Thoughts on Doom from a 7-year-old

[DavidN]

A while ago, my daughter Penny was bored of her usual Minecraft and Dreamlight Valley favourites and asked if there was something new we could play together. I suggested that she could try playing Doom with me, and she breathed in, stood up tall, and bravely and dramatically said "...I knew this day would come." So I set her up on my desktop computer and I joined in on my laptop - here are some things I observed!

 

Content

If it were still the early 90s I probably wouldn't have let a seven year old play Doom (so okay, Dad, you were right). But she'd never been bothered by it when glancing at it over my shoulder, even eagerly asking me to "do the fountain again" which I would come to realize meant the voluminous gushing effect when a Cacodemon is killed with the Deadmarine effects - and I felt that the bloody effects were far enough removed from realistic these days that it wouldn't disturb her. And I also feel that it's important to note that she and all her friends love things that are absolutely bloody terrifying anyway - Poppy Playtime with its demented Sesame Street monster with a mouth full of needle-teeth, the horrors of Freddy Fazbear and his chain of possessed restaurants, and even Minecraft is pretty horrifying when you first see the weirdly proportioned dark Enderman out of the corner of your eye (followed by it stabbing you in the face).

 

She got through episode 1 on the easiest difficulty setting with no deaths at all, which is impressive even bearing in mind I was around to help her through some of the bigger encounters. She did get a bit panicky once we went up a difficulty level and entered episode 2, though, so now she prefers to play Chex Quest instead. Other than that, there were only a couple of things that disturbed her:

 

1. The player's dead face on 0 health. I'd never even thought of this as particularly disturbing because he doesn't look distressed to me, just sort of tired - meanwhile, the Ouch face still shocks the hell out of me whenever it pops up.
2. "I don't like how you can move the bodies". I didn't understand this one at first, imagining she was seeing the weird movement of corpses bouncing down (or even up) stairs when they're killed with some momentum. But I later worked out that she meant how the corpse graphics only have one direction and always face you when you turn around - that's another thing that I'd never really considered, but that I can see might be strange to someone who doesn't understand that they're just rendered as a single sprite.

 

Graphics

I'm honestly really proud that Penny isn't a graphics snob like I expected most children to be. I think that nowadays, the games industry race to shun "old"-looking graphics in favour of new ones has more or less stopped, and we're at a point where games can be 2D, 3D, flat-shaded, pixelly or realistic and they all coexist. As a result, Penny doesn't really have a concept of old/new graphics - for her, a game looks how it chooses to look and it's as simple as that.

 

Apart from the issue with the corpses above, the only graphics-related thing that tripped her up was that your appearance doesn't change based on what you have equipped or what you're wearing. In Minecraft, these are always visible to other players - they'll be able to see the four possible pieces of armour in the appropriate places, and the item that you have equipped is visible in your hand. As we know, Doom doesn't do this - the player always stays the same colour they started with even if they picked up blue or green armour, and will appear to be firing a little rifle no matter whether you have a pistol, rocket launcher or just your fist equipped. Having all these sprite variations would have been a bit much in the early 90s, but having the appearance change is a logical expectation that we didn't really have back then.

 

Mechanics

The mechanics of Doom are simple enough - collect things, point weapons at demons, shoot them and get to the exit - so this was all very straightforward for her to grasp. She preferred avoiding the mouse and keyboard controls and instead used the Playstation 2 controller that I've had attached to my computer for the last twenty years, because she's got very used to navigating first-person games with dual analogue sticks - this is a skill that I had to learn much later in life and I'm still not good at it! She had some difficulty with precision because you're just so enormously fast in Doom, but over her lifetime it's been pretty incredible to have seen her evolve from barely being able to walk a character in a straight line to having precise control over what she's doing.

 

She had a small panic when running away and finding more health, because she assumed that all the medikits and potion bottles she was picking up were going into an inventory that she didn't know how to use. I'm struggling to think if there's anything similar in her other games - the only thing in Minecraft that you 'use' immediately on pickup are the little orbs that represent experience, so she didn't have a lot of context here. The only other things she didn't immediately understand were things in the game that she reasonably has no idea about - she doesn't know what shells are and identified the sprite as batteries instead, which works equally well as a concept for fuelling something.

