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My kiddo has easily spent 500+ on Roblox across birthday/Xmas gift cards/chores.

I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get.

As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...

Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices. I imagine they can hide behind the fact users are making most of the mini games, and they are just providing a platform.

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I've mentioned this in other comments, but I sat in with my nephews on a Roblox session, then stayed after to check things out on my own. There's an astounding number of adults on that platform saying some of the most horrible things.

The games are like you say, and there's some that are indeed the model of what I expected: games that kids and amateurs made with their tools. Car jump games. Simple platforming. Basic shooters. But then there are games that seem like they're some dark pattern mobile devs side projects lol Games where you do nothing but collect stuff or pets and there's lots of gratification devices happening and suddenly there's just a literal pay wall. Just the worst of f2p gambling addiction built right into player built roblox games over and over and over again.

But on to the adults, my favorite example was joining a 'shooter' game that was really just a shooting gallery of sorts but it had voice chat enabled and wtf there's some eastern european accent going off on gay people and talking about how the targets should have sombreros so 'we' can shoot "lazy" Mexicans.

That experience was replicated through a few games and I just wrote Roblox off completely as infested with people trying to help kids find hate based ideologies or get them addicted to gambling. I warned their mother, she didn't listen til she got her credit card stolen.

First thing I do when playing a multiplayer game with proximity voice chat is to turn voice chat off. Makes play sessions much more enjoyable.

Sure you may miss the 5% of chat that is actually tactical and relevant to the game, but it's a very small price to pay in order to avoid edgelords and other toxic people.

This sucks because, when used appropriately, prox voice chat works really well and adds depth to multiplayer. A lot of games feel really dead without it. But finding pubbies that use it appropriately is practically impossible.

I appreciate Valve for having both an in-game skill score as well as a behavior score. Once your behavior is maxed out chat becomes an entirely different experience.

Here's a chat log from a game I played yesterday: https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/7902208511/chat

Some wholesome banter and that's about it.

I wholeheartedly disagree as someone with 8k+ hours in game.

In fact most people in dota have maxed out behavior scores.

You have to try pretty hard to be muted in the game or have behavior or communication scores lowered significantly.

I can assure anyone that just because you're sitting at 12k doesn't mean your experience is going to be good or an "entirely different experience"

Is that simply cultural? DOTA is well over a decade old. If everyone's toxic and behavior is self-moderated, then toxic behavior is not just normalized but reinforced.

And as someone with that many hours too... Go check a 8k behavior score or below. The system is working. It's just that the depths of hell are deeper than people think.

It could be more aggressive at lowering score tho, true. Used to be. They "buffed" the gain per 20 matches last December, but it was great before (And even lowered the scores of streamers that had it coming).

Games in general have been a target of hate base voice chat.

You get these people everywhere.

I struggle to understand why people are so toxic with chat in video games. I don't go to the supermarket, or even the bar and hear people just casually chatting about "who hates [racial slur]?"

There's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which says that if you give normal people anonymity and an audience then they become (let's call them) assholes. I feel that, in order to buy this, you must accept that there are a surprisingly large number of assholes, much larger than I want to believe.

Are the number of racist idiots just much greater amongst Gamers™? (To be clear, I play a lot of video games myself. I prefer to believe I am not a racist.)

I'd love to say that there are a lot more young people playing video games, and they're just trying to be edgy, but I had a chat with some guy who was talking about getting his appliances repaired by "lazy [racial slur]" people. That's probably not a fourteen year old, right? I've seen that a lot.

I understand that it probably just takes one or two people per game to make the chat unbearable, but if I'm on a team with six or eight people, and I consistently get at least one of these fucking idiots per match, isn't that still an uncomfortably high percentage of the population?

I suspect it's because angry and disenfranchised people are over-represented in terms of hours spent playing online games. There's also a negative feedback loop where more casual and/or sensitive gamers opt out since they don't want to deal with the bullshit.

> There's also a negative feedback loop where more casual and/or sensitive gamers opt out since they don't want to deal with the bullshit.

I think there's also a loop where extremes are pushed. Ie it's common to celebrate victories in games. This then tilts players. Players lean into that tilt, and teabag. Teabag eventually is mundane, so you spread verbal toxicity. Toxicity then isn't enough, and etcetc.

