Gaming with a 2-year old

Tonight Vivian needed a little break from Quin. So I took the opportunity to have him tag along with my activities. We fixed a small issue with one of the backlights on one of the coin slots on the arcade machine (Quin says “Fix! Light?”)

After we played with the treadmill just a bit (he didn’t get the hang of that at all), I decided to see if we could attempt an arcade game together. Generally, he won’t really let me play a game because he wants the controls. And if he gets bored, I can’t really play either because he’ll end up in the shop potentially playing with something dangerous. So I wasn’t really optimistic.

I hadn’t played Defender in quite a while, so I pulled it up on the machine. It turned out to be a good choice! My Defender/Q*Bert panel has a second joystick in the middle (for playing Q*Bert). Quin grabbed onto that joystick and used it as “his controller” for the game. Which works out pretty well in this case because what he mostly did was push and pull the joystick along the diagonal which translated to left and right inputs to the game. I’ve setup Defender so that it doesn’t respond to those inputs. So basically, I was able to play the game and Quin had the illusion that he was playing too!

That worked for a couple of games. Then Quin found the buttons. The next couple of games featured random hyperspacing and smart bombs going off at less than optimal times. Quin did seem to enjoy it. He laughed a few times (at what, I’m not really sure) and he kept saying “uhver one” (“another one”) requesting another game.

Then he found that pressing the quarter credit button made a deep electronic sound which he seemed to enjoy a lot. Later, I found out that Defender doesn’t credit any more games past 99 credits. Did you know that?