On the other hand, this just feels gross... If my parents just picked a video game for me and decided I was going to take a course on it I don't think I could be convinced to give a shit about it.
I got closer, and sure enough, he had a window full of python code!
It turns out that Roblox had (has?) basically no anti-cheat measures built in, so you can download a hacking toolkit that gives you direct python control of all the game's memory
I told him that cheating is wrong and you're only cheating yourself of the satisfaction of a game well-played, and then walked him through using the toolkit to make a new cheat.
His popularity skyrocketed among his buddies after that, haha
As an example there are basically no hard copies of photos and videos now so a kid could potentially lose any memory of their child hood they didn't share on a social network or that their parents didn't document for them.
Facebook encouraged uploading of full albums when it was popular but all of current tools heavily encourage curation to project an image or that for fun images are ephemeral.
There are tools that help mitigate this like dropbox and iCloud, but as far as I know they only save images taken on the device and not images sent to you.
As a kid, cheating was often the only way I could actually play a game and enjoy it. It was cheating or not play at all. I used to play all kinds of games with printed walkthroughs.
Later when I got more proficient I needed cheats less and less and berated myself of using them.
Now as an adult I sometimes still "cheat", because it's not worth it cursing at the screen over and over for not finding that one solution to a puzzle. Or my kids get bored watching when I get stuck in a place for too long.
So no, for me cheating is not wrong. Cheating in online competitive games, thats a different story though.
"Oh, you invested 3 hours getting to level 8? Well, you died - start all the way from the beginning again and sink another 3 hours to have a few minutes of practicing level 8 before you die again..."
Screw that, I have a job and family, I don't have time to sink 100 hours to reach the end "legitimately" so I cheat and take away permadeath so that I can practice the endgame without the grind.
For example, I saved a backup copy of the temporary save file in Teleglitch[0] to allow me to start at the beginning of level if I die instead of the very beginning of the game, and as a result I could practice the later levels without having to grind through first levels over and over.
Imagine if you could only learn a piano piece by starting over from the beginning every time you mess up. It's absurd. The fastest way to master a piano piece is to practice the measure you are bad at until you have it down. I have no qualms cheating at video games that don't respect my time.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/234390/Teleglitch_Die_Mor...
It’s not the kind of game I play for the challenge of staying alive, rather for the progression and development of base/gear/tech. Plus past mid game, there’s tools available to avoid death consequences anyway (totems etc).
Always gotta be careful in the use of cheats, mods, and game modifiers that the underlying challenges and enjoyment in the game aren't sucked out. But careful use can take away pointless grind and turn an impractical time sink into something that fits enjoyment into a smaller amount of free time.
That's not to say your style is not okay - it's a single player game, do whatever you like! But I think "wasting time" or "absurd" is a blatant miss-characterization.
It's like a multi-phase boss where you can do the first 2 phases with your eyes closed, but you die really fast on the 3rd phase because you haven't mastered it yet. The problem is when the first 2 phases take 10 minutes collectively. So basically you pay a time tax of 10 minutes, have a few precious seconds of practicing phase 3 before you die and have to pay another time tax. A lot of games (not just roguelikes) fall into this trap of having unavoidable time taxes.
Games that are conscious of time taxes like Guitar Hero, Celeste, Crypt of the Necrodancer, etc., usually give you some sort of "practice mode" where you can practice the part you are stuck on without paying the time tax. It's games that uncompromisingly force you to pay time taxes that I cheat at.
I guess in Super Mario Bros. it was revolutionary that you could use warp zones to go down pipes, but you still had to get to them.
And from what I can tell this flexibility isn’t going to change, since it’s what is making roblox so popular.
I can’t watch what my son is encountering in such a game every moment, so any online games for kids really need to have much better safety mechanisms.
Some more info, and you can also google roblox sex if you want to be disturbed.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game...
Again, no judgement, I don't see optimal solutions here, just choosing the least worst option maybe.
I just can't imagine being a parent myself and feeling equipped to protect a child from adult material these days so it feels like the only viable alternative is to have adult conversations and enable the child to make decisions rather than the alternative of the child inevitably encountering adult situations and feeling the guilt/anxiety of having to hide that from their parents.
My 6yo loves Minecraft. The servers and YouTube videos are consistently on topic. Not too hard to keep an eye on.
When I looked into Roblox last year, the top YouTube results were how to make super sexualized clothing and innuendo. Skip.
I'm less worried for the boys. I'm also less worried about the 'sex stuff' they might see (say, stumble upon erotica, porn, fetish porn, etc) as all those will come with time. I'm more worried about violence and /r/watchpeopledie kind of things. Imagine a seven or ten year old that can't sleep after watching Caspar or Moana, encountering a video of an innocent person being pushed in front of a train, or lynched, or ... It's absurd to me how that's legal on the US platforms that prudely censor every nipple...