It seems a loop without external pressures like in-person-reputation to inhibit how far it goes. A cycle of abuse that's all anonymous, fueled by the general competitive arousal of PvP/etc games.

Note that i'm mostly speaking to PvP games where that competitive environment also contributes to it. However i imagine "cycle of abuse" has it's place in most of these anonymous environments.

From my experience any pvp game that doesn’t have in-game admins attracts these people.

I think you’ve run across one of the major, unfortunate reasons US elections are so close, from the …less-progressive… side of things.

Well that's easy to explain. Most voters skew older for historical reasons and older people tend to become more conservative as they age (again, for historical reasons).

This "gamer rage" is a more recent enabling by technological anonymity, as well as instantaneous, cheap global communication. Actions without consequences, but without needing millions to cover up the petty actions.

My boss at my first job was a nice guy, helped me out a lot when I was still a fledgling adult. Added him on Facebook after a few months and it was covered in Confederate flags, Nazi windmills, and talk about certain types of people.

I knew he did some bad stuff and spent a long time behind bars, but I didn't see that coming.

Also, if you go to any YouTube video that involves a non-white person committing a crime, the comments are stuffed with thinly veiled, or outright, racist remarks. People are just garbage.

Something has changed in the last 10 years. I'm sure this was always there, but. I used to see people get ripped and shredded in comments sections for racist etc. commentary. Now it seems like the norm.

I'd blame Trump & crew, but I suspect his rise is as much a symptom as a cause.

The other day I got fed a mattress ad in my Facebook feed, and it featured a mixed race couple relaxing together on a bed. The comments were just full of some of the most outright vile content I'd ever seen, and I'm not young. Full-on neo-Nazi stuff. I made the mistake of calling someone on their crap, and got threatened, person went through my profile snapping public pics, etc. etc. it was just insane.

I just... despair :(

People revert to their inner twelve year old punk kid self when they are there. Bullying and trying to one up others in terms of most outrageous thing you can say is common and applauded.

> I feel that, in order to buy this, you must accept that there are a surprisingly large number of assholes, much larger than I want to believe

Why? The theory is that they become assholes, not that they started that way. The microphone is corrupting.

Thankfully multiplayers games without chat exits. It’s enough to get tea-bagged by a team winning a 1v3 without actually hearing them talk.

I always found those games extremely depressing, and... Widely known to be botted to hell and back. Ever since the Hearthstone cheating software became capable of "emulating" human behavior, it became clear that 90% of the userbase was non-human. Why play then? An unbalanced game, by virtue of their grind/paid advantage, and you're not even outsmarting anyone. Single player deckbuilders like Slay the Spire and its spawn are objectively better at that point.

Yes, it seems clear that a component of Gamer Culture is casual bigotry. It has been changing but that mostly means spaces have become more inclusive and new people are more inclusive. The pre-existing people didn't stop existing they just sort of got shoved out of places that started having standards around behavior.

An aspect of the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory is also the level of exposure behavior gets in an online context - so very many more people are present in a way that invites sharing and comment that just doesn't exist in a grocery store. Think about how unusual it would be for me to reply in depth to an offhand comment like this (that was not directed to me) at a bar. Or how many people you might socialize with in a tf2 or l4d lobby over the course of an hour compared to in a grocery.

There is also a component of self selection when it comes to the spaces you are comparing against; you probably wouldn't want to go to bars and groceries where that behavior was present well before you actually got to live examples.

In my experience individual communities can also have very different feels. For example I used to play League of Legends and eventually switched to Dota2 because it felt very consistent that at least one person would behave in an awful fashion in the league lobbies. Whereas when playing Dota that sort of behavior was the exception.

In games where you're shooting others, how can you justify that? Either you are bad or they are bad. When you're in a team, it's normal that the team talks about justification.

> "Are the number of racist idiots just much greater amongst Gamers™?"

You have clearly never read the comments on newspaper websites back when they still had them. Sturgeon's Law applies to human beings in general.

I think that unfortunately there are just a larger number of assholes than we would like to believe, and they particularly manifest when playing video games. Playing video games is something people due for a release, and what they are releasing isn't always pleasant. For every person that openly acts like a asshole out in public there are at least 2 secret assholes who understand the society expects them to be on their best behavior, but once they are anonymous then the vitriol can flow freely.

With that said I think the percentage of assholes by percentage of population is always going to be higher in video games with voice chat simply because it becomes a outlet for a certain type of person.

