Game Tactics and Parenting

Ok there has been a lot of talk about good and bad parenting since the great Gorilla, Harambe, thing at the Cincinnati zoo. I’m not going to say anything about the lady who was watching the kid, I’m simply going to try and help parents understand tactically where you should try to be at all times when watching your children using tactical thinking and good old fashion game play.

First of all lets look at a scenario, you have four things you want to keep safe. They all at any moment could run crazy directions and do dumb things to attempt to murder themselves. There is only one of you, so where is the smartest place for you to be? Let’s look at some pictures.

See the green dots are the things you want to protect. The blue dot is you. If we take a look at the current scenario what do you notice? See how it would be impossible for you to pay attention to all the green dots at once? Why is that? Positioning! This is simple to explain, if you are the blue dot you have placed yourself in a tactically inferior position to fulfill your goal of keeping the four green dots safe. If you were looking at the three on the left the one on the right could easily crawling into someplace they shouldn’t.

Equally as bad if you watch the one on the right like a hawk the ones on the left could be creating a master plan to take over the world, or escape somewhere to a dangerous location. So where should you be? Or better yet, where shouldn’t you be?

See that picture? The red circle is where you should not be. To be 100% certain that you can keep track of all green dots at any given time you should be outside the red circle and facing the center of it. Yes, it sounds dumb, and almost sounds like you cannot have any fun at all, but to meet your goal of understanding what is going on and having all the green dots be safe and understood at all times this is the position you should take.

See how you are outside the circle that contains the things you want to keep safe? This allows you to see everything that happens as it happens. No surprises. Now you say, what if they are not all equal? What if one is prone to be crazy, or bad? Then you position yourself in a way to be closer to that one. Like this…

See how you are still outside that circle, but you are closer to the one that is prone to do wacky and crazy things? I colored the one in yellow that you wanted to be more ready to help when the time was needed. Oh but things go wrong, I know. What if one of the good ones starts fighting with another of the good ones?

How do you handle this? the trouble maker one you are nearest is being good, but only because you are by them and watching them intently. If you ran to stop the fight, that the two that are shaded in red are having, then you would be violating the rule of going in the circle and lose sight of the yellow one and something terrible might happen. Turns out to be tactically sound you have a couple options here that I see. Lets start by showing what you should not do.

You quickly run into the circle from your previous position. You arrive at the fight and stop it, but where are you? In the circle! Can you see all the green dots at one time from within the circle? No! No you cannot. You are not doing the correct thing and the yellow filled dot suddenly crawls into something and stuff goes bad. What can you do? Think tactics. What if you changed the circle? A few seconds is not going to hurt the two fighting. Let’s try to get to this situation now…

See you grab the Yellow filled green dot by the face and move them to the white filled green dot. This changes things up the circle gets smaller and you remain in a tactical position to see and remain informed about all the green dots situations. Now you grab both the Yellow filled and the white filled green dots by the face and advance at the fighting pair. This puts you in a position to keep all the green dots from being dumb and ending up somewhere they should not.

This makes your circle of no entry very small. You can start smacking green dots until they realize the errors of their ways like nobody’s business from this distance. And nobody lost a foot or anything in the process.

Oh, but what if there was no time to gather the other two before the others were going to start stabbing each other? Always remain calm and NEVER go into the red circle. If you believe that one of the green dots will die soon in that fight. You can always advance around the outside of the red circle to get close to the fighters and begin smacking away with extreme authority.

Move like that and you can keep your eyes on all of the green dots like a champ. You have successfully escorted your 4 green dots to safety without letting any of them get themselves into situations that cause anything to be killed. Tactical thinking gets a lot done in more than just video games and warfare. Keep these things in mind in your life and sometimes things work out better. There is always that time when you just let one go to save the three and complete the mission though.

Hope this makes sense and remember tactics win. Please do understand the humor and the factual awesomeness here. I understand situations can be more dynamic than these, but keep a tactical mind as a parent and everything turns out better.

Originally published at gamedevbrain.wordpress.com on June 4, 2016.