The Minecraft Parent 174
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Agger has an interesting article in the New Yorker about parenting in the internet era and why Minecraft is the one game parents want their kids to play. He says, "Screens are no longer simply bicycles for the mind; they are bicycles that children can ride anywhere, into the virtual schoolyard where they might encounter disturbing news photos, bullies, creeps, and worse. Setting a child free on the Internet is a failure to cordon off the world and its dangers. It's nuts. ... The comfort of games is that they are partially walled off from the larger Internet, with their own communities and leaderboards. But what unsettles parents about Internet gaming, despite fond memories of after-school Nintendo afternoons, is its interconnectivity. Minecraft is played by both boys and girls, unusually. ... At its best, the game is not unlike being in the woods with your best friends. Parents also join in."
According to Agger, the significance of Minecraft is how the game shows us that lively, pleasant virtual worlds can exist alongside our own, and that they are places where we want to spend time, where we learn and socialize. "To me what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise," says new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "It's this open-world platform. If you think about it, it's the one game parents want their kids to play." We need to meet our kids halfway in these worlds, and try to guide them like we do in the real world, concludes Agger. "Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft's ownership, but it's a historic game that has shown many of us a middle way to navigate the eternal screens debate."
According to Agger, the significance of Minecraft is how the game shows us that lively, pleasant virtual worlds can exist alongside our own, and that they are places where we want to spend time, where we learn and socialize. "To me what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise," says new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "It's this open-world platform. If you think about it, it's the one game parents want their kids to play." We need to meet our kids halfway in these worlds, and try to guide them like we do in the real world, concludes Agger. "Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft's ownership, but it's a historic game that has shown many of us a middle way to navigate the eternal screens debate."
Yeah, it's creatitive (Score:4, Insightful)
Creativity is one important skill children need to develop. I think this kind of effusive praise willfully ignores that sometimes these activities can and do take the place of other important childhood activities in some cases.
And that brings me to how I kind of lament the lack of textual information in modern games. I learned a rather large amount of reading(and vocabulary) skills by trying to understand what games were saying as a child.
The universality of voice acting harms how much children can develop by reading.
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Totally agree with you. Grew up playing RPG's on Sega (not to mention PTO, heh -- which spawned a lot of interest in geography and history, but i digress)
Then Everquest, which again, a lot of reading -- and typing, since you had to actually read an NPC's dialog in order to know what to say to progress quests.
Compared with the past couple of years: The last two RPG type games i've played (skyrim, and now Elder Scrolls Online) have characters that are entirely voice acted. I find myself clicking through the
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Creativity is one important skill children need to develop. I think this kind of effusive praise willfully ignores that sometimes these activities can and do take the place of other important childhood activities in some cases.
And that brings me to how I kind of lament the lack of textual information in modern games. I learned a rather large amount of reading(and vocabulary) skills by trying to understand what games were saying as a child.
The universality of voice acting harms how much children can develop by reading.
100% this. I hated reading as a child until I came across Final Fantasy 6.
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Reading is overrated - it is an eyesight based function that degrades with age.
http://www.engineersjournal.ie... [engineersjournal.ie]
There's an insensitive clod / get off my lawn meme in this somewhere, but I can't remember how to execute it.
Fluxx - reading (Score:2)
My neighbor's kid refused to learn to read ... so I started playing Fluxx with him. (specifically, Zombie Fluxx).
As he had to read the cards to be able to play (or reveal his hand to someone else at the table), it finally pushed him over the edge to read. Once he got to the point where I was fairly certain that he had memorized the cards, we switched to Pirate Fluxx.
These days, he uses his reading skills for reading books on Minecraft -- I saw him at the library last week checking one out.
I was dubious too... (Score:4, Interesting)
Pleasant? (Score:1, Flamebait)
As a parent, I don't see Minecraft through the rose-colored glasses, as it seems to be commonly described. While a game was supposed to be nonviolent, plenty of Minecraft servers seem to have added functionality that allows direct fighting and ability to kill other players. Chat capabilities go unmonitored and "adult language" is widespread.
Due to Minecrafts de-centralized nature there are no effective technological age or content controls, leaving children (mine anyway) exposed to kinds of things that I wo
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1. I am not in the micromanaging my kids business. Sitting next to my child every minute they are on the computer, and watching their every step is not viable. I prefer services (and games) that are designed from ground up to provide child enough freedom without having to have a permanent guard set next to them.
