Reply to No Roblox and too upset

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "No Roblox and too upset"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I feel so bad for this kid. My DD got Roblox during the pandemic when she was 9 and her younger brother soon after. Yes, they love it and play it all the time. We have a lot of conversations about how to do so safely, but I do not monitor them. It's a huge way for them to bond with friends from school and ECs. They are active, their grades are awesome, etc.

He said something horrible (newsflash: so do adults) and it sounds like he feels way more than sufficiently bad about it. He is not a bad kid.

Get him Roblox. It will bring him happiness.[/quote]

My kids also had/have large amounts of screen time and handle it fine. But I think it's naive to think every child will do well with all videogames. OP allows other games and set boundaries around Roblox due to her knowledge of her child. She was pleasantly surprised when her kid got to play: instead, all of her concerns were confirmed.

OP, I don't think you need to punish or address what he said further. But it does seem that setting limits around the game makes sense.[/quote]

These games aren’t that different. It’s sort of like restricting beer but allowing whisky and wine. Friends and cousins drink beer, they talk about it. They drink microbrews, ipas. They compare, contrast, talk about their likes and dislikes. All the while you listen and watch. Beer takes on a certain fascination. Eventually, finally child gets a chance at beer and drinks as much as they can.

Why give a addictive substance at all to kids? If it were up to me no one would. 30 years ago, my parents took the no video game/tv route, and I learned that’s a terrible solution for reasons I won’t go into. Arbitrarily restricting one game that’s really no better or worse than the others may backfire also. My kids play an hr a day on weekends including Roblox, and they’re fine.[/quote]

I don't understand how you can say Roblox is no better no worse.  Roblox has teams of engineers whose primary job is to make the game more addictive for kids to play. It has a massive social component, and also a monetary/reward component tied to real money. Roblox is far more addictive - it is designed to be. [/quote]

You don’t think Lego and Microsoft/Minecraft have that too? Every video game company has staff hired to make the games more addictive. I think one benefit to Roblox is that it’s more of a platform and many of the game designers are individuals without big companies R&D funds behind them. Lego has a gigantic marketing team with a powerful brand strategy. [/quote]

You're mixing up commercialization and monetization/gameplay.

Roblox and Minecraft are very different in their sales models. The Roblox economy is much more complex and also more prone to scams and fighting over items (see the thread about a kid who tricked another kid into giving him an item in game). Roblox has more freedom for innovation and novelty, but also more freedom for weird crap like the white supremacy game world. It is designed to move quickly and follow fads so that there is always something new to buy. Minecraft has that to an extent with purchasing new mods and worlds, but the money tends to only flow from the consumer to Mojang, not from consumer to consumer which is where a lot of the problems arise.

Lego is heavily commercialized, but it does not have gameplay designed with an eye toward addiction. That would be like if you bought a lego kit, discovered you were missing 10% of the pieces and had to pay $20 to get the rest. For the most part, what you see is what you get with Lego. You want a star wars kit? You pay $50 and you get it and you build it. Done and done. It's not like a subscription where at the end of the month, your pieces disappear unless you keep paying. [/quote]

Believe me. They’re all designed to be addictive. Somewhere someone is measuring usage, engagement, dropoff, rentry, etc. Lego Nintendo games are designed to be addictive. The ones online are designed to bring kids back to the website. So those are measuring impressions, clicks, etc. It’s all heavily quantified and analyzed. Regardless of how they differ in terms of monetization, they’re all designed to get kids to return to the game and/or brand[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics