[HN Gopher] Minecraft vs. Roblox
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Minecraft vs. Roblox
        
       Author : lawrenceyan
       Score  : 69 points
       Date   : 2021-03-10 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.codeadvantage.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.codeadvantage.org)
        
       | _muff1nman_ wrote:
       | > Roblox has a single version which works seamlessly across all
       | platforms. In Minecraft, kids can only play together if they have
       | the same edition, and modding can only be done via the Java
       | Edition.
       | 
       | This still saddens me everytime Minecraft comes up. I bought
       | Minecraft when it was in Alpha and it was immediately apparent
       | how social the game was as we all sat in the dorm rooms sharing
       | servers over the LAN. Then Microsoft came along and trashed the
       | whole interoperability aspect and now I have to explain to others
       | why anything other than the Java version of Minecraft is a lesser
       | version.
        
         | codeulike wrote:
         | If by interoperability you mean 'PCs Macs and Linux boxes can
         | all play Java edition', then that's still there.
         | 
         | Mojang made Java edition.
         | 
         | Mojang then made Pocket Edition for iOS, and made it as a
         | separate thing with no cross-play.
         | 
         | Mojang then got someone else to make the Xbox edition, again it
         | didn't cross play with anything else.
         | 
         | Then Mojang sold to Microsoft.
         | 
         | Microsoft then made the iOS, Android, XBox, Nintendo Switch and
         | Windows 10 editions all work together and have the same
         | features and upgrade path.
         | 
         | So its not really fair to say that MS trashed the
         | interoperability aspect - it was Mojang that started down the
         | path of different versions for mobile/consoles. MS actually did
         | a huge amount of work to make all those platforms work together
         | again.
         | 
         | But yes there are now two seperate Minecrafts - Java edition,
         | and all the others (previously known as Bedrock).
         | 
         | Its better than it was though, in interoperability terms.
        
       | booleandilemma wrote:
       | _Should my child learn Minecraft or Roblox?_
       | 
       | Learn? Really?
       | 
       | They're games. Let them pick the game they want to play, or let
       | them choose a different game entirely.
       | 
       | This is like seeing "Should my child learn Java or Python?"?
       | 
       | I'm really questioning the "nation of coders" that big tech is
       | envisioning. We don't need a country of people programming full-
       | time.
       | 
       | Get your kid a chemistry set.
        
         | Turing_Machine wrote:
         | Chemistry sets suck nowadays.
         | 
         | Some years ago I wanted to buy one for my nieces and nephews.
         | The only one I could find had on it, in bold letters, "No
         | glass! No flames! No hazardous chemicals!"
         | 
         | Yeah...no fun, either.
        
           | OkayPhysicist wrote:
           | The evolution of chemistry kits over time is really
           | highlighted by the ones my grandfather, father, and myself
           | owned.
           | 
           | Grandad's had all the ingredients, and told you how to make,
           | a couple explosive compounds.
           | 
           | Dad's had the ingredients, but not instructions.
           | 
           | The most dangerous thing I could do with mine was probably
           | eat the copper salts.
        
         | entropicdrifter wrote:
         | Just _imagine_ the average code quality once everyone is
         | coding. The people who are mediocre coders now will be the all-
         | stars of tomorrow.
        
       | Steuard wrote:
       | This article's focus seems very different than the experience
       | that my 9-year-old has had playing both games for the past few
       | years. At least for now, she's not really shown interest yet in
       | _programming_ either game: she plays them. (She has the option of
       | using them on a full computer and occasionally does, but she 's
       | usually on a tablet.) So most of what this article focuses on is
       | orthogonal to her experience.
       | 
       | I'd summarize more like this: Minecraft is a game focused on
       | building things in a virtual world. Roblox is a game platform for
       | playing games other people have created. Playing in the same
       | world as your friends is easy and built-in on Roblox; it's a good
       | bit more complicated on Minecraft (at least if they aren't on the
       | same local network).
       | 
       | On that level, my sense has been that Roblox is much more of a
       | "content consumption" platform (quite often involving social
       | elements and/or storytelling) while Minecraft inevitably includes
       | creative designing and building (sometimes including social play,
       | if you can figure out how to get it set up).
       | 
       | I suspect that creating your own Roblox content is easier than
       | writing a Minecraft mod, but Minecraft has a _whole_ lot more
       | "building" in the base game than most Roblox games do.
        