2. You are making my point for me. As a game universe, in general, Minecraft is *not* nonviolent or purely creative, as it is being generally described. It has its fair share of sex, violence and use
Re:Pleasant? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Any game that takes an effort to make "safe" cannot be described as pleasant or safe by default.
It takes more than a little effort or research. Unless you constantly monitor servers for content or audit server list daily - you cannot claim that the game is played "safely". Server content can change at any time, and your children can add and delete servers as they see fit.
Something is up with /. reader's ability to comprehend the material today :)
Re:Pleasant? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dam,n, no mod points this week to mod you up with....
Parenting is WORK.
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You can simplify that sentence and make it "Anything regarding your children involve a little bit of effort on the parents part." Yes, that's the true, folks, having kids is hard work, for the rest of your life.
More on the topic, my own 8 yo daughter never payed much attention to PC games (she loves to play on the iPad), but when she saw me playing Minecraft, she got interested. She likes to watch, and sometimes play a bit, she is still getting the hang of the keyboard+mouse controls.
Part of the appeal is t
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It has its fair share of sex, violence and useless junk. It takes a conscious and significant effort to protect players from that. This is something that articles about Minecraft seem to conveniently omit.
Sex in minecraft? The only straw I can grasp at here is its extremely abstract animal husbandry model...
As for policing content that you do not approve of, this is true of any scenario that involves your child interacting with other human beings...which seems to be your real issue, given that most of your objections stem from the multiplayer experience. I don't know what level of parental authority is reasonable to you, but I should hope it would include some basic supervision and boundary setting, as dig
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Blocky, pixellated sex, I imagine.
Kind of like the GIFs we downloaded from BBSes in the 1990s.
My safe word is "ZMODEM".
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You're showing your age. KERMIT is the way to go!
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Modem7. On CP/M.
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Then you aren't a very good parent.
You aren't your child's friend, you are their PARENT.
Re:Pleasant? (Score:5, Interesting)
While a game was supposed to be nonviolent, plenty of Minecraft servers seem to have added functionality that allows direct fighting and ability to kill other players. Chat capabilities go unmonitored and "adult language" is widespread.
So do not let your child play, unsupervised, on these public servers. You cannot get to a server without specifically adding the server address (which you typically get by searching on the internet).
On a personal level, it annoys me that a game world with a level of 3d graphics and physics sophistication that was state of the art 20 years ago is extremely popular today, but I can see the draw of "retro" look and feel.
So graphics trumps gameplay for you? I still play my favorite NES/SNES games on an emulator because of how much fun they are, not what they look like.
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While a game was supposed to be nonviolent, plenty of Minecraft servers seem to have added functionality that allows direct fighting and ability to kill other players. Chat capabilities go unmonitored and "adult language" is widespread.
So do not let your child play, unsupervised, on these public servers. You cannot get to a server without specifically adding the server address (which you typically get by searching on the internet).
Better yet, run your own server [gamepedia.com]. It's free, easy to set up, and super fun (for my family). It also provided me with a way to make my job sound intersting to my kids (My dad runs all the Minecraft servers at his work!)
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When I used to play with MC, some of the most fun I have had on my friends' server was to mess with them.
"oops, I have no idea how that lava field got underneath your farm. What, a creeper opened a hole to it and all the sheeps became BBQ. That's terrible!"
or
"A random which in your house which blew up a gigantic hidden stash of TnT? Where did that come from?"
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Someone doesn't understand how computationally intensive rendering voxels can be. N^3 algorithms get big fast.
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I know when I first started I didn't have a good grasp on the work involved. I was deathly afraid of mobs, so when I encountered my first skeleton spawned, I quarried my way down to it so the sunlight would disable it. I still have that world save, with the humongous quarry hole.
MUCH more work than I initially thought it would be.
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My parenting approach does not include use of force or abuse of my authority, (where safety or law is not directly concerned), so I can't in good consciousness prohibit it outright.
My god, i'd hate to behind you in line at the grocery store.
Re:Pleasant? (Score:4, Insightful)
and every single parent I've ever met who has these loosey-goosey standards, and tries to reason with a fucking 3 year old -- has unmanageable, entitled little monsters for children.
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Uh? Minecraft is supposed to be nonviolent?
A game in which you start off fighting zombies, skeletons and exploding texture errors (creepers) to work your way to building a portal to hell (the Nether) to get the supplies you need to fight a giant dragon is nonviolent?
