Thankfully my son and his friends have somehow iterated away from Fortnite. It's no longer cool so they just stopped playing it. That's one less thing I have to worry about.
She gets along just fine without Roblox.
A portion of her pocket money goes to Robux, which she saves up for special outfits (eg halloween) or creatures in her favorite game about birds. No different from the hobbies many adults have - except I use it as a teaching opportunity about saving, buyer’s remorse etc., again while she’s still young and listening.
I've instigated a purchase wait period of at least 3 days. Very often they themselves realize that the thing that they wanted to spend their pocket money on was a brief desire.
I was super proud when I heard my son say "meh, this is pay to win" as quitting a random roblox game he was trying out.
laptops and phones mage that a lot harder.
I think the more technologically literate a person is, the more wary they are of unfettered access to it for children. Hence, preferring a stationary desktop where use can be supervised.
For example, where I live, the cheapest (monthly) bus tickets require an app, so kids need a smartphone to get to school (or their parents have to pay a lot more for daily tickets).
There is a lot of social pressure on the kids too. There are lots of activities that have either moved online or are organised online. Lots of ways to get left out.
this stuff seems criminal to me...and outright bigotry against poor people.
I think the concern many people have is that not everyone, maybe even not most, are good parents. They are themselves addicted to their screens, sports betting, credit cards, etc etc.
How much of a "nanny state" we create is a fair question. Of course due to economic incentives the companies will generally tend to outsource the problem as "be better parents", and indeed the problems of digital society are not these games' fault or burden alone. But to me it seems we have to break the cycle somewhere, and regulating these apps more is a perfectly sensible starting point. We should have freedom, yes, but also need to make systems that match reality on the ground and don't fail under the lowest common denominator situation.
Edit: not to assume you were implying otherwise. Just that we should avoid the "well it's not a problem for me, just do <x>" error.
This is why we need regulation. Both for child-focused platforms, but also for adults (regarding social media).
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.
No inducements to buy in-game currencies, no weird people chatting to my child online, no deeply profoundly unsettling user-generated content. About the only downside is that I occasionally have to remind him that his teacher probably doesn't really want to hear about Screaming Females or Rough Francis or Bad Religion, although it's perfectly okay for him to have opinions about them.
Plus I doubt I'm ever seeing my initials on the highscore table ever again. The Future Is Now, Old Man.
THPS1 is forever intertwined with having a few pints with my wee sister, pick up a curry and some beer on the way round to hers, then watch The West Wing, then beating her boyfriend at Tony Hawks', drinking beer, and eating curry until the small hours of Sunday morning.
In the early 2000s, we really did have it all, didn't we?
Then there is the wider Minecraft community based on a constellation of public and semi-public servers. This is a lot more like Roblox.
As a parent, I don’t have time for this bullshit, and assume they have malicious intentions. Also, at least once, there was some warning about a profanity filter that my kid dismissed without reading. It’s tied to my MS account, and only a matter of time before that is tied to github and linkedin.
So the kid says “doodie head” one too many times, and what, I lose my windows login / bitlocker key, gh repos and professional network?
Screw it.
The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.
I grew up on RPGs and adventure games where you usually had an objective out there in the world. In comparison, Minecraft is extremely solipsistic; there are no structures in the world to meaningfully interact with, and it seems one is supposed to simply treat the world as a sort of Lego set.
Fortnite is about killing eachother, Roblox is about literally anything, Minecraft is about… well, mining and crafting, mostly.
But really, with mods, it can be just as ‘anything’ as Roblox, only with possibly less scrutiny.
Idk. I love Minecraft, for the record. It’s just the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the popular online game that provides access to kids gets the creeps.
Full tilt P2W servers, ran by low key cybercriminals, with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children. And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by selling paid mods - for Bedrock only, which is the version most children play.
Then there's the usual boon of online gaming - getting to interact with the shadiest characters you've ever met online.
[0] https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...