But beyond this, there's a categorical difference to seeing something and being urged/pushed/forced into seeing it and the other person taking some perverse pleasure from it, as described by the previous poster. Goatse is disgusting but funny to some degree, but being lured into someone's virtual torture or rape den...?
It's like upskirt porn - totally uninteresting from the sexual perspective, its all about power, abuse, invading in the private sphere and mind of the victim. I don't want to expose my kids to that risk. The most previous thing I have in my world are my kids and especially their minds.
I want them to explore the digital, but the powers of abuse unleashed online - it's just incredible. From the random middle aged man paying for child rape in the Philippines or pretending to be a 12 year old boy and tricking kids into revealing their lives up to the abuse among classmates, friends and strangers - the internet is a damgerous place for kids. And I can manage and anticipate some risks for my kids. I dread what my daughters' friends will encounter when their only protection is a barely digitally literate single mom.
What I've learned raising children in the internet age is that boys are vulnerable during the formative years to porn addiction and the dopamine spiral that causes humans to seek harder stuff more often.
The girls are more susceptible to depression from social comparison through social media. There is a correlation, perhaps even a causation, with a drastic increase in suicide and self harm attempts of preteen and teen girls and the prevalence of social media consumption.
It shouldn't be too surprising that the formative years, when kids' brains are still developing and most vulnerable to impulse decisions, are formative for actual brain development through experience as well. It doesn't work to treat kids exactly like adults because they aren't as well equiped ad adults to handle adult situations.
Giving up on restrictions to experience and material during these formative years is, imo, like trying to teach children how to responsibly consume meth.
In my case, the answer is to tell them that there are some decisions that should absolutely wait until their prefrontal cortex is fully developed because of the developmental impact it has on them. Until then, there will be restrictions on certain things in this house under my roof.
I try to build a trust relationship that encourages them to be open and honest about what they've been exposed to do what I can help them navigate. And when we've calibrated wrongly, there's also therapy that had proven to be helpful for three of my six kids. It's also not cheap so I feel lucky that I'm able to afford the extra help when needed.
Kids are far craftier than you give them credit for, and even if you watched over your son's shoulder all day every day, I can assure you he would find a way to break your rules.
I'm personally of the persuasion that we're approaching this "internet safety" stuff from the wrong perspective. Why not teach your kids how to be responsible, set reasonable limitations (more expectations than limits), and discuss how they're using the internet in an open and honest way?
The grandfather stepped in, and said something to the effect of "stop pressuring the boy; you're obviously going to force him to lie to you, and that doesn't help either of you."
This is consistent across most human activities. There's no better way of making an otherwise enjoyable book deadly dull than to turn it into a class assignment.
Sometimes the best way to get to the destination is to have a reason to get there.
After several months of re-typing in each game listing every time the computer got shut off, I was getting pretty damn fast. My parents finally got me the $30 audio cassette tape recorder for my birthday. That was a glorious day! Once I could save the code, I started changing little things in the games like the colors and number of lives. That expanded into adding new obstacles and new levels.
Ultimately, all the BASIC games were pretty primitive. All the unobtainable ROM cartridge games were coded in some magical incantations rumored to be called "Assembly Language". I knew a guy at school with the same computer who had a couple of game cartridges and I'd sometimes manage to talk him into loaning me one for a couple days. Giving the cartridges back sucked. Eventually I learned how to copy the ROM space memory by writing a BASIC program of PEEKs and POKEs. Many hours of experimentation later I was able to copy the 2k of ROM data into user memory (the BASIC code had to be short or the ROM would start overwriting it). Now I could run that game without the damn cartridge! Unfortunately, that was the only game game cartridge at Radio Shack that worked. All the other ROMS I tried had protection measures which I eventually figured out were trying to write to their own memory.
Then I found a listing for a BASIC program called an Assembly Language Monitor that would turn bytes back onto mnemonics. With that, a bunch of luck and several days of effort I was able to find the code in the game ROM that tried to overwrite its own memory and replaced it with NOPs. I felt like king of the world. I wasn't very productive as a software pirate because I spent many times longer figuring out how to copy the game than I ever spent actually playing the game. :-)
However, as I bumbled my way through each new obstacle I encountered as a game pirate I was writing more and more of my own tooling code. Eventually that slowly evolved into a career as a self-taught programmer, software architect and then tech startup entrepreneur. So, yeah. There's at least one case of a frustrated teenage game-player being an on-ramp into a successful tech career.
Some kids will respond better than others to this approach, but this seems like a perfectly normal thing for parents to do as part of their kids' education.
I know at least one parent who used Minecraft as an opportunity for both the parent and the child to learn to code.