No, that's not what science tells us is going on. There are no in-person cues that tell someone their behavior is unacceptable or must be controlled:

- Other people watching (no social cost)

- No facial expressions or body language from others triggering mirror neurons that serve as empathy precursors.

- No risk (violence, loss of property, loss of status... etc.)

There are simply too many people that don't consciously monitor their own behavior for right and wrong. Absent those other layers and pressures, we all tend to make unconsciously selfish decisions. That many young people don't think about the morality involved in those behaviors is a failure of upbringing, not nature (IMHO).

I'd argue its from attention seeking from lonely people online. Being a rage troll is the quickest way to get some kind of interaction, and being online means theres less consequences for it

One doesn't behave bad to someone stronger than them (or wealthier, or in a powerful position etc) because they know there will be consequences. One doesn't pick a fight in a bar or supermarket because they know there will be consequences.

What consequence is there for saying crappy things online, in a video game, especially playing with kids? At best one would get banned? Then go to some other site/game and repeat the same bad behavior.

The truly nicest people are those who are nice even when there is no one around to watch them.

This really hurts to think - that so many people are only doing the decent thing because of consequence :(

My hypothesis of civilization is that even the smallest child with a blade may with sufficient luck grievously wound the mightiest warrior.

So there is a natural mechanism that tends people towards some level of civility when they're in meat space with each other.

Incivility towards the other not present is then about fitting in via tribalism. After all, those others could be dangerous so we had better make sure our tribe is all on the right page about mistrusting them.

Incivility towards the other who is present is then about an attempt at social dominance. "Don't mess with me because there are others like me who will avenge me." Perhaps.

Online there is only reputational harm and emotional harm. And when anonymous there is only emotional harm.

When the fear of an unexpected stabbing is truly removed we see the true heart of our fellows. Alas, not the most aesthetically pleasing view.

The asshole fraction is surprisingly high. If all kinds are accounted for, anecdotally I would estimate that the number is between 1/4 and 1/3. If you’re on here, there is a good chance that you are an outlier in many respects, and normally that means that we tend to breathe rarified, filtered air…we don’t see it except online.

It helps to remember that for every college professor level person there is someone out there for whom tying his shoes is a significant cognitive challenge. For every really smart person out there, there is someone who is cognitively incapable of meaningfully participating in society.

The bell curve is a bitch.

Faux-anonymity/lack of consequences.

The same reason that many on the internet are toxic.

> There's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which says that if you give normal people anonymity and an audience then they become (let's call them) assholes.

I don't agree. HN is one of the best examples. We're as anonymous as we can be here and still this is one of the most friendly online environments I know. Clearly community culture plays a big role too. And it keeps offering refreshing content, I learn new stuff here daily, unlike in the commercial bubbles.

Same on Libera chat. Didn't turn into a cesspool. In fact the former freenode suddenly did but the community immediately turned their back on it en masse. It was beautiful to see.

Also, the early internet.

I would guess that you don't have showdead turned on and/or haven't been to any of the rather, uh, energetic culture wars threads that the moderation team used to allow over the past few years. It's not that there aren't commenters inclined to behave badly on HN, it's that either they've learned to restrain themselves as the cost of continuing to participate in HN or have been rendered invisible by user flagging or moderators.

Yeah but there's always assholes. Anonymity or not.

What defines a community is how it deals with them and as such as steers the sentiment of the entire community. The "they learned to restrain themselves" is exactly what should happen.

And I doubt getting banned is much of a deterrent. After all one can sign up without even as much as an email address. I know many people throw away accounts daily. Imagine doing that on Facebook or X. It would really go off the rails.

Yet the community here is still very pleasant.

>[HN] is one of the most friendly online environments I know.

Um....wow! Are you and I on the same site? There's a lot of ways I'd describe HN, "friendly" isn't one of them.

Genuine meanness and cruelty is WAY more common here than friendliness and there's an overall tone of reactionism, cynicalism, and negativity for the sake of it. People here are very cocky and confident talking about things they don't know anything about.

Would it be toxic if your culture didn’t train you to see it as such?

Would members of an uncontacted tribe clutch their pearls all the same?

So tired of one cultures anxiety being made the norm everywhere to serve the hallucination 300 million Americans the other 8 billion don’t need should be special.