> The ruling continues to apply to the legal status of video game modding, with mods viewed as derivative works that require the consent of the copyright holder. While this may legally limit the creation of mods, machinima, broadcasts, or even cheats, many game developers have authorized and encouraged some of these activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Star_v%2E_FormGen_Inc%2E
Java edition is a lot more wild west and next-to-impossible to enforce their EULA due to the nature of distribution and installation of Java edition mods.
Me personally, I absolutely hate it. I got into programming to mod my favorite games of the time, Minecraft among them. My first exposure to actual code was through reading open source mods and trying to modify them to achieve my own ideas.
edit: the private server operators might be bad, but I don't see how this is Minecraft's fault (or how it doesn't apply to every game that allows dedicated servers)
So, I dont think anyone said it was their fault, just that it's being exploited.
You mean Microsoft.
And many of those mods at worse might have a donation link if any kind of monetary discussion at all.
Unity makes money as usual, the people doing those games pay their professional licenses to Unity.
Roblox is a dystopian nightmare in comparison.
The subsequent versions also developed the game mechanics a lot to turn it into something closer to an RPG than the early, bare-bones sandbox game with minimal, well-understood mechanics and the rest purely up to the players' creativity.
There's nowadays an abundance of Pay-to-Win servers with custom mechanics to enable that, and I'm sure a lot of unsavory people preying on children. The social media (YouTube/etc) community around it has exploded too in a way I don't recall it before (I used to be into Minecraft videos back in the ~2012 era, and what I see nowadays grosses me out in comparison).
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/lacoste-x-minecraft
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Universal_Studios_Event
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-the-hell-do-you-throw-a-m...
The sad thing is that Bedrock is super simple. You can get it on any tablet, pay like 5-6€ a month to Microsoft for a "realm" and you can play with 3-4 friends online. They can join even if they don't pay, any mobile device, console or windows PC will work.
With Java you need someone to host the server or pay for hosting, then you need to give the address to your friends and have them connect. Then you need to worry about whitelists, because there are multiple services scanning for open Minecraft servers and people WILL come in and fuck your world up (happened to me).
I think the problem is that either you can give children freedom to explore the world, or you can make them accountable for their actions. Can't have both, and parents will protect their kids by not letting them get into trouble.
https://walksf.org/2023/06/28/pedestrian-deaths-reach-highes...
https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-i...
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger...
End result - machine capable of going 50km/h or faster (think they caught one doing 90) in hands of young teen or outright kid. Hell, there was even a trucker that reported getting overtaken by one...
Actual solo-scooter serious crashes were rare.
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom and came into adulthood with a bunch of wonderful warm memories of our childhoods, free of any stigmas or psychological trumas.
This modern fear-based attitude towards childhood is beyond sick.
Now before anyone says "but pedophiles and terrorists" - mind you, that was 80's USSR, Chikatilo had still been at large, the gossip was there but wasn't amplified enough to put everyone into scared trance like modern mass-media does.
Literally nothing has changed in the society since then, maniacs were around just like they are now, but the attitude towards the outside world has been so blown out of proportion today, that parents are eager to outsource the upbringing to strangers in online games out of fear of strangers and dangers outside.
As someone who thinks kids should have freedom, like kids in Germany or Japan have, I hate it when ridiculous arguments like these show up.
Look, if you was regularly doing all that, you probably should not have all that freedom. But, most kids are actually more reasonable, if raised right.
See, neither me nor any of my friends became terrorist bombers, heck, there is not even a single stuntman around us! On the contrary, that unimaginably dangerous activity in our childhood raised responsibility in us better than any supervision. We knew what we did. No amount of nannying will fix kids who lack the touch with the harsh reality, as it takes feeling some pain sometimes to be responsible and not inflict pain on others.
And yet every single one of my friends managed to survive this now-impossible freedom
However, I agree with you. Kids raised in dangerous rural areas do learn. I had my fair share of close calls as a child in my city! I feel lucky to have had so much freedom. 30 years later I was told one guy I knew as a child was convicted of pedophilia: I still remember his awesome basement but I don't recall any bad close call with him (perhaps I was ugly : sorry sicko).
