I hear the tape drive loading screech in my dreams sometimes. I cut my teeth on a VIC-20 and later a C-128, then Amiga 500 and 2000, then finally PC, spending hours typing lines of code from a magazine just to see a blocky pixel move across a TV screen.

Gaming has been one of the constants in my life. I’ve played everything. But these days? I’m finding modern gaming increasingly boring, and I also have difficulties fitting games into my tighter schedule as a dad. The AAA industry feels like a factory assembly line, so I retreat into a few niches like sim racing, open-world escapism like Cyberpunk and Red Dead Redemption, or deep strategy runs in BattleTech. I still log into LOTRO when the mood strikes, and I pull out old DOS, Amiga or C-64 games more often than I care to admit. For the short breaks there's Torn City and Top Drives.

But gaming isn't just about me anymore. It's also about my seven-year-old son.

Our boy is incredible, but he operates on his own wavelength. He’s homeschooled, and for a reason: the moment people put expectations on him (“sit still”, “do this worksheet”, “act this way”), he shuts down. Sometimes blocks all interaction. Traditional kindergarten was a tough challenge, so we pulled him out of school before it even started. It was a good decision. He needs to explore the world at his own pace, without the pressure of arbitrary demands.

Back to the point. He loves gaming. Specifically, he loves building stuff. He’s a SimCity kid at heart. He loves trains with a burning passion. We spend hours hunched over either the Brio, Lego, Märklin or LGB model train – or the PC, laying out roads and plotting a perfect medieval village in Manor Lords. He’s a natural architect.

Side-note: he also loves me or him crashing a rally car down the hill full of trees...

The problem starts when he asks to play something on his (my old) phone (LAN only, no SIM-card).

The mobile game landscape is an absolute dystopian nightmare IMO. He tries hundreds of games, looking for that simple, creative hit. Instead, he gets garbage. Adware disguised as a puzzle game. The same puzzle game with different names, over and over...

Worse than the annoyance, though, is the fear. I am genuinely sick and tired of the ads. He’ll be solving puzzles in some free app, and suddenly the screen cuts to a screaming, hyper-violent ad for some zombie survival game, or a creepy, jump-scare horror ad. He’s seven. He gets frightened.

He hands the phone back to me with a look of anxiety, his creative flow completely shattered by some predatory algorithm trying to farm clicks. It makes my blood boil. You could argue we should not have given him the phone in the first place. Yes, point taken.

Originally, he played Luanti on the phone. If you don't know it, it’s the continuation of Minetest, an open-source, moddable voxel engine that gives us the Minecraft vibe without the Microsoft account nonsense or the predatory marketplace. He can build to his heart's content, offline, ad-free, and safe.

He also has an Amazon tablet, where he can play kids games. They bore him immensely in the meantime. So we allowed other games, such as “Idle” games. Games where something is built while solving puzzles to get energy for progress. But things are clearly out of hand now with the ads that appear in rather harmless games.

So, we are purging now. The adware is gone. The “free-to-play” trap doors are closed. We are retreating to the safe harbors. We’re sticking to Luanti. We’re diving into OpenTTD, the open-source transport tycoon successor, where he can lay train tracks and schedule trucks. No pop-up will ever demand three bucks or watching an ad for a “locomotive pack.”

I went though F-Droid in search of reasonable free games that he would enjoy. I didn't find much. So I need your help. I know you are out there. I need recommendations. PC (Windows, Linux) and Android. Maybe mobile Linux too, we're looking at a PinePhone for him. The rules are strict: No ads. No predatory monetization. Premium upfront is fine, free and open source is better.

He loves building, city sims, and trains. Minecraft/Manor Lords style building is a hit. Open world exploration is great. If it involves laying down rail lines or managing a medieval town, he’s in. Robots, too. Graphics don't matter much, so emulated 8-bit games also work.

I refuse to let the modern gaming industry scare my kid or kill his creativity just to squeeze a few cents out of an ad impression. I’ve seen gaming go from the C-64 to whatever this hellscape is today, and I’m drawing the line. Help me build a library of games that actually respect the player.

Drop your recommendations on Mastodon (https://fedi.at/@jhunnius). Thanks a bunch.

#GamingDad #OpenSourceGaming #Luanti #OpenTTD #Parenting #IndieGames #RetroGaming

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