One of the Most Popular Games on the Planet
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
If I had access to Unreal type 3D then, you wouldn't have been able to pull me away from the computer. So probably a good thing for me it wasn't!
I became a programmer because I had many, many hours with nothing to do at my grandparents' house. I did have a programmable calculator and the reference programming manual that came with it, so I'd recreate (in extremely basic form) the games I read about in magazines/that my friends told me about and that I dreamt of playing but didn't have access to, such as Diablo/Sim City/etc. Later I learned assembly to make faster games (I'd print out z80 asm reference tutorials at the library, write code by hand on paper, and then type it out, compile it, and load it on my calculator from a library computer a week or so later).
Honestly, lots of respect for the kids these days that are so self driven that they'll spend hours on their projects and not watching mindless short form videos. I don't think I'd have had that self discipline if I had had a phone with unlimited internet/YouTube/TikTok/etc access.
I'm jealous of the resources, not of the kids. No way in hell I'd want to go through being a teenager again, especially with social media existing. But that has nothing to do with the learning resources available now that were not when I was their age.
Not only are the job opportunities just starting to dry up, the competition for these openings gets ever fiercer, giving only the most dedicated people a real chance.
I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs.
Additionally, because of the scarcity of information and degree of difficulty in learning those skills 15+ years ago, you could actually get paid well enough to have very good access to the housing market wherever you'd want. Now, in some places where work actually exists, if you get a job that you can sustain long term, it might cost 100% of your paycheque to land a mortgage on much more than a tiny apartment. You realistically need to shack up with another software engineer or whatever, not just anyone you fancy which itself seems quite difficult to pin down even well into one's 30s
Go to school -> take the debt, grind for potentially years to get a job if you're lucky -> find someone who also has a high paying job -> take on an amount more debt that your grandparents can't even visualize, and are yet responsible for -> kids?
Not only are there repeat allegations of unfairness towards the player, Roblox also contains a stock market so that children can start gambling early. (See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ)
Besides that and far more disturbingly there are repeat and ongoing accusations of child abuse and child sexualization, which the company behind Roblox is ignoring. These accusations are bad enough that they have caused short selling of the company stocks.
I don't allow my kids (kindergarten and middle school) to play Roblox based on the advice of a prosecutor in my town that works exclusively with child abuse, endangerment, and other crimes like that. She said Roblox and Discord are the top places right now where predators are hanging out cruising for kids to exploit. Discord makes sense, but I was surprised at Roblox.
As someone who came of age in the free-wheeling early 90s bbs and early internet era (“borrowed” shell account at a local university), it’s really disappointing how exploitive the internet and gaming is, especially in spaces that could stimulate creativity.
Any place with a large gathering of children and free form text input/chat instantly turns this into exploit. Pretty much every video game w/ chat has to deal with this.
> free-wheeling early 90s bbs and early internet era
In simplest terms, the predators hadn't fully adapted yet.
It's sad but as with any tool that gains mass adoption it'll get both sides of the coin weaponizing it into something nefarious. In this regard I am worried about predators adapting AI tools in ways that aren't obvious and I am concerned for my children, but exactly as you say, we must "play with them" which helps ensure their safety at multiple levels.
I've heard the same advice from a friend who works in law enforcement in this same area (child abuse, CSAM, exploitation) for the US (federal) government. Some of the stories I've heard...
Oh yeah. Scary place.
Think of it this way: Why don't those problems happen out on the street? Because law enforcement and public response stop them, with the former driven to a great degree by the latter.
Where is that response on the Internet? Law enforcement - and much of the public, and corporations - have abidicated their responsibilities, as they have abidicated so many other responsibilities on the Internet to their communities, the consequences of their actions, even decency.
Did you even consider that predatory behavior should be stopped by law enforcement and by the corporations that control these websites, or did you accept that the Internet is lawless?
Probably a heck of a lot less clunky than the 2000s too! That era you had to either mod something that already existed, or attempt to make a source mod (+fight with Hammer to make maps).
Plus there weren't too many good free 3D tools, but now Blender is as good as commercial software. On top of the huge selection of good IDEs and documentation for the coding bits.
Glad to see there's still a scene around just making things for the fun of it!
Roblox algo heavily favors games with good retention, that explains something like the first 50k concurrent users. But this game also has a lot word-of-mouth effect because the seeds for sale are the same for everyone, creating a Wordle-like effect of talking about the best thing to buy.
At GDC, Roblox was hiring engineers. They announced their goal is to upgrade Roblox to be the best system to make AAA games
"Real games" as found on Steam et al are still very niche in the grand scheme of things; while gaming is more popular now, that mainly applies to things like Flappy Bird (and Roblox, etc) and not PUBG.