 

But the most surprising revelation I learned from playing Doom with Penny is…

 

Doom is a game about building things!

Obviously it's about shooting demons, of course, but she made me realize that that's been pretty secondary for a couple of decades now. Through what Penny's seen in my interactions with it, Doom is really about people building these big techbases or caves or castles and setting up challenges for other players in them, just as much as it is about actually playing those creations.

 

She's seen me going around adjusting things in UDB, and it took her a bit of time to understand that editing the game happens in a separate environment from playing it. In Minecraft, if you want to build or move around freely, you can just flip the game into creative/spectator mode without having to exit and change things around externally - and she saw me zooming through the same Doom worlds in an editor 3D preview and in the game, so why shouldn't she assume that they were the same thing? And now that I'm thinking about it, it's not impossible these days to imagine some combined editor/Doom source port that would allow you to modify a Doom level while it's being played, just one step beyond the 3D previews that we never had in the 90s.

 

I hope we get to play more - and hopefully she'll be interested in trying Ultimate Doom Builder for herself quite soon :)

 

[Dusty_Rhodes]

It's too often that we don't give kids the chance to really create and voice opinions about things. This is a really beautiful example of letting that happen! I also hope you two play more, that sounds like a wonderful family binding experience. 

[Maximum Matt]

Sounds like you've got a long way to go before she's ready for Plutonia

[CrocMagnum]

Thank you for sharing that lovely anecdote. 

 

[Zoti]

On 3/2/2024 at 3:20 AM, DavidN said:

I hope we get to play more - and hopefully she'll be interested in trying Ultimate Doom Builder for herself quite soon :)

Future Cacowards on the way ;)

Edited March 3 by Zoti

[Vermil]

Indeed, the closest to in game map editing classic Doom has got is probably Doomsday's inbuilt Bias light editor:

 

 

 

Edited March 3 by Vermil

[Redneckerz]

I propose the Cacowards get a Post of the year award, and this thread as a contender.

[ZeroTheEro]

On 3/2/2024 at 10:20 AM, DavidN said:

 

1. The player's dead face on 0 health. I'd never even thought of this as particularly disturbing because he doesn't look distressed to me, just sort of tired - meanwhile, the Ouch face still shocks the hell out of me whenever it pops up.
2. "I don't like how you can move the bodies". I didn't understand this one at first, imagining she was seeing the weird movement of corpses bouncing down (or even up) stairs when they're killed with some momentum. But I later worked out that she meant how the corpse graphics only have one direction and always face you when you turn around - that's another thing that I'd never really considered, but that I can see might be strange to someone who doesn't understand that they're just rendered as a single sprite.

Funny thing, I felt the same when I was a kid playing shareware Doom at the time, pickup face on below 30% health scares me more than the dead face, and also realizing the corpses don't turn like the live enemies was.

[DoomGappy]

This is the cutest thing. I've noticed a bit of that too with my brother, he said that "Doom looks really good for a game made in 1994". He thought the game was much more recent. I guess that's the benefit of having a more varied landscape for games that don't just aim into full realism and rising appreciation for pixel art thanks to the indie scene.

[DavidN]

On 3/3/2024 at 7:12 AM, ZeroTheEro said:

Funny thing, I felt the same when I was a kid playing shareware Doom at the time, pickup face on below 30% health scares me more than the dead face, and also realizing the corpses don't turn like the live enemies was.

 

I've just remembered that I used to be very scared of the heartbeat monitor on Blake Stone, and always had to turn its sound off! I'm really not sure why.

[Gifty]

On 3/1/2024 at 6:20 PM, DavidN said:

Even eagerly asking me to "do the fountain again" which I would come to realize meant the voluminous gushing effect when a Cacodemon is killed with the Deadmarine effects

 

The fact that my Dead Marine mod has persisted at all in the memory of a young child is absolutely trippy and mind-blowing to me. Not something I ever anticipated!

 

Delightful read, just really nice to see a parent and kid bonding over a shared experience.

[Scuba Steve]

"What are you making, hun?"
"A Doom map."
"Cute!"
"...of our house."