       | 867-5309 wrote:
       | >earn the virtual currency 'Robux' to purchase items
       | 
       | not sure about this one. my kids have been playing Roblox and
       | Minecraft for almost two years and AFAIK the only way to get
       | 'Robux' and 'Minecoins' is by buying them with real-world money
       | 
       | creative and social advantages aside, they are both ultimately
       | microtransaction based moneymakers and both offer monthly
       | subscriptions. that said, you don't need to spend money to enjoy
       | or progress, unlike some other games where you perpetually pay
       | through the nose to be second best
        
         | v64 wrote:
         | You can earn Robux in game [1] [2].
         | 
         | [1] https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-
         | us/articles/203313200-Ways-...
         | 
         | [2] https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/learn-
         | roblox/monetization
        
       | robotnikman wrote:
       | Minecraft was what got me into Java. I still run a small server
       | with a few regular players, and I experiment with making server
       | plugins when I have a neat idea I want to try.
       | 
       | And before that, I learned Lua when trying to mod the game
       | Company of Heroes.
       | 
       | It seems like video games we know are a great starting point when
       | it comes to learning how to program at first.
        
         | mratmeyer wrote:
         | Same here, I learned Java when I wanted to make Bukkit plugins
         | and minigames for my server. I don't play Minecraft much
         | anymore, but I'm glad to see that it still seems popular and
         | thriving when I do play on servers or watch it on YouTube.
        
       | cheb wrote:
       | As someone who got into coding at age 11 thanks to ROBLOX and
       | it's use of the lua scripting language: I can recommend! A lot of
       | beginners get discouraged because their program is A: a boring
       | command-line (don't get me wrong, cli is cool), B: too
       | complicated to do something of relevance.
       | 
       | The Roblox-API allows you to do e.g. spawn a explosion in a one-
       | liner: Instance.new("Explosion",game.Workspace) It allows you to
       | do almost anything a game would need (GUI, networking, physics,
       | databases, you name it), with a very straight-forward API.
       | Checkout https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/api-reference , they
       | also have AWESOME tutorials which also explain some mathematics
       | https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/CFrame-Math-Oper...
       | Roblox made learning these various disciplines straight-forward
       | and easy, I still benefit from it today!
       | 
       | Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as they
       | are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling wait()
       | until something loaded, Excessive use of globals, overuse of
       | strings, coding single god-functions that do everything (with a
       | frick ton of redundancy). Remember who the demographic of Roblox
       | is: kids and early teens. The people who create the scripts for
       | it are also fairly young, think teens to young adults. So bad
       | practices are more common here, especially in some YouTube-videos
       | (seriously, some are terrible learning-resources).
       | 
       | If your kid is curious, give Roblox a try :D
        
         | phaedryx wrote:
         | It's funny that I got into Lua via a Minecraft mod:
         | http://www.computercraft.info/
        
         | mentos wrote:
         | Awesome, curious to know how old you are now and what were your
         | most memorable experiences in Roblox?
        