Americans have expropriated other nations labor and resources and rely on their slave labor without batting an eye about it. Really sick of holding them up as some shining beacon of freedom and dignity.

You rely on worse to survive but omgurd wurds hurt so much as someone else’s back and knees after digging up others food, and their lungs after testing vapes, and their hands after sewing together your Nikes.

The elders are right about my peers; oblivious and entitled. Just parrots of cognitive dissonant TV memes like “Do your own thing. Drink Sprite like the rest of the group we’re showing. Engaging in norms of your society like everyone else is unique!”

Americans are an insane and dangerous people; temporary meat suits convinced of their permanence and righteousness while carrying on about being above biases and exploitative behavior.

I struggle also. I love that PA comic! I often tell my wife when we get someone who starts throwing in Rocket League, "you wouldn't do this if you walked down to the park for a pickup game of basketball - nobody would ever play with you again. you would look like a moron." and maybe that's it. there's no meaningful consequence? It's sad though to think so many people are only being compelled to do the decent thing to avoid consequences and eschew decent behavior as soon as they enter a consequence free zone? Just breaks my heart really, because I thought we did these things for fun lol

This is nothing new or exclusive to Roblox, I recall this sort of language in every online gaming platform.

To be fair when I was <10 years old my siblings and I had a lot of fun in AOL chatrooms and various forums full of people of all ages saying all kinds of things. Not that it makes it okay but that particular aspect of roblox isn't really something new when it comes to kids exploring the web.

> As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play.

Considering how much you said your kid has spent, that money could’ve been spent on buying copies for all their friends and you’d still have plenty left over.

I upvoted you but after thinking about it actually, you will find that this will attract kids that are friends for the money and start weird dynamics in the social bubble of his son. But your idea is right! Maybe he could have done gaming sessions at his house or who knows what to better spend this money on other games.

LAN parties were/are a thing.

Eh yes. And no. Turn it into a gathering event at your house with pizza and bring back LAN parties. That's stuff that kids remember for life.

> this will attract kids that are friends for the money and start weird dynamics in the social bubble of his son

From the amount of money sunk into this one game it sounds like there are already weird money dynamics in his social bubble.

Yah, but Roblox weird money dynamics is that he's showing up and is overpowered in the games because he's paying to win, but fellow kids likely view him as exceptionally skilled :P

That's like one console and a couple games so its not necessarily the most efficient usage.

Couch co-op is the way to go.... but as the dad be prepared to lose control of your living room.

Many games don't even require separate copies. This is a fairly new phenomenon.

I mean, I'm fully grown and I still get together with friends and play Mario Party and Smash. I just bought extra controllers and boom, good to go.

Really depends on the genre nowadays. Fighters (mostly) still support local co-op (Nintendo in General is pretty good at couch co-op). Shooters are becoming less local co-op friendly, not even having split screen.

> As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...

If there's a paid game your kid really likes, perhaps you can talk to his friend's parents and buy the friend a copy of the game. ...I say talking to the friend's parents first, because just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy.

But buying friends copies of a game we want to play together is something my friend group routinely does and we're all adults with disposable income.

> just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy

lol well this certainly depends on how it's done. Walking up to them in a trench coat and handing them a disc? Probably creepy. But you could also just, like, send them a gift key on Steam...

Unless this person is literally Santa Claus, I suspect a lot of parents might question the motives of a grown man sending gifts to their children without their knowledge.

Just give your kid extra keys to hand to his friends lol, no need to make this complicated.

Just talk to parents. Maybe you will have lan party with them too.

The key is “without their knowledge”. Seems like an easy thing to explain to a parent. Plus it’s reasonable you’d ask the parents so they have a chance to say yes/no to the game.

Having been a victim of grooming, trust me. It's better to talk to the parents than to give a child a gift without the parents' knowledge.

Yes much better. Send an unsolicited game on steam to a minor. Maybe one whose parents have more limits on content than you.

Excellent idea. Two additional reasons: (1) many parents would want veto power on what kids spent their time on and are exposed to, including video games; and (2) you could suggest quietly buying the game through the parents, to avoid complicating the kids' relationship with getting stuff.

Some other, more expensive, activities (e.g., tennis lessons together, when the family of one of the BFFs isn't affluent) are harder for more people to do this, but video games are relatively inexpensive.