Okay then. If you say so.
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On a personal level, it annoys me that a game world with a level of 3d graphics and physics sophistication that was state of the art 20 years ago is extremely popular today, but I can see the draw of "retro" look and feel.
I'm sorry, but it certainly seems like you're a bit too uptight about this particular aspect of the game. Minecraft is not popular because it looks like 20-year old shit. It's popular because of what it does and what it brings to the players, playfully ignorant about the demand to make each subsequent release more "lifelike", unlike other franchises.
There is no "draw" of retro look and feel outside of this particular game. Even Apple isn't bold enough, and they make one of the most fashionable pieces of
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I tried to think of something I care less about in a video game than "level of physics sophistication", and I couldn't think of anything.
Then I tried to think of something I care less about in a video game than "level of 3d graphics" and I thought of one thing: level of physics sophistication.
Answers (Score:2, Insightful)
"Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft's ownership,"
Within 18 months:
Java codebase abandoned in favor of either from-scratch VB.net (or some other proprietary nonsense) rewrite, or a porting of the xbone codebase back to windows.
Support quietly dropped (if not dropped, no new updates published) for non-microsoft branded platforms.
Some new architecture to monetize DLC and/or server mods.
"premium" version with a subscription based revenue model.
Two or three smaller-scale spinoff games based arou
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What is the XBox 360 version written in?
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My understanding is it's C++, so a complete rewrite from the PC version. There's no way in hell it's Java, and I doubt they'd bother with XNA/C# if they had access to the real developer environment.
remember companies and 2nd life? (Score:1)
Remember companies doing "recruitment" in 2nd life? Almost same shit, different name.
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Hell, I just did some newly published online "training" for my giant employer, and they made direct reference to their second life island in the AD 20 fucking 14.
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Minecraft is *a lot* different than 2nd Life, for a lot of reasons.
Creation is a primary gameplay activity, not something done in an external tool and then imported. When playing online, Minecraft uses a strict client/server architecture and all game objects and their behavior are defined by the server. A client cannot create and upload a scripted object or behavior to the server like in Second Life.
Minecraft was initially created as a single player adventure and exploration game by a single person for fun.
I look forward to Minecraft with my son (Score:2)
It takes coordination, cooperation, critical thinking, and creativity to create in this game and I'm looking forward to having this be one of the activities we do together as he gets older. Of course I also cannot wait until he's old enough for legos.. I only wish I did not sell all of mine 20 years ago in a garage sale..
I watch some stream
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My son is 8 and has been playing Minecraft for 2 years. I've seen him go from just throwing stuff together to really putting thought into design and ascetics.
We started him out on Minecraft Pocket edition.. He can play with friends on the same lan but internet play is not all there yet so you don't have to worry about online strangers. We bought the PC version for him last year and started playing on the Reddit servers. Overall it's a good community.
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We've been considering getting our oldest son (11) into Minecraft. He currently loves playing Disney Infinity because he can build worlds and then use his favorite characters to navigate through those worlds. Of course, at $14 per character figure, this can get expensive fast. I can get Minecraft - Pocket Edition for $7 from Amazon's app store, load it on his tablet, and set him to building.
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My 2 year old girl runs around in Minecraft on her tablet and on a PC. Although by her behavior she must have inherited my genes from playing doom, duke nukem and the like growing up. Unless your son is isolated, I doubt you will be able to keep him from minecraft before 3.
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Coordination in a sense that he will need to learn what materials, and how many, are required to proceed.
I played soccer, football, baseball through high school and have since taken up golf and ice hockey as an adult. My son is going to have plenty of opportunities to play outside, especially since there is a pack of kids running around outside nearly every evening.. spring through fall. Next year my son will be with them.
And I plan on sittin
More mental retardation (Score:2, Insightful)
This is 2014, and we're in the decade of reboots. This is the reboot of "sit your kids in front of the TV to watch the Children's Channel" thinking. The glowing, phosphorus parent of the 80s, now back with less Big Bird.
Put your kids outside. Don't put them on the bicycle of the Internet; put them on a *real* bicycle. I walked the 1/3 mile to school when I was 6; I could bicycle 1.2 miles in that time, a good 10 minutes walking by myself, well out of sight of my parents. When I was 8, I had a bicycle
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Well, the real truth is that some of the best predictors of adult success, as far as parenting practices are concerned, is simply time spent together in infancy and early childhood.