           | Qub3d wrote:
           | I can't speak for OP, but I have a very similar experience:
           | 
           | I was introduced to ROBLOX in late 2008 -- my account was
           | created September 26. I spent the first several months just
           | exploring the platform. It was only a few years old at that
           | point, and had just started the curve upwards on its
           | hockystick graph.
           | 
           | The games were way simpler at the time, and they were
           | genuinely made mostly by kids and young adults, and it
           | showed.
           | 
           | One cool thing I discovered is that not only could you choose
           | to open-source a world, you could publish individual models
           | for anyone to make use of. I saw my first lines of code by
           | grabbing a public model and looking through it to see how it
           | worked.
           | 
           | My first forays into coding was pure "script kiddy": I'd take
           | an existing script, stick it in a new model, and tweak it
           | until I was happy with it. This was often things like taking
           | a model of a sliding door, re-sizing it, and adjusting the
           | script's `for` loop so it would slide the door the full
           | amount I wanted.
           | 
           | I slowly figured out stuff like loops, variables, scope, and
           | flow from that, without ever learning the term or reading a
           | book. I was so engrossed that I asked for and received the
           | Lua Reference Manual for my birthday.
           | 
           | I grew out of the platform's intended audience age early in
           | High School, but I had already transitioned to writing python
           | and making Java mods for Minecraft at that point.
           | 
           | I'm now almost 3 years out of college and doing embedded
           | software engineering full-time. And it does really retain a
           | part of that initial joy; I get the same rush when I write an
           | ISO 8601 parser and see it spit out JSON to AWS, really!
           | 
           | Occasionally I'll log on and check things out. Games are a
           | _lot_ more polished, thanks mainly to the developer program
           | that enables revenue sharing, so people can actually have an
           | income from their creations. The studio and platform have
           | also matured a lot as well. I remember when custom GUIs and
           | dynamic lighting were mind-blowing features we sort of hacked
           | together using tricks like a bunch of semi-transparent
           | spheres anchored at a user 's origin to simulate fog.
        
         | AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
         | > Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as
         | they are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling
         | wait() until something loaded, Excessive use of globals,
         | overuse of strings, coding single god-functions that do
         | everything (with a frick ton of redundancy).
         | 
         | I feel like that's probably true of everybody's first
         | adventures in programming. Certainly was for all of us who grew
         | up writing BASIC.
        
         | davidw wrote:
         | Is there any particular version of the game you need to be able
         | to code for it? I know for instance - in a vague way - that
         | Minecraft is different in terms of the version that runs on my
         | son's iPad and the Windows version, written in Java.
        
           | tialaramex wrote:
           | There are now (historically it was more complicated) two
           | types of Minecraft. The Java type runs on a wide variety of
           | general purpose systems including your Windows PC. On every
           | other platform where Minecraft is still updated it's "Bedrock
           | Edition" which is not Java.
           | 
           | If you buy Minecraft from Microsoft on their Windows store
           | thing I believe you can buy "both" together in some sense,
           | which is a good deal, but obviously programs from the Windows
           | store do not run on an iPad.
           | 
           | Although Microsoft has dipped their toes in the water and
           | sometimes did some PR about it, you can't today mod Bedrock
           | Edition and if you could it would always be a far more
           | limited experience because of how Bedrock Edition works.
           | 
           | For Java Microsoft is doing the most essential work to make
           | modifying it possible, as well as maintaining it, but a
           | _huge_ community actually takes that and runs with it. If you
           | tried to just use what Microsoft makes available then anyone
           | except a Java expert would probably be stuck with toy changes
           | that barely scratch the surface of the game.
           | 
           | For example as a modded player it's hard for me to think
           | about, but there's no electrical power analogue in Minecraft.
           | The modders (not Microsoft, after all their game doesn't have
           | electricity!) added a framework for a single unifying type of
           | electrical power so one mod's steam turbines can power a
           | different mod's plate pressing machine without either of them
           | needing to spend a year designing an electrical energy system
           | they don't really care about.
        
             | davidw wrote:
             | Thanks! What's the story with Roblox?
        
         | bgirard wrote:
         | Wow I didn't realize it was released in 2006 and there's
         | already programmers entering/already in the workforce that
         | started there. I though it was much more recent.
        
           | afterwalk wrote:
           | Exponential growth is very counter-intuitive. Although it's
           | been around forever the vast majority of users probably came
           | onboard recently.
        
         | acbart wrote:
         | I still believe it is easier to teach good habits to folks who
         | have experience with bad habits, than to teach folks who have
         | no experience at all. It's not too hard to find examples of how
         | those issues (e.g., globals, stringly types, god-functions) can
         | backfire once you get to scale, but it's really hard to
         | motivate them when folks are still trying to wrap their head
         | around function calls and variable assignment.
        