I'm a gamer and I always play the games my kids are playing to see what's up. Roblox was banned in my house after I messed around with it on my own for 30 minutes. Most of the games on the platform are pay to win skinner boxes and they have a pedophile problem. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-pro...

As a new father that will eventually get into that situation: how do you ban Roblox in your house? I imagine it’s popular among your kids’ real world acquaintances (school etc). Doesn’t banning it exclude your kids from these groups? Do they feel left out?

Given the current state of gaming and where it’s heading I would love to ban gaming altogether but I feel social pressure from other kids makes it very hard.

I go against the stream it seems, but even though I grew up gaming, I see it now as mostly wasted time. Any benefit that came with it is easily overshadowed with literally wasting the most precious thing we have - our time in this universe which could be spent having serious adventures (or anything else like finding/working on love and real friends(TM)).

I've gotten into various sports mostly done in mountains and some additional filler training like weightlifting and running, my quality of life and satisfaction from it skyrocketed. Obviously you get much more healthier, attractive and happier as side effect, but over time your mindset also changes a lot.

These days, displays in our home are kept to the minimum since content is mostly toxic and made as addictive as possible (as mentioned all over this thread). As time progresses we will gradually ease it off, but games will be last thing on a long list. There is not much skill to learn so they are not missing out, clicking all around can be done by infants.

It helps that we are surrounded by people where such approach is the norm and mark of good invested parenthood, and letting kids get addicted to various dark patterns online or in gaming is seen as on cca same level as being absent alcoholic parent or similar fail. Not that I don't see it often ie when traveling, kids glued to screen to me looks very sad while their parents often look like epitome of laziness. Physically and mentally weak, socially awkward, stuck in eternal dopamine kick chase, largely defenseless from sophisticated actors milking their parents credit cards.

Everyone will have different experiences. I turned that gaming passion into a career and am fortunately much better off than my single mother who struggled raising me.

(and speaking of parents: who the hell is letting a kid use their credit card? I bought an extra $.75 butterfingers one time and it was probably the most mad my mom ever got at me. More than when I dinged the car while learning to drive. I NEVER spent her money again without asking).

Games help motivate me to read (being into RPGs with little/no voice acting will do that), they arguably enhaced my logic puzzle ability and reaction time, they gave me something to bind over with like minded acquaintances.

I think it really comes down to a case by case basis.

I'm mostly in agreement with ya. I've always been big into the outdoors as it's what truly allows me to recharge. Fishing/hiking/hunting/mountainbiking, etc. All of it is good for the soul. As the kids have gotten older I've been able to get them out in the same activities. In my house 8/10 times we are outside doing outdoorsy stuff, while the other 20% is gaming.

The type/quality of the games definitely matters IMO. My six year old really enjoys DCS World and Kerbel Space program. Roblox is a total no go in my house, but I rarely deny my kid from wanting to land a jet or build a rocket.

> Doesn’t banning it exclude your kids from these groups? Do they feel left out?

The way I was raised we understood that most kids do things that come back to bite them later and we could choose to be better than that.

I don't feel guilty for teaching my kids to avoid drugs and alcohol—the friend groups that would actually fully exclude them from aren't worth their time anyway. I feel the same about Roblox. It's a dangerous drug produced by an intentionally exploitative company.

If refusing to participate causes a particular friend group to become inaccessible, that says something about the amount of time that friend group spends on the drug and therefore says something about the utility of the time my kid would have spent with them anyway.

Explain them the concepts of loot boxes and pay to win. My son, who was 8 at that time, understood quiet fast that these games don't require skill and are just trying to steal money from him. He doesn't like that and now avoids games that contain these dark patterns and has become quiet good at spotting them.

Also, buy a Nintendo console. It solves 99% of all problems. I haven't seen these dark patterns in any Nintendo title and personally I think it's the best gaming environment for kids.

My kids did not paid a cent nor did most of their friends. There are some paid a little, no more then the relatively normal amount of money. If someone 8 years old is paying a lot of money for Roblox while his friends prefer roblox because it is free, then the issue is provably solvable.

Beyond limiting infinite amount of paying by not giving the kid infinite amount of money, you can limit their time in the app or on tablet by rules like "max X hours per week".

I am a gamer dad too. This is something I worry about. I have been playing Minecraft with my son but he is learning about these other games.