Those other things are almost all certainly good ideas, but it mostly comes down to parental engagement.
(sufficiently disengaged parents are thought to be one of the primary causes of psychopathy)
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Sticking your child in front of a video game to parent for you is NOT engaging.
Children need independence. Independence doesn't mean mommy isn't around; it means they make decisions and mistakes on their own, and are able to move away from their parents and return by their own action--even if they're instructed when to do so. Such instruction is engagement, as is parents asking where you're going, where you've been, what you've done, and having food prepared for you when you get home.
We can extrapolate
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blame mommy culture for this :(
also, sensationalist news stories. A fluke child abduction occurs*, and is blasted on the news -- and suddenly the mommy brigade is convinced that monsters are lurking behind every corner waiting to snatch little kids.
*IE: a instance of abduction that is NOT perpetrated by a family member.
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It's been happening forever. In the 1500s, a Catholic Priest dedicated his efforts to attacking the mnemonics techniques used to memorize scripture--and everything else--because they attached lewd and base images to ideas in the mind. This happened after one preacher admitted he used an image of a naked virgin girl in a not-so-puritan situation to help remember some odd line of the Catholic bible. Having such thoughts in peoples's heads was unacceptable, entirely.
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I'd guess that those guys look a lot like Endermen. Just sayin :D
Thanks grandpa! (Score:2)
Minecraft is autocad for kids lets be honest... (Score:1)
.... it was never much of a videogame, more a modelling editor who's basic building block is cubes.
All the corporate PR speak in the world can't change the fact that the game isn't really a game, just software in which to tool around in with some minor if trivial game elements.
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Beats second life... (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend of mine's kid plays incessantly. Not even in kindergarten, but can build gigantic, amazing structures. And then he blows it all up. :)
Major plus sides:
Ability to express creativity with no real cost but time
Ability to socialize with others without having to worry about getting beat up
Ability to exercise lots of things, like planning. I mean, when we were kids, we built forts in trees to throw pinecones at each other, snow forts from which to throw snowballs at each other, and cardboard forts at which to shoot each other with bb guns. Now kids can kinda do the same in a video game. Plan out the fort, build the fort, then tear it all down and do it again, even better this time.
I'm pretty impressed with the game, but haven't actually played it myself. Shame. I wish I had more time for play these days.
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This might be really good for my son. He's 11 and has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. One of the things he struggles with is executive function. Whereas you or I might see a task and immediately start breaking it down into subtasks, prerequisites, etc and organizing them, he struggles with this. This might help him out by giving him a task "Build a Fort in Minecraft" and making him think through the steps (e.g "build the foundation first, then t
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Ability to socialize with others without having to worry about getting beat up
And we wonder where the internet trolls come from...
I mean, I get it. Parent want their kid to be safe. But when you remove the whole "do this and you will get punched in the face" aspect of social interaction, then certain behaviors fail to get snuffed out.
We've all seen that comic about when little stephan forgets he is not online [google.com]. There's a kernel of truth to that.
I'm sure it will help socialize them to the facts of the Internet. Like how to deal with trolls, and how to ignore annoying people, and how yo
Digital Lego (Score:4, Insightful)
The best description of Micecraft I've heard is Digital Lego.
In creative you can build anything.. My son and I built the Great Pyramid of Geza to scale on the Reddit creative server.
Play with redstone.. lean the basic electronic circuits with switches and logic gates.
Then switch to survival, join a community.. work with others as a team.. So many things you can do in one little game..
Well not to call it little.. the map can have more land than 9 million earths.
Brilliant marketing strategy, MS (Score:1)
Lego (Score:2)
Minecraft, Lego, Mechano...all branches on the same tree. I don't have children, but if I did I would rather they play Minecraft than CoD Whatever: The Sequelling.
Best of luck to Notch. Hopefully MS are good stewards of the property.
half nonsense (Score:3)
With some mods, it can also teach basic programming skills and simple electric circuits.
OTOH
It can be modded into a pvp shooter. Not the worst thing in the world, but it sort of kills the educational value of it. It is not a safe, walled environment because, you know, other players are coming to kill you. Moreover, even in other forms of minecraft other players can come and destroy your stuff. They can also yell at you and call you names and otherwise annoy you via the chat window.