           | kbenson wrote:
           | You can impart the concept on those without experience, but
           | what you get is cargo culting. Often better than nothing when
           | used for good, but causes sub-optimal (at best) solutions in
           | some cases where people refuse to acknowledge or don't even
           | see better ways to do something because it goes against what
           | they were taught.
           | 
           | That's not to say I'm free of this. I doubt any of us are
           | truly free of this. That said, recognizing it's a thing means
           | you can try to put something into your design
           | practice/workflow where you sit back and think if there's a
           | better way that's a "hack", and try to honestly examine the
           | pros and cons and whether it's actually the better solution.
        
           | Demigod33 wrote:
           | Or they don't understand why its a good habit and so follow
           | the advice blindly, not knowing when to skip it or not.
           | Breadth of experience.
        
           | hypermachine wrote:
           | This is quite true. We are building a VBA interpreter and the
           | language is full of problematic practices. Go's much-maligned
           | _if err != nil_ pales in comparison to _On Error Resume
           | Next_. Good static analysis and linting really helps here.
        
             | skissane wrote:
             | > We are building a VBA interpreter and the language is
             | full of problematic practices
             | 
             | Fascinating. I'd love to know what motivated you to
             | undertake that task. Is this open source or a proprietary
             | project?
        
               | hypermachine wrote:
               | It will be released as open source over the summer.
               | Currently only the interpreter is working. We are still
               | building out the UI builder and editor. Take a look at
               | our earlier comment regarding motivation/business model:
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325064
        
       | kiddico wrote:
       | On one hand an actual professionally designed course on
       | programming in either of those games would be amazing if that's
       | what you want to do.
       | 
       | 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.
        
         | munchbunny wrote:
         | I think we're getting to the point where it's quite common that
         | the parent(s) are also gamers. In that case, if it's going to
         | be the kid's first exposure to either game, I don't see why it
         | would be any more gross than picking a sport for the kid to
         | try.
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | estaseuropano wrote:
           | Not to dismiss your position but I think you might have some
           | sample bias - most 'gamers' are just used to mobile and
           | console and really have no noteworthy IT skills or
           | understanding of what happens behind the scenes.
        
             | munchbunny wrote:
             | I wasn't assuming that they were particularly savvy at
             | anything. I was just pointing out that the parent(s) being
             | gamers likely means there's a decent change the parent(s)
             | know what they're throwing at the child by handing them
             | Minecraft or Roblox.
             | 
             | I know at least one parent who used Minecraft as an
             | opportunity for both the parent and the child to learn to
             | code.
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | How many people today got into coding because it was a means to
         | an end for modding their fave videogame? or customizing their
         | myspace profile?
         | 
         | Sometimes the best way to get to the destination is to have a
         | reason to get there.
        
           | mrandish wrote:
           | I started out as a teen over 40 years ago now. I begged and
           | finally got my parents to buy the cheapest Radio Shack 4K
           | home computer for me for xmas ($299). I learned to type by
           | typing in simple game code listings from magazines written in
           | the ROM BASIC. I couldn't afford games at the pizza place (@
           | .25c for three lives) and the game ROM cartridges Radio Shack
           | sold were $20.
           | 
           | 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.
        
         | Turing_Machine wrote:
         | "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and ...
         | Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." -- Mark
         | Twain
         | 
         | 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.
        
         | VRay wrote:
         | I was watching my 11 year old nephew play some game on Roblox,
         | and he kept alt tabbing between the game and a black window
         | full of text
         | 
         | 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
        
           | umvi wrote:
           | I cheat all the time on roguelike games to avoid permadeath.
           | Permadeath games are designed to be as massive of a time sink
           | as possible.
           | 
           | "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...
        
             | FooHentai wrote:
             | Similar for me and the wife in minecraft - /gamerule
             | keepInventory true every time.
             | 
             | 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.
        