I have been using some of similar messaging to smoking and saying things like that playing too many video games will destroy the health. Of course, I am not a good role model when it comes to living healthy lifestyle. And kids probably don't even understand what health really means.

How does one protect their kids against these predatory practices?

> I am not a good role model

Maybe fix that?

Saying we don’t play the casino scam works pretty good here.

Like strict zero money after buying the game. Not on custom skins not on early access characters. We just don’t .

Just don’t give the money and don’t argue about details.

Alternatively, that one custom skill gets unlocked after getting a good grade at the end of the year or for birthday/Christmas/whatever.

Wild. You know there’s a problem but you continue to feed into your child’s addiction. This is known as “enabling”.

Yeah, this post is legit insane - what child has $500 to spend on ANYTHING, let alone fucking Robux (which presumably requires a credit card)!?

Buy him DRM free games on GOG.

I Do this for young relatives.

Ive been shown WhatsApp threads of the young teens who play the DRM-free games i upload - my google drive ID is effectively referenced as some kind of deity lol

Side benefit: No online play or interaction with the outside world, only with your own group (usually)

As a game developer it's kind of sad to see such practices in stealing my or others hard work.

But I have to keep telling myself those kids or parents wouldn't have paid for them anyway.

Maybe consider buying a few copies at least in the future?

That's always the risk in a game with no protections. It just takes one person uploading it to the internet and it's shark bait.

At least this example is limited to a neighborhood.

It really depends on what games are being pirated. If it's a solo dev or small team, then yeah, definitely pay for the official release if you can. But since these are kids, they'll definitely be pirating games here and there since they don't have money. At least the person above is helping them by giving them, presumably, safe copies.

Now, if we're talking AAA titles from companies who will post record profits at the same time as record layoffs, while also giving the C suite a bonus bigger than the GDP of a small nation... Then yeah, sail the high seas. Those same companies thoroughly don't believe buying is owning, so I'm fine to call piracy polite borrowing.

Or buy him a MiYoo/Ambernic and add Pico-8 games. Pico-8 is a great platform, games are free and short and sweet. In addition, you can pry under the hood and read the code, modify it freely, etc. It's a perfect on-ramp for programming.

I personally got a Miyoo for my kid but ended up getting one for myself. The fun and nostalgia are there.

Eh, I dunno. My son plays a bunch of Roblox and has spent a net $10 for a few custom avatar mods. While there is certainly a pay to win aspect for some games within, there is also a ton of "free" games to sift through, and since all of them are competing for players, they still have to make the experience compelling enough at the free tier. We've had conversations about the pay-to-win aspect, and even though he has several hundred dollars saved up, he has never once asked to spend money on pay-to-win aspects of Roblox. I'd argue that almost any modern videogame / mobile game is equally if not more "predatory" with the pay-to-win side of things. Just look at the menu screens in any modern first person shooter / battle royale type game. Those look far worse than anything I have seen in Roblox.

both should be regulated, this type of predatory gambling-like behavior shouldn't be allowed for kids under a certain age

Sure, I don't disagree with that at all. I'd love to see that happen. I was just pointing out that most of the industry is far worse than what I have seen with Roblox personally.

So, no social media and no video games for kids? Man am I glad that I grew up before tomorrow when everything is going to be restricted.

social media generally bans kids under 13 in the US — there's a good amount of evidence regarding the harms it can have at this point

kids haven't been able to buy mature games from brick-and-mortar stores like Gamestop since I was a child decades ago

kids used to be able to smoke cigarettes too

>there's a good amount of evidence regarding the harms it can have at this point

Considering this evidence was produced during a time when the public opinion was looking for any excuse to blame social media companies and that the field of research producing those studies has an accuracy of a coin flip I'm unconvinced. I'd need to see a lot more than out of contact quotes from Facebook research or these questionable "we asked kids to taste xyz, they're totally more depressed and it's totally social media's fault."

>kids haven't been able to buy mature games from brick-and-mortar stores like Gamestop since I was a child decades ago

They pirated them instead because kids don't have money.

That being said, I would rather kids be banned from the internet outright rather than the internet becoming yet another watered down place.

Some of this evidence has been produced by companies with an incentive to not produce it (internal Facebook research has shown negative mental health implications for teenage girls on instagram for example — this is known as part of some whistleblowing efforts)

> They pirated them instead because kids don't have money.