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Is this just a problem in the PC version or can people do this in the tablet versions also? For example, if I loaded Minecraft - Pocket Edition on my son's Android tablet, could other people enter his "world" and interfere with things he made? Could they initiate chats with him (abusive or otherwise)? Can you choose to wall other people out and operate in your own "Minecraft World" and/or only allow approved people in? (For that last one, perhaps I could load up Minecraft and walk through something my s
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But you have to go our of your way to run this way. And if you were to run this way there is still nothing to prevent a child from logging on to some other server (there are thousands).
Server is critical (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Server is critical (Score:4, Interesting)
The chat messages are full of nasty, hateful language. It seems to me that the user experience varies greatly from one server to another.
too true. I like the servers with chat filters, which bring a level of amusement to the situation when the chat scrolls with tales of bananasing female dogs and so on
Pros and cons (from a parent) (Score:4, Interesting)
We have 3 kids, two of whom are BIG into Minecraft. (The 3rd. one, our 11 year old daughter, just kind of played along since the other two were so into it -- but it's not really her thing.)
IMO, any of these computer games that encourage kids to actually create and think are a good thing. The "Little Big Planet" series of games on the PS3 work a similar way (but have much better graphics, as they're not trying to do the retro, early 80's block graphic look).
The original article's author seems to be implying that they're also a "win" for parents in the sense it gives kids a place to play and explore on the net that's still relatively safe. Unfortunately, I think that's less true than some people might think.
Our youngest girl (a first-grader, who was able to chat/type far above her grade level) ran across a fellow Minecraft "player" who turned out to be some kind of perv -- getting kicks out of sending her links to hard-core porn photos and videos, etc. She was still too young to really get what was going on with all of that. But we had to have a talk with her and make sure she knows never to give out ANY personal information in the game -- and have to review what she's doing in the game more closely now.
As much as there is to dislike about Sony and its money-grabbing, proprietary ways? I will say they seem to have a lot more invested in locking down the play environment - so I feel this sort of thing is less likely an issue in a game like LBP.
"Who knows how Minecraft will change (Score:1)
under Microsoft's ownership?"
Did... did anyone else just feel a cold chill up their spine?
There are alternatives... (Score:3)
I don't mean to advertise here, but if language, "adult content" and so on is as big a problem as it's being made out to be on Minecraft servers, you might want to try an alternative game instead.
Those of us who run Minetest (the open source game/engine) usually very careful about policing the users on our servers, to the point at least that adult discussions are usually not tolerated at all, and coarse language/cursing is usually equally shunned. Sometimes, depending on the server, it's okay to "blur" your curses if they're not directed at someone in an insulting manner.
Some servers have PvP enabled, but I guess most server owners have that turned off.
We're small, and we're not Minecraft, but I think we do okay, and besides - its fun.
Freenode channel #minetest or http://minetest.net/ [minetest.net] if you want to take a look. And no, it's not supposed to be a Minecraft clone and it does not use any code or assets from that game. It's just supposed to be similar enough to appeal to same "sandbox" audience.
Full disclosure: I am a modder and texture pack author for this project and have contributed a couple of small things to the engine.
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you guys need to get the word out there. Seriously. Nobody knows you exist.
Start by submitting a slashdot article. Slashdotters HATE Microsoft. Tell them an open source version of Minecraft exists, and you will get favorable replies.
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>it's not supposed to be a Minecraft clone
Having just looked at the site I can't really believe this. It has the same visual appearance (like Minecraft to Infiniminer but more so), the same tools in one screenshot, the same placement of the tools. From descriptions it appears to have the same general game mechanics. It doesn't have to be an exact replica to be a "clone" in game terms IMO.
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I should say .. that's not a bad thing to me. I'll be trying it out for sure.
We know better: Ignorance is no defense (Score:3)
"Setting a child free on the Internet is a failure to cordon off the world and its dangers."
Well, yes. At a certain point when they lack the ability to comprehend danger, that might be true. However, you can only go for so long before enforced ignorance will backfire. You think your kid's friends have the same definition of limits as you? Or the public library? Or commercials on tv for sexed up teen drama, or sexed up medical drama, or murder-sex-up-cop drama? Or the line of magazines at the grocery store proclaiming "10 ways to have SEX that will give you a SUPER-ORGASM"? Or pop music about sex, drugs, and how great it is to combine the two?
At some point, you have to start coaching the child on the actual dangers of the world, including the internet. Especially the internet. It's ubiquitous, and once they're old enough to be a target, they're old enough to have circumvented any access restrictions you might use.
