"Journey to Justinia" – how I got my 5-year-old son to sit still for 5 hours

http://justy.me/justy/2013/8/18/journey-to-justinnia-or-how-i-got-my-5-yo-son-to-sit-still-and-concentrate-for-almost-5-hours

by Bockit • 13 years ago

271 70 13 years ago

justy.me

vanderZwan• 13 years ago

This looks like so much fun. How much time does creating the maps take?

justy3• 13 years ago

It was heaps of fun! We both got really absorbed in it. I'd made the map the day before, off and on during the day and evening. Maybe 4-5 hours work.

donohoe• 13 years ago

See my comment on your post - but this would make for a great game-kit.

If you could come up with a flexible system for the fog-of-war and organize parts of the map to work with the areas they'd cover, then let parents/kids share/collaborate online or offline to make their own adventurers.

If this were a Kickstarter project I'd back it in a heart beat

fredley• 13 years ago

I love the creativity in this, it's just wonderful. Any chance of slightly more detail about the rules? Are chests populated with treasure when you design the map or is it generated randomly during an encounter? Is there a 'goal' or is it a just explore-neverending story type game?

simonbarker87• 13 years ago

Best Dad ever!

foobarbazinga• 13 years ago

This looks incredibly fun to play! Great :)

speeder3• 13 years ago

Whoa, this is hell cool! It make me miss the fun I had with my uncle...

My uncle loved to spend LOTS of time drawing stuff like this and making games similar to this one (although less RPGey and more puzzley)

Sometimes he did it with whatever paint software was available on the machine.

I never understood why instead of becoming a artist (he draw really well) or a game designer (he loved to design games) he went to become a prosecutor...

Also, another fun variation my uncle taught me: make your maps with matches, and use paper balls as characters (or coins, or beans, whatever), with matches you can simulate doors, opening and closing them, and have a more freeform roleplay thing, like simulate for example a space ship, and then a accident, as a asteroid hit the ship, and you then throw a heavy coin in your matches and see as they make a hole on the thing, and then the players try to survive in the ship full of holes, broken walls and stuck doors.

By the way, my uncle is still alive, is that we don't have time anymore :/ (also living 600km apart does not help either)

WalterSear2• 13 years ago

Why not build him a blog for his inventions?

speeder3• 13 years ago

I am certain he would never write on it. He don't read blogs, and don't care for them, and much less would write one.

justy3• 13 years ago

That's awesome! I like the real world physics touch.

jtsnow• 13 years ago

As a child, I would draw similar maps with monsters and artifacts using MacDraw Pro. I'd draw black layers to simulate fog of war and delete as play progressed. My friend and I would take turns creating maps.

It was loads of fun. If something like this gets kickstarted as others have suggested, I'd recommend a kid-friendly way to build maps. Creation can be more fun than playing and also gives kids a different set of problems to explore.

protomyth• 13 years ago

Another way to do "fog of war" is to imitate Warhammer Quest / Hero Quest where floor tiles are placed on the table. Might be a bit much for a 5 y/o given the articles points about the greatness of magnets.

diggum2• 13 years ago

You could also cut the gameboard into tiles and flip them over as the players approach an area.

tarice• 13 years ago

I've recently been using white sticky notes, which are quite easy to remove and cover a 3x3 square grid almost exactly, to great effect in a pen and paper RPG I run.

embwbam• 13 years ago

Oh man, I did something like this years ago, but for teenagers. It's super fun to make them. Just think maze + dice and you can come up with some cool stuff.

jasonjei• 13 years ago

These days not being able to sit still is considered a medical problem, when the truth is that it's just boys being boys. In fact, probably those who are bored more easily are engaged at the difficult to solve problems and games. When I was a kid, I was told my attention span was short and that I had ADD, but in truth it was that I was bored. Given a difficult programming problem, for example, such as learning Win32 for example, I could spend hours working on it because it became a puzzle. Kids that think creatively are probably easily bored by conventional attention getters. They like solving problems.

ericabiz3• 13 years ago

Actually, girls can have ADHD too (I should know--I am one, and I've been diagnosed.) Also, as someone who's been diagnosed with ADHD, saying "boys being boys" is not only untrue, but also dismissive of what IS actually a medical problem for some of us.

I wrote a blog post about ADHD called "Why I Feel Like A Failure, Even Though On the Outside, I'm A Success..." I think it might resonate with many here: (http://www.erica.biz/2012/failure-success/)

I would ask that you please not be dismissive or stereotypical of what is a real medical issue that some of us have had to deal with our entire lives.

speeder3• 13 years ago

erica, I doubt 20% of the population really has ADHD that is the current issue that has been cropping up.

He is not dismissing people that REALLY has the issue, he is dismissing the fact that people has been throwing this around a lot, without any need.

mdc• 13 years ago

I don't think jasonjei was being dismissive of real ADHD. He was just pointing out that it is often over and mis-diagnosed. Many kids are considered misbehaving or diagnosed with a medical problem because they can't sit still for hours at a time, but that really is just kids being kids.

I think jasonjei and you are on the same side of this issue. He was a normal kid that didn't want to be mis-labeled, and you have a real condition that deserves consideration. You should both be opposed to the lazy parents/teachers/doctors who extend ADHD diagnoses far beyond its real scope to medicate normal kids into compliance.

pekk• 13 years ago

The point about boys isn't that girls cannot have ADHD, but that boys specifically are over-diagnosed (and medicated with powerful substances) for behavior which is merely typical of their age or gender or both. Children are supposed to explore and get excited. They are not supposed to be putting in 60 hour weeks in the coal mines just yet. They're kids. Their brains are immature. Growing up makes them more suitable for the coal mines, you don't need to medicate them into an artificially premature maturity. That's the argument, anyway.

And here's a different, more controversial point. We used to have psychiatric disorders called hysteria and homosexuality. Now those have been reclassified out of existence. No one knows which of the current disorders will meet with the same fate. It's not impossible that while the help you get from your treatment is real (and the problems you face are real), ADHD is a poorly defined disorder.

gojomo• 13 years ago

Thanks for that post. Now almost a year later, is your medication/dosage/enthusiasm the same?

(Looking to see if you'd written a followup, I instead found your 2006 post about Adderall. Of course that's a different drug, but the older post is interesting for both the contrasts and similarities to your later Ritalin assessment.)

Tichy2• 13 years ago

Why do you automatically assume that not being able to complete the tasks you assign for yourself is a medical issue? Maybe "boys being boys" (and sometimes girls) just means they are not well suited for the kind of tasks that they are supposed to do. They might still be perfectly suited for other tasks.

So if Ritalin helps people to achieve their goals, great, but I don't think it implies that they had a medical issue when they were unable to complete those tasks.

Retric• 13 years ago

I have met several people with ADHD one of which was extreamly hyper and clearly had major issues the rest where fairly close to the norm. IMO, the real issue is spectrum disorders like ADHD tend to get over used and really need a sliding scale vs a simple tag. Aka this person has level 2 ADHD and has trouble sitting for more than 30 min, this person has ADHD lvl 10 and has trouble focusing for more than 20 seconds.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I tend to agree with this, for most folks who present "ADHD" like symptoms puzzles and exercise are pretty good cures. Often parents underestimate their kids, and that is a challenge. I sent a "problem" child off to design the language for a robot project, it had to be understandable by humans and the robot could only speak with four LEDs and a speaker that could play 10 canned sound effects.

He wasn't a problem at all, and his language was awesome! Sort of like C3PO on steroids.

lifeformed3• 13 years ago

Oh gosh, I used to do stuff like this as a kid. I only needed a piece of paper and pencil though, no other tools. I would draw an adventure puzzle like this, but the big thing was it used BOTH sides of the paper. When you went through a door, you went to the other side of the paper (you'd have to bend the paper around your finger a little bit to estimate where the door led to).

Also, there were many locks and keys and items (think Zelda). A door might have a strange symbol on it, and you needed to find the key with the corresponding symbol to advance. Or you needed to get the lava suit to get past the pit of lava.

This is what I did during class in elementary school, and challenged my friends and brother to beat them. Now that I'm 26, I still do the same thing, but with computers and in 3D.

vehementi• 13 years ago

Totally did this too, though without the innovation of using two sides of the paper. I'd draw mazes with monsters and stuff on grid paper, and use a piece of paper with hole cut in it to implement the player's vision (can only see 5 squares around etc.) Good times...

ArekDymalski• 13 years ago

Thanks for the inspiration. My son will love the "player's vision" concept.

rev087• 13 years ago

We did these too! But our little group of kids used two variants: the first was meant to be played by tracing your path with a pencil (so we could erase and reuse the map) through really narrow passages. The second was more interpretative; the players needed to use tools and the environment to progress (such as chopping down a tree and building a canoe to go through a river). We even had recurring characters from our real life experiences.

Our textbooks were full of mini maps like these around the edges.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

Haha awesome. I recall drawing insane war scenarios with stick soldiers in the most ridiculous situations. Every inch of the paper was different from the next.

lifeformed3• 13 years ago

That's great, I loved doing that too. Literally anything was a possible scenario for the stick figures, when all you had was a pencil and blank paper.

winter_blue• 13 years ago

lifeformed! I really do appreciate your work on Dustforce. It was a really great game, and work of art.

I'm looking forward to your new game. :)

lifeformed3• 13 years ago

Thanks! :) Glad you like it.

malkia• 13 years ago

As a dad Of 5 years old boy all I can say is thank you. He loves playing lego with me, and video games too.