[NeilForshaw]

On 3/2/2024 at 2:20 AM, DavidN said:

I knew this day would come

XD she definitely knows you XD

 

On 3/2/2024 at 2:20 AM, DavidN said:

the Ouch face still shocks the hell out of me whenever it pops up

I remember when I first saw this. Cause the early versions were bugged so it was exceptionally rare. Been playing for months then suddenly it appeared out of nowhere. My brother didn't believe me when I told him.

Think it was more that after months then suddenly this appears so more freaky than the face itself.

 

It is interesting to hear what people who (more and more so nowadays D:  ) were not there when doom came out what they think of it.

[Eurisko]

This is brilliant! 
My eldest son is 13 and I got him playing Doom a while ago. It is indeed a  fantastic experience to pass this game on.

 

We just finished playing both SIGIL wads together. Moving onto Final Doom next…..
 

[CacoKnight]

Isn't amazing and beautiful how much you can observe and learn from kids?

I'll never stop saying this but I haven't touched a game in like 25 years and I re-discovered Doom after 30+ years only because of my son and now I am addicted to this marvel while he's playing all kind of other games, FPS etc. and I'm there looking at those new AAA games thinking "how can they even compete, look how they move and shoot, the only one that comes close is HL2 in my opinion".

 

Doing 20 other things now but I'll read the story again later, you just enjoy your time with the kids, it's a wonderful thing.

[Klickach]

I love how child's perspective on different things is very often different from adult's perspective (well, because child had much less experience in life) and it is always interestiing for me to read posts like this. I wonder what your kid will think about building levels

[TheShep]

I wonder what my dad would've posted 30 years ago when he helped me mod doom when i was 8 years old... with Barney pinkies, Energizer bunny sargeants, Bill Clinton cacodemons, shoulder-mounted chicken launchers... ?? (He's still around, just not a gamer, even with his gaming laptop, lol.)

Probably nothing quite as awesome and detailed as this. Thanks for sharing!

[Reisal]

It's great to hear things like this, especially from a kid's perspective. Sooner or later, she'll probably want to pick up the game and play it again because of her prior experience and move up on the skill level over time.

[bioshockfan90]

Adventures of Square would be a fun WAD to try with your daughter - similar vein to Chex Quest, just for the modern age.

 

Fun read, I vividly remember sitting on my mom's lap at age 5 watching her play Doom 3 and having bad dreams that night only to be curious about it at a later age and eventually installing Skulltag at age 7 on a crusty Dell laptop and playing KDITD over and over on my keyboard, since, well, that's how my parents played and it and a laptop only has a trackpad. That and Fava Beans were my jam for a long time. I think I just kinda did that and eventually got my own desktop and started playing some community works based on the Cacowards and dipped my toes into mapping in 2016 with DUMP 2. Been sort of an on/off addiction since then. 

 

I'm glad you're letting her explore what she wants to play, Chex Quest is a fun playthrough and it goes to show you don't have to play any one way to have fun with Doom's engine. I think it's a great game for building hand-eye coordination and reflexes, as well as some of the more aesthetically pleasing WADs inducing that creative spark in me (but she has you, a mapper for her father so I can't imagine the apple falls far from the tree in that regard). No wrong way to go about it, playing your compiled RAMP works has shown me that if you give any person access to Doom editing, especially in the past few years, there's no telling what they'll make. Heck, maybe they'll stick around and push out a Cacoward winner given enough time. So I dunno, it's just charming seeing this interaction happening both isolated in a bubble and as a hope that Gen Alpha will have interest in our game of choice on this forum, and I can't wait to be an old geezer yapping on here in 2065.

[CacoKnight]

2 hours ago, bioshockfan90 said:

Adventures of Square would be a fun WAD to try with your daughter

I had no idea this one existed, can't believe how much fun I'm having right now!

[DiceByte]

Lucky kid. I had to wait till I was 12 to play Doom! Anyways, I like to hear what a 7-year old kid thinks of doom, and how confused she is at why the monsters look 2d. We have just evolved to far. It’s also nice to see a kid play something apart from Roblox skibidi toilet tycoon or something like that. This kid ain’t a cocomelon kid. This kid is a doom kid.