When they're old enough to start using Minecraft, they're probably old enough to get one in a series of many talks about the world. Stranger Danger applies to emails and creepy guys on websites too, you know.
Minecraft is not any sort of solution to this issue. It's just entertainment, and has nothing to do with it.
Single Player Creative Mode (Score:3)
Put the kids on single player in a creative map and just let them create. When they get older, introduce survival mode.
Not quite sure how they got there, but I believe it went something like this:
1) Kids watch daddy play Minecraft and watch Paulsoaresjr's videos along with daddy. (Paul is very family friendly in his videos) They scream when surprising things happen.
2) Kids start playing around with Daddy's copy of Minecraft PE on iPad and eventually take it over.
3) Kids get plush Creeper stuffed animal with explosion noises from Santa and use it sneak-up and scare Daddy. Kids: (whisper) "Lets creep Daddy!" Creeper: "ssssSSSSBOOM!" Daddy: "Ahhh!" Kids: *Giggles*
4) Kids beg Daddy to let them play Minecraft on PC and eventually Daddy sets up a single-player creative world for them. Kids show-off their creations to Parents.
It's not all the time and as with any toy it goes in and out of their attention, but they are having a good time and I feel that it is beneficial.
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5. Daddy builds a Minecraft server PC and throws it on the LAN. 4 kids play together or alone in a server you control.
6. Daddy bought a relm subscription.. performance was way better then the 7 year old desktop plus they can now access it from grandpas house or on vacation and let their cousin & school friends join in. I still have control as it's a whitelisted server done by invite form me.
The kids now play on some of the public servers but I always play on them first to get a feel for the user base be
Kid friendly servers? (Score:2)
Our whole family loves playing Minecraft, although so far we've kept network play to our own server. For parents with young kids playing on the net, any recommendations for kid friendly servers? Ours are currently 5 and 7, so may be too young to consider letting them venture out on their own, but will be looking pretty soon probably.
Come out of the Mine and go outside its the world (Score:1)
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Re:Is minecraft really 'creative'? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is minecraft really 'creative'? (Score:4, Insightful)
For us adults who are set in our ways, minecraft might not be as fun as a sandbox as it might be as a player in an environment someone else built, but for a kid who really gives no shits about anything other than fucking around and doing what the mind and heart desire, minecraft is a pretty good playpit.
Re:Is minecraft really 'creative'? (Score:4, Interesting)
there COULD be. my son and daughter work together to build the worlds they create in the game; they've gone to great lengths to reconstruct their own school, and dug deep to learn how to accomplish things with just the goofy 8-bit tools provided. It's a large interactive puzzle, it seems, and they get to decide what the picture is.
Granted, it's no Galaga or Vanguard, LOL
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Uh, yes, it's totally creative. It doesn't actively encourage creativity, but it still lets you make things, and you absolutely see children making "roller coasters" or interesting architecture, or sometimes even some light pixel art.
It's like calling legos "not creative" because you can use your imagination with action figures too. It's not radically creative, but it's a little more creative than most games.
Re:Is minecraft really 'creative'? (Score:4, Insightful)
You haven't played it, have you?
It's like a box of legos. I've played with my daughter and my friend's kids, and in our little server, we've build castles, towers, giant highways in the sky, a glass dome, funny little traps for each other, underwater houses, a giant rocketship, houses, and many other things I can't recall at the moment. You can literally build your own little world in that game.
I was watching two of my friend's sons build their own little arena for each other so they could spawn zombies and spiders and ender dragons to challenge each other to see who could do better.
As the article says, it totally gives you the creative, imaginative experience of "exploring the woods" without having to have the woods to explore (handy if you live in the city!)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is minecraft really 'creative'? (Score:5, Interesting)
But... But...... Then children might learn that they can make their own entertainment without needing to pay Hollywood to imagine it for them! You monsters! What are you doing to our children???!!!!
=)
Of all the things my 14 year old could have gotten hooked on, Minecraft doesn’t even register in the “lesser of evils” category. A little moderation is a good thing, but compared to having his brain rot in front of the TV, I’ll take Minecraft any day. He’s imagining & implementing the things he imagines, and he’s communicating and cooperating with his peers. Most of them are even in our geographical area and/or in his school which puts his online social interactions a good bit better than my own at his age where my closet emotional connections were to people I’ve never seen who lived on the other side of the country.