A friend of mine with two boys close to mine did this for his kids: He would go one day earlier to some close hike trail or peak, and would put some coins in the ground, different places, etc. The next day he would go with the boys with a pirate map looking for the treasure.

Boys (and could be girls too) love these things. My son for example can get completely concentrated when comes to fishing (even if it's with some made up rod, and fake stuff in there). Last time we went to lake Casitas (California). He was hooked (unlike for him) for an hour doing his fishing.

officemonkey2• 13 years ago

I have a 5-year old too, and he loves LEGO and Video Games too. What video games do you two like? He LOVES the LEGO Batman game, but my wife is concerned about the LEGO guns.

The other day we played Minecraft on the iPad together and he built a house, two beds, and put two signs over the beds. One for himself (he typed his name all by himself) and one for me (he needed help to find the "p" in "Papa.")

Avenger42• 13 years ago

My wife and I (no kids) enjoy the LEGO Harry Potter games - wands instead of guns, and as far as I remember, when you fight enemy humans, you don't "kill" them, they just teleport away.

Most of the LEGO series of games are similar - LOTR has swords and bows & arrows; Pirates has swords and muskets (and in sword fights, IIRC, enemies fall down and break apart when they "die"); and Star Wars games have blasters and light sabers.

gingerlime2• 13 years ago

This looks super-cool. I kinda wish I was a dad to have a chance to play with my son (he's going to be born in October, so there's hope, and I should start preparing).

However, I must be totally stupid, but I don't get the rules, even after reading them twice, and looking through all comments on the post and on HN. I get the movements turn-by-turn. But how do you decide the outcome of encountering a ghost/spider/arrow with the dice? how do potions work? what's in the treasure chests? which other items can be collected? (in short, what am I missing?)

clarkmoody• 13 years ago

It may be that the little numbers represent how you have to roll. For instance, the {5/12} might mean you have to score a 5 on a roll of 2 6-sided dice (or one 12-sided die).

At the bottom of the whole map, he has a big list of these {N/M} scores along with characters.

gingerlime2• 13 years ago

yeah, you're right. Thanks. So I'm guessing higher than 5 wins, less loses? But what about the potions and other stuff you find throughout the game? I'm guessing something like this can give you, say a +1 dice points for 5 moves or something like that?

themstheones• 13 years ago

All the research on the subject shows incontrovertibly that 5 is way too young for video games.

lutusp• 13 years ago

All the research on the subject shows incontrovertibly that 5 is way too young for video games.

First, "all the research" means "all the psychological research". Recent scandals demonstrate that psychological research has the approximate value of astrological forecasts:

http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...

Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."

Second, one would want to compare video games with whatever a 5-year-old would be doing instead. Looked at that way, obviously a well-designed age-appropriate video game might represent an improvement over its alternatives in some cases.

Finally, let's let the parents decide -- you know, the people who ignored all conventional wisdom and decided to have the child in the first place?

vacri• 13 years ago

Speaking of sloppy work, you link to an article on social psychology yet extrapolate the findings to the whole of psychology. You then throw the baby out with the bathwater by claiming the entire thing is useless when it's not.

The nature of psychology lends itself to more fuzzy or fraudulent work, but by saying that psychological research is itself useless, you're also throwing away things like A/B testing, UX testing (including Apple's much-vaunted usability stuff), research into grief management, team-building research, research into cognitive recovery therapy after acquired brain injury, work looking into ameliorating sexism and racism, perception research for HUDs in fighter aircraft (my honours research), some pain management research, research into dealing with PTSD, research into crowd control and management...

... all this (and more) is apparently useless, simply because you've got a chip on your shoulder. Fuck I'm tired of people just taking pot-shots at a soft target that they don't understand and never bother to.

Tichy2• 13 years ago

That can't be true if only for the broad generalization. How are they supposed to have tested all possible, conceivable video games?

Would like to know how they did test, too - did they follow kids who played video games over a 30 year period to see how they turn out?

pg2• 13 years ago

This is a subtle example of the advantages of the Internet. When people made things like this in 1980, you'd never even hear about it.

mratzloff• 13 years ago

I have a coworker who adapts old text adventure games into simple roleplaying games for his young daughters. Planetfall is their favorite.

When I was a kid my parents didn't have a lot of money, so instead of playing video games, I would design entire worlds on paper that looked very similar. Of course, I couldn't play them--the D&D aspect to this is pretty neat.

(I also designed my own cardboard Transformers that would actually transform! I was really proud of those. I remember I had little sliding bits, like revealing the robot's head.)

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

I also designed my own cardboard Transformers that would actually transform!

Heh. I used to make paper Transformers that transformed. They were at least as fun as the real toys, and a lot more portable. I may even still have them somewhere in a box.

Later I graduated to making Lego Transformers that transformed. When I bequeathed my childhood Lego bin to my older son, it still had some Lego Transformers in it. I had to explain to him what Transformers were, because this was before the Michael Bay reboot.

drivers99• 13 years ago

When I was a kid my parents didn't have a lot of money, so instead of playing video games, I would design entire worlds on paper that looked very similar.

This makes me smile. I actually did this as well in the 80s. I was inspired by games I saw on my friend's computer, so I'd fold a piece of notebook paper into 8 pieces (or 16 if you use both sides) and draw "screens" that you could move between. I'd tear off a small piece of paper and draw the player's character on it. I'd design the game during class-time, then I'd have my friend play it at recess. He'd move the character around and I'd change things around to the correct screens when he moved from screen to screen.

corin_• 13 years ago

Many people would argue that the flip side of this is that less people would make things like this now that the internet offers so much more, easier time-consuming.

pg2• 13 years ago

I'm one of them. It is definitely a double-edged sword.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Can't get any easier than watching TV.

wslh• 13 years ago

But at the same time Internet doesn't offer many games for toddlers, say < 4 years old.

hammock• 13 years ago

I'm so glad I found this post. It brought back such great memories of when my friends and I used to make mazes, and paper maps and games eerily similar to the ones he shares.

In fact the first product I ever sold, was a maze I drew at age 5, to my aunt for $1.

agumonkey• 13 years ago

Or the author might have been distracted by the web instead of completing his idea.

diggum2• 13 years ago

This is great! A few years ago, I did something similar for my son and 3 of the neighbor kids. It was a very minimalized D&D type of game where they each picked from a stack of predefined player charts, then played a simple but thrilling campaign to rescue the kidnapped king. There were a few routes they could take, each with different hints and warnings from villagers along the way. In the end, 4 boys from ages 4-7 sat at the table, engrossed and attentive, for over 3 hours. They've since made their own maps and stories, though I think the making has been more fun for them than actually playing.

I love this approach, though, as it is almost something a kid could play by themselves or more easily create for one another and play together. It could even be played in the car on trips, reducing whining about playing with the ipad. (I didn't have ipads when I was your age!!)

10098• 13 years ago

That guy is a great father.

sadkingbilly• 13 years ago

Just to add, you can do this in an even simpler form and cater it toward your child's age. For example, instead of drawing a detailed maze like that, you can build a dungeon with blocks. It doesn't have to be big. Put some toys inside it to represent monsters, treasure, traps, etc. If your kids are 2-4, you can even skip the dice too. Put a puzzle of some sort before the final boss, like you have to play a series of tones on a toy flute to unlock the door, or pick a colored key, or say a magic word ("please"), etc. For child-friendly play, the monsters can be scary at first and then become your friend. Everyone can live happily ever after at the end (spiders and monsters too).

joshdance• 13 years ago

Super fun. I love little projects like this. I am sure the kid loves it, and they are making memories.

krisc• 13 years ago

Me and my twin brother did stuff like this when we were kids! We thought of it as playing "video games" on paper.

lancefisher• 13 years ago

This is really cool! My 5yo loves to draw games on paper. I let him play on the iPad almost as much as he wants, but often he prefers to draw the games, expand on them, and create his own. We make mazes for each other, and he creates levels for me to figure out.

I go down to our local newspaper, and buy newspaper end rolls for $1 each. These are the rolls of paper left over after printing. They are about two feet wide and probably 100 feet long.

Just today, I found a game for the iPad that lets him create his own platformers. He's excited to try it out tomorrow. It's called "My Doodle Game" https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-doodle-game!/id572842495?...

PixelPress also looks promising: http://pixelpressgame.com/

If anyone knows of other easy game dev tools for kids, I'd love to hear about them. I think it's good to keep the momentum going when he's having fun with something.

justy3• 13 years ago

If you want to DL the map and support the development of new ones, search Etsy for 'Justinia' :)

cpeterso• 13 years ago

This game reminds me of another drawing game: "How To Host A Dungeon". More info and instructions are here:

http://planet-thirteen.com/Dungeon.aspx

"How to Host a Dungeon is a solo fantasy pen-and-paper dungeon-building game. The game follows the progress of an imaginary dungeon from the dawn of time through to an arch villain attempting to conquer the world.

The creation of the dungeon is driven by random tables and procedures as monsters, adventurers, civilizations, and arch villains interact in an underground environment. The player records these interactions, maintains the dungeon map, and makes some choices in how they play out.

The end product of the game is a complete unique dungeon map and history which stands as an interesting artifact on its own or can be used as the basis of a dungeon crawl role-playing game campaign."

"Journey to Justinia" – how I got my 5-year-old son to sit still for 5 hours

Related Stories