             | Sebb767 wrote:
             | It's absolutely fair if cheating makes your gaming
             | experience more enjoyable - feel free to! But rogue-
             | likes/perma-death games are definitely not trying to waste
             | your time. Many games focus on replay to enjoy the game in
             | a different way, try a different strategy, discover a
             | different aspect - you name it! See, for example, Faster
             | Than Light: There are so many hidden aspects and pathways
             | and possibilities to play the game; if you mastered it on
             | the first try you probably would never think it's that
             | great. Or see Dwarf Fortress: It's simply fun to find out
             | how the castle is going to go down this time. Sure, it's
             | sad when your homie-dwarves get slaughtered by a gold
             | dragon, but it let's you move on. Making your castle
             | invincible destroys the fun and removes the feeling of
             | success when you master a large castle or fend of a dragon.
             | 
             | 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.
        
               | umvi wrote:
               | Sure. But I think we've all played games where you keep
               | having to replay the part you've mastered over and over
               | just to get to the part you haven't mastered.
               | 
               | 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.
        
           | twostorytower wrote:
           | Be careful - this was me back in the Diablo II days when I
           | was in middle school. It's great because it got me into
           | technology but the downside is it's extremely easy for kids
           | to stumble upon a virus this way. Hopefully you have some
           | safety measures in place.
        
             | munk-a wrote:
             | Getting a virus on your (adult) personal computer can be a
             | really big pain due to potentially forcing you into losing
             | valuable data (tax records) or needing to sink a lot of
             | time into recovery or reconfiguration; back up your data!
             | For a kid I'd generally run with the assumption that
             | they're going to software brick their computer at some
             | point and just hope they don't overheat the computer in the
             | process. Be prepared to reformat and reinstall operating
             | systems, and, if you can, grab a cheapo computer dedicated
             | to your young ones and keep them away from the "important
             | things" computer.
        
               | Larrikin wrote:
               | There is alot of content to be potentially loss that
               | could be important through out someone's life that aren't
               | financial.
               | 
               | 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.
        
           | aequitas wrote:
           | > I told him that cheating is wrong and you're only cheating
           | yourself of the satisfaction of a game well-played
           | 
           | 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.
        
           | crazydoggers wrote:
           | This is also why I don't let me son play roblox. The lack of
           | oversight also means that their are lots of predators on
           | there. I've seen kids basically being lured into virtual
           | brothels and other nasty stuff.
           | 
           | 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...
        
             | toolz wrote:
             | I'm not a parent so I'm not nearly invested enough to have
             | put much into the problem, but having been a kid playing
             | online games I have to wonder if you believe you can
             | actually shield your kid from adult material anymore and if
             | you can't then wouldn't it make more sense to just have
             | some hard conversations and let the kid handle things as
             | they come up?
             | 
             | 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.
        
               | estaseuropano wrote:
               | My daughter is starting to use her Chromebook more and
               | more independently. I'm very happy she's developing the
               | skills, but also nervous about who and what she might
               | encounter. I am convinced the danger is overblown by far,
               | but seeing how trusting kids are I know I have to be safe
               | rather than sorry. They think the world is a safe and
               | good place and while it's much better in western
               | countries than, say, India or Iraq, truth is that the
               | world is a dangerous world for little girls everywhere.
               | The internet takes away some of the physical aspects
               | (direct bodily harm) but there's enough things that can
               | happen to ruin your mind, psyche, life, and some abusers
               | are skillful to even get victims to expose or harm
               | themselves, setting up further harm for a lifetime (think
               | of all the teenage girls who's photos are shared online
               | for decades, with many of their friends having seen them,
               | and with facial recognition this can all only get worse).
               | 
               | 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.
        
               | bronson wrote:
               | How old a kid are you picturing?
               | 
               | 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.
        
         | mzg wrote:
         | I taught a semester of this company's Minecraft course in
         | college. My students all had a pre-existing interest in the
         | game and seemed interested in learning how to code their own
         | experiences into it, for what it's worth.
        
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