I mean sure, a kid can break a window and rob a gun store too... we're not talking about creating rules that are impossible to circumvent, the answer to imperfect regulation isn't no regulation.

> That being said, I would rather kids be banned from the internet outright rather than the internet becoming yet another watered down place.

Content filters have come a long way, this isn't what anyone is suggesting.

>internal Facebook research has shown negative mental health implications for teenage girls on instagram for example — this is known as part of some whistleblowing efforts

This is one of the reasons why I have difficulty taking this rewatch seriously, because that is not what the internal research at Facebook said. That was a media headline that misrepresented the results.

They measured 12 different indicators problematic use of Instagram, body image issues, sadness etc. For teen girls 32% of respondents said that IG made their body image issues worse, what the media didn't say however, is that 45% thought Instagram had no impact and 22% said it made their body image issues better.

And that was basically the worst indicator out of all 12 of them. For example, the same research said that on the question of loneliness 12% of teen girls said that IG made it worse, 36% said it had no impact and 51% said that IG made it better.

On every issue Instagram eat mainly either neutral or positive. And that's the internal research that places like WSJ used to say Facebook causes negative mental health effects in teen girls.

>Content filters have come a long way, this isn't what anyone is suggesting.

No they haven't. It's still the same garbage it always was just dressed up in fancier words. You can look at AI and see how well censoring it works. It's crude and ultimately doesn't work, just makes for a worse experience.

> So, no social media

When I was a kid, everyone was absolutely riddled with self-doubt and insecurity. Jealousy and bullying was the norm. There wasn't a soul in my middle school who didn't deeply, deeply hate themselves.

This was before social media. Imagine that, but now kids ALSO get to form unrealistic expectations and envy at home on their devices.

> no video games for kids?

What are you talking about? You can still get your friends together and play mario party or super smash or kirby or whatever. That never went away, we still have co-op games where it's free to play for the other kids.

We just shouldn't have gambling for the kids. Probably.

>You can still get your friends together and play mario party or super smash or kirby or whatever. That never went away, we still have co-op games where it's free to play for the other kids.

Yeah, they don't add those free to play mechanics because they force you to buy an extra piece of hardware for $400 to play those games. It works great when you're rich, I guess, but then these f2p games shouldn't matter in the first place.

What? No, you don't need a console. One switch can play a 4 player or 8 player game just fine. How it's been for decades.

Yes, and you need the switch to play that Nintendo game in the first place. Thus forcing you to buy the piece of hardware.

... was there ever a point in time where you were able to play a console game without the console? Was the game magic?

You only need one (1) switch. I can play smash with 8 people, on my couch, and 7/8 DO NOT have a switch. You need at least one (1) switch because the game cartridge cannot magically be projected onto my TV.

This is how it's always been and, in nintendo land at least, has only gotten better. I mean, I certainly couldn't play 8 player anything on the NES.

> I can't stand that almost all of the games seem to have a pay to win aspect, or are heavily advertising every chance they get.

That started at a certain moment in history, when paying online became trivial, so everyone who didn't produce pay-to-win was leaving a lot of money on the table. You need to find games that are older than that.

Some of the good old games are free, for example Starcraft or Wesnoth. There are many cheap games on Steam, but you need to review them first, or maybe find a review on YouTube. If the game is sufficiently cheap, for example up to $5, you could simply buy 5 copies and tell your kid to give donate 4 of them to his best friends.

Former Roblox player that quit back in 2016, there used to be a free currency called Tickets which were a free currency you could get through various means, it was a lot more restrictive on what you could get, but it really boosted my enjoyment of the game. The moment they got rid of tix I quit, because I refused to spend any of my meager allowance on Roblox (also generally being bored of the game after years of playing.) Modern Roblox is really impressive, and really depressing. The things people make are incredibly cool, and they are rewarded incredibly poorly for it.

>As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play.

It'd be cheaper to buy games for his friends to play than to support his robux addiction.

> Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices.

Because if you held game companies responsible for deliberately fostering addiction in their customers to earn a profit, we'd have scores of industries behind them in line to be brought to heel the same way and the stocks for tech companies, game companies, tobacco companies, casino companies, alcohol companies, etc. etc. would all implode.

There's no danger of that of course because we long ago decided as a society that we're fine with vulnerable populations being put through an economic woodchipper to fuel our retirement funds, and that's been status quo for so long that I sincerely doubt there's any way to actually change it.

