences with my older son. We play Mario Kart regularly, but he doesn't ever want to enable CPU players, and regularly asks me to slow down and occasionally to let him win (although he's been getting a lot better about keeping his cool when things don't go his way) - and generally gravitates towards games that enable playfulness with minimal or no consequences. (Mario Kart World's Free Roam mode has been a big hit.) He also really took to Donut County, but needed a lot of encouragement and help to get over some of the trickier level humps (and I handled the final boss battle for him.)
Surprisingly, something he really took to recently is a web game called Space Waves (apparently it's a knockoff of Geometry Dash? and is basically just a slightly less annoying obstacle game in the vein of Flappy Bird.) For whatever reason, he's absolutely fine with failing levels in this game over and over again, grinding out incremental progress until he can clear. Maybe he's just seen enough YouTube clips of people failing really hard challenges in these games? Maybe the game's instant-retry loop is forgiving enough? In any event, it's been an odd duck in his game lineup - something where the challenge *is* the entire point, and where he's been happy to meet it head-on.
I obviously can't speak to what it is with this game and your son, but I think with mine some of it was just developing distress tolerance and self-regulation. But honestly, who knows? So much of parenting remains mysterious, even as it happens before my eyes.
What you describe reminds me of playing with my youngest daughter, where we both have very different play styles. She too would prefer doing things her way, regardless of what the game might suggest you should do.
When we played Kirby and the Forgotten Land together, I would always try and encourage her to look for the secrets throughout the levels - because that's what I wanted to do. She would rather blast through the level though, or just mess around. It would frustrate me sometimes that we weren't on the same page. Except when it came to the boss fights, that's when we finally worked together well, especially towards the end of the game - some of those final battles were hard, I really needed her help!
Everyone’s got their own way of enjoying games. I relish the challenge of smashing difficult bosses, my husband turns everything to story-mode, easy difficulty and breezes through so he can do the story and enjoy it.
When it comes to enjoying things together, it sounds like you’ve got it nailed. I can’t wait to get a controller into my son’s hands and see what he likes. 🥰
I noticed this too with my son, though I think I found the solution: he needed to see me modeling the thrill of victory in overcoming a challenge. I got him to watch me (exaggeratedly) struggle against some moblins in ToTK and celebrate when I won after a few deaths. That made his eyes light up and want to take on the challenge too.
That said he absolutely still prefers Minecraft on Peaceful mode lol
Lol Some wasn't built in a day!
Rome *
I've had some very similar experiences with my older son. We play Mario Kart regularly, but he doesn't ever want to enable CPU players, and regularly asks me to slow down and occasionally to let him win (although he's been getting a lot better about keeping his cool when things don't go his way) - and generally gravitates towards games that enable playfulness with minimal or no consequences. (Mario Kart World's Free Roam mode has been a big hit.) He also really took to Donut County, but needed a lot of encouragement and help to get over some of the trickier level humps (and I handled the final boss battle for him.)
Surprisingly, something he really took to recently is a web game called Space Waves (apparently it's a knockoff of Geometry Dash? and is basically just a slightly less annoying obstacle game in the vein of Flappy Bird.) For whatever reason, he's absolutely fine with failing levels in this game over and over again, grinding out incremental progress until he can clear. Maybe he's just seen enough YouTube clips of people failing really hard challenges in these games? Maybe the game's instant-retry loop is forgiving enough? In any event, it's been an odd duck in his game lineup - something where the challenge *is* the entire point, and where he's been happy to meet it head-on.
I obviously can't speak to what it is with this game and your son, but I think with mine some of it was just developing distress tolerance and self-regulation. But honestly, who knows? So much of parenting remains mysterious, even as it happens before my eyes.
What you describe reminds me of playing with my youngest daughter, where we both have very different play styles. She too would prefer doing things her way, regardless of what the game might suggest you should do.
When we played Kirby and the Forgotten Land together, I would always try and encourage her to look for the secrets throughout the levels - because that's what I wanted to do. She would rather blast through the level though, or just mess around. It would frustrate me sometimes that we weren't on the same page. Except when it came to the boss fights, that's when we finally worked together well, especially towards the end of the game - some of those final battles were hard, I really needed her help!