And as far as TFS’ assertion that, “Setting a child free on the Internet is a failure to cordon off the world and its dangers,” may I just say, “Fuck you!” I’ve never once felt the need to shield my son from reality. We’ve talked to him throughout his life about the fact that there are bad people and that there are things you should never do online because they could put you at risk in the real world (sharing personal information, arranging to meet people, etc.). I think my son is a much better adjusted young human being for the trust and faith that we’ve shown that we have in him. Teaching, guidance, and trust are much better tools than surveillance and censorship. It’s the same approach that my parents took with me (admittedly more out of ignorance of what the Internet was at the time on their part). It worked out alright for me, and my son has never done anything to make me regret taking the same approach with him.
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One other thing I liked about Minecraft for my kids was that it's not as polished and easy to use as most modern games (and console games especially). The players actually have to struggle and figure it out and tune their settings and figure out how it works behind the scenes a bit. This is so much better and they learn so much more than just sticking in a disc and having the game run!
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You create your own homes and monuments. It's almost literally digital Lego. Most kids seem to disable or ignore most of the "gameplay" stuff like the monsters and fighting and just build stuff. A lot of the blocks have interesting interactive elements as well, with buttons, triggers, and the functional equivalent of conditional statements. You can literally build a digital computer (but it will be quite large).
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You're a fool if you think that. Minecraft doesn't have its success for being a lego-like building game, it's way more than that. People build games within it for example. Think of it as a friendly version of Unity or UE. You have adventure games, survival, exploration, competitive, all online or LAN on all platforms. You can explore real world maps with it using the survey data from various countries' official map data. I've seen GoT cities built in it too. And that's before the mods.
I was a plank and thou
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The creativity involved from my limited exposure seems close to nonexistant.
I don't really see any benefit from it, compared to any other game. Are parents just deluding themselves? Or is there some substantial creative benefit that I'm not seeing?
Speaking of delusions, I'm struggling to find the "benefit" you're looking for from the worlds most popular kill-em-all games...
Re:Is minecraft really 'creative'? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not old, not entitled, not egotistical, loves minecraft.
Please re-examine your warped sense of reality and generalizations based on someone's UID number!
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Do not poke the elder gods.
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You're just jealous that no one invites you to the circlejerk.
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Oh, wow, dude... Calm down. Have some water.
I gotta say, "goosestepping neckbeard" is the best thing I've been called in weeks. And no, a low UID only means I showed up. Just like you did.
I could type something nice about Minecraft, but I already did in another thread today: stuff about minecraft being an excellent UI for 3D printer data. [slashdot.org]
And try not to lunge so hard at obvious trollage. :)
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i have a low UID and run 3 minecraft servers
i can say with much authority that anonymous troll is an idiot.
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That's right, some psycho kids once tried to kill another kid in the woods. So DON'T EVER THINK OF LETTING ANY KIDS GO INTO THE WOODS EVER!
Keep them inside, where nothing bad ever happens to kids. No kid ever suffered harm while locked in the basement. Right?
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That is what all parents think. Good luck.
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Nobody ever called your parents realists.
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My three year old nephew was building red stone traps I didn't even dream up.
No surprise... you don't even know that its redstone (without the space...) so I doubt you know how to use it...
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It helps if you don't live in some sprawled out suburban hellscape devoid of both nature and culture, like the kinds of places people who think minecraft is good for kids think is good for raising kids.
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How about trying *actually" being in the woods with your friends?
Right. My kids visited with some family friends, and their kids play Minecraft 3-4 hours a day.
I guess it's entertaining, and they do neat stuff _in_ Minecraft, but it'll all illusory.
When they came home they asked me if we could get Minecraft. I told them, "of course not - go outside and build a treehouse. Get some sunshine while you're at it".
Minecraft is conditioning the factory workers of tomorrow. If we're to build a digidystopia, at l
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It's not illusory, not at all. Is reading a book illusory? Is going to a museum illusory? Is painting a painting illusory? Playing a videogame is NOT illusory. Building things out of your mind into a videogame is NOT illusory.
The world your kids are growing up is not the world you grew up, the world your kids will have to live and work is not the world you're living and working right now. Why would you want to make your kids grow up like you did? In the future, there will probably be few to none factory wor
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When they came home they asked me if we could get Minecraft. I told them, "of course not - go outside and build a treehouse. Get some sunshine while you're at it".
Because, of course, there's no possibility of kids both playing Minecraft sometimes, and playing in the woods at other times. It has to be one or the other, for ever.