Understand your point, but Epic (Fortnite) and games like Fifa have gotten sued or major slap on the wrists for the same practices

> major slap on the wrists

That doesn’t make sense as a concept. The point of the slap on the wrist is that it’s ineffective/insufficient punishment to change behaviour. You’re essentially saying they got a big small penalty.

Paying fines while still racking in cash. Basically the cost of doing business.

It's a big enough penalty to be noticed and course correct. but not a big enough one to fundamentally hit their bottom line. I think it fits.

They're still doing it though. They stopped whatever specific part got them in trouble but in the broad strokes they're still exploiting customers because the law says they can.

Everything that a business of that size does is legal because if the authorities actually wanted it stopped, it would be stopped.

We did that for tobacco, though? It was a huge public health win?

Actually, it's mixed. The states now get such a huge chunk of tobacco money that they're incentivized to keep people smoking. The more they smoke, the more the state gets.

Also, the companies are doing gangbusters in developing countries where people aren't as informed of the dangers of smoking.

This is not judgement, to be clear. I enjoy the occasional smokable like anyone else, but I do that with full understanding of the health risks associated with it.

> The more they smoke, the more the state gets.

The state "gets" tobacco tax revenue to help pay for the burden of medical treatment for those with smoking related illnesses. Lung cancer isn't free to treat.

I've read that smoking related illnesses cost less money overall to treat than average. As an extreme example, if someone went around disintegrating people with an orbital laser, this would clearly reduce overall heathcare spending. So in this analogy, smoking is the equivalent of an orbital laser that (plausibly) causes people to die before they develop an even more expensive-to-treat healthcare situation.

I don't think this analogy works, the space laser is instant and does not spread to non-targets. Smoking does reduce the average life span, but not to zero. In the remaining time, healthcare costs are increased on top of anything expensive they'd develop naturally. Smoking also causes serious diseases in non-smokers and kills 1.3 million non-smokers per year. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco

> I've read that smoking related illnesses cost less money overall to treat than average.

If you've read it, then please provide the citation.

Smoking not only has its own direct impacts (lung cancer, emphysema), but it also makes many other conditions far worse than they would be without smoking, and therefore more expensive to treat.

Yes, I'm sure all that money is perfectly tracked and the system is perfectly efficient so there's no money being burned somewhere along the way to line someone's pocket.

They have to treat them any way because of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare.

So it's all about tax revenue to defer this cost.

The alternative is to deny medical care to smokers. That would at the very least violate medical ethics, and possibly the law.

> we'd have scores of industries behind them

Not if they have good lobbyists. In the US we still have beer ads on TV though tobacco commercials have been gone long enough to barely be remembered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUY0w2cVAUQ

You forgot the most important industry: the food industry. But they settled that battle long ago.

And on some level I agree. We shouldn't hold companies accountable for raising our children. Simply mitigate their ways to target them And exploit their data (something Fortnite got dinged hard for).

> There's no danger of that of course because we long ago decided as a society that we're fine with vulnerable populations being put through an economic woodchipper to fuel our retirement funds

"We" did? Who's "we"? I certainly never agreed to this. Citation needed.

> Seriously don't understand how Roblox isn't being investigated for predatory practices

Who gave to your kid the money to spend on Roblox?

Moderation is dead, and copyright is the knife.

I think I will love this quote if I knew what it meant. Care to elaborate?

I should have elaborated more originally.. I suppose part of me wanted to be asked.

Moderation used to work well, because relatively small communities (forums and game servers) included moderators, who were users that also actively participated in discussion. That model is incredibly rare today. Instead, we have a tiny coalition of corporate giants who own (monopolize via copyright) the overwhelming majority of discussion content and interaction platforms. On these platforms, traditional moderation has been replaced with corporate censorship and automation, which in turn are driven by corporate goals (advertising) instead of genuine participation by moderators.

It's my assertion that this is a natural outcome of copyright itself. Copyright demands that content be exclusively owned and profited upon; therefore interaction must be siloed and incentivized accordingly. Even free (as in beer) interaction must bow to this pattern eventually.

You should find abandonedware games for him to network play on.

Right around the time of the mobile phone gaming took a very, very sharp turn to pure sociopathy. It had always been flirting with it, but now the mbas are full on putting as much sociopathic addiction rigging, social bullying, and manufactured demand as possible.

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