Lack of trees as well

I've noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.

When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go... anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.

I posted because I have seen it go from expecting a bike rider to be a kid to expecting them to be an older adult. But I guess it's different depending on where you live.

Hell I was born in the mid to late 00s and i grew up in the 2010s, but I still did this, we did have dialup internet (i lived and still live in the middle of nowhere, but now we get satellite internet) and I distinctly remember the time we went with my sis and some friends and a fucking massive storm appeared, I thought we were gonna die lol, I think I was like 10 or 11 at that time

Yes I am an European, specifically one of the eastern kind

The problem is that there isnt really anywhere for kids to hangout any more. Playgrounds are for small kids, but even just biking to the library is completely out of the question for most middle schoolers/early teens who dont have a car. There's no malls, few small public parks, no arcades, small local dinners/ice cream joints, or any other "third places"that aren't just school or home. We, as a society, have spent the past 40 years destroying the concept of a public space and are now shocked that we dont see kids hanging out in non-existent spaces.

When I was a kid in the 90s, we biked all over. Loved going 5 miles down the highway to the surplus store. It wasn't a busy highway though and had a big shoulder.

Yeah I was never into arcade games as a kid. I realized right away that they were made to be difficult for that reason, so it felt like they were not worth it.

But games at home, at my commodore 64 or Amiga, were often difficult too. There was often no tutorials even. You just started playing and figured things out. I remember feeling like I had all the time in the world back then. As an adult, I often feel my time is limited and I should be doing something useful with it.

The real scams were games with countdown timers that went down constantly unless you were able to get a lucky object. Notably, Gauntlet. You had to keep putting in quarters or you would die even if you were really good.

Kinda. Publishers often found arcade difficulty spikes useful in home console games because it would mask how little content there was. Super Mario Bros could be beaten in an hour or two by most people if the lives system didn't send you all the way back to the beginning of the game when you ran out.

Making the game harder also made a smaller game last longer. If you remove the difficulty factor of lots of most old games, either by tweaking it or mastering it, then it becomes possible to beat the game in a matter of minutes.