We don't notice many dangerous close calls. Hopefully we learn from from other close calls we did notice... I remember hammering a blank gun cartridge (ramset) until it exploded and thinking I shouldn't do that again. I also did a lot things with fire that I shouldn't have!
Some high risk activities are difficult to learn from. Philip K Dick writing about the dangers of the drugs he took: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642422
Now ideally parents would just keep an eye on them, teach the kids, and maybe even "help" in potentially dangerous-yet-fun-for-kid stuff to make it not dangerous
...but parents now don't want to spend time just like parents back then didn't wanted to spend time and let kids alone to their own devices. Only difference before parents kicked kids outside while now parents give them ipad...
This is in stark contrast with the way parents want their children to be near and observed, but separated with black mirrors.
Now, please don't think that I blame every modern parent out there. There are enough good parents around even today. What I talk about are the trends in general.
I have no reason to believe that. The issue with 2 out of 3 activities you listed is also the danger or damage to OTHERS and their property. Which you do not even noticed, clocked or cared about. The only thing you care about is you feeling some pain, presumably.
I used to do similar crazy things, had this friend who liked to play a kind of a game of chicken with an M-80, see who will hold on to it the longest. He would've been 45 years old today. /s
I cannot count the number of times I've heard "we never bothered with that" with things like refrigerating leftovers, and its unspoken rider of "and it was fine" is never followed up with "look how foodborne illnesses are rising, or at least not dropping". Very curious.
There's a lot of blame for parents, much of it deserved. But when you have CPS being called for kids playing in the woods or parents charged with manslaughter when some one else runs over their kid you realize this is now going against the grain to resist this stuff.
Unfortunately, I don't see how kids would stick to offline experiences anymore if you just turn them loose in the neighborhood, because one of the other kids will undoubtedly have unfettered internet access, so the kids will likely just end up clustered around their computer or phone.
If so, was it a problem that you didn't listen?
I'm not a parent, but fortnite is not like smoking or drugs, common. If you don't let kids grow over this kind of bad content, they will never become good discriminators.
What show did you like when you were a kid? Do you still like it? Are you eager to consume it in the same amount as you did? If not, it means you grew over it.
When I was a child I loved the Monkey Island series, completing them several times a year. Solving the puzzles made feel smart, and the jokes made me chuckle. But now? I could hardly complete the high-res remakes or even the latest title. The puzzles are either too simple or just nonsensical try-and-error, I find the story boring and shallow (compared to other content I consume now), and none of the jokes really hit the spot anymore.
South Park even has an episode about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxRFQ_333_Y
I think forbidding kids to access content they crave is wrong and cruel, as you are basically forbidding them from exploring their tastes, forbidding them from becoming interesting adults with refined and deep tastes.
Even in the case of alcohol, I think people should explore it and their limits (getting wasted) when they are young. I have an aunt who never tried alcohol until she was in her 40s, and she went through the same phases as teenagers; however, at that age getting too drunk too often has serious social consequences. She spiraled out of control, becoming alcoholic, and then later addicted to other drugs. I am not a psychology expert, but I always thought that her problem was that she was too old to explore this path.
In my country we have an idiom I like: "potro que no galopa, de caballo se desboca", which means "colts that don't gallop become wild horses".
Schools group together only one age of kid for socialization and only 20-30 of them. If your kid is not into the same thing as enough of the other kids in that group, they will likely be ostracized, even unintentionally. So you must let your kid do the things their friends do.
Broader society does not restrict the age of who you can socialize with. My friends vary in age quite a bit. My friend's kid can play with my kid despite being a different age, but that's much less than the 30 hours a week spent in school.
This kind of approach is also invalid. So what everyone plays Fortnite? There are many places to get socialized with other kids. The kid likes basketball? Sign him up to a basketball team; he likes to play music? Sign him to some band; etc. Kids shouldn't surrender to peer pressure.
I agree schools are also a problem, but not the main problem.