5 ms·

Roblox pisses me off so so much as a parent. There are some good games but it's mostly wading through an ocean of shit. And the vast majority of games that are

Roblox pisses me off so so much as a parent. There are some good games but it's mostly wading through an ocean of shit. And the vast majority of games that are popular are clickers that incentivize children to pay money to get more for each of their clicks. And it's full of scams. Kids spend $10 for a hat or something in the game and it doesn't end up working in all the games and there's no recourse. It's a true free-for-all wild-west. What we can learn from it is: 1. Making games easy to make and distribute. It's honestly amazing what kids are doing these days. I give Roblox a lot of credit for this. 2. Roblox has become an awesome way for kids to communicate with each other, they share their username at the playground.

marianov 6y ago
related: is there some resource to know what a game/social network concerns may be? My small kids requested: Minecraft, Roblox, Among Us, tik tok , Hogwarts Mystery and the list goes on. My due diligence process is overbooked.
- webwielder2 6y ago
  https://www.commonsensemedia.org https://www.commonsensemedia.org
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > related: is there some resource to know what a game/social network concerns may be? If you search for "roblox parents" you'll find several good resources.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  I have always used https://www.pluggedin.com/ https://www.pluggedin.com/ It's run by a Christian org but to their credit they seem to be the only group that actually cares about what kids see and hear in movies and tv. And they cover the most popular movies and tv really quickly.
- Scramblejams 6y ago
  If you go for Roblox, I recommend using the parental controls to enable curated games only. It wasn't on by default for my <13 yo, which annoys me to no end. If you don't turn it on, you'll end up with your kids in games with freeform sketching and all sorts of questions you weren't planning to answer until later. :-)
webwielder2 6y ago
"Pisses off adults" is historically a pretty good metric for evaluating success.
- guidoism 6y ago
  I don't disagree with you — Both theoretically and in reality where success means forking over your money to a massive corporation in order to shut your kids up. Do I sound cranky? :-)
lumenwrites 6y ago
I'm not very familiar with Roblox. But I have been learning Godot, and it makes creating games extremely easy and fun. And Godot now has https://gotm.io/ https://gotm.io/, you can easily upload games there to be played in the browser. It's really amazing how simple this is. I imagine that this could be the future of game creation and distribution. We used to have flash, then it went away, and now we'll have something much much cooler. Shameless plug, some of the games I've made: https://gotm.io/godotacademy https://gotm.io/godotacademy (playable only on desktop, I still haven't figured out what's necessary to make them work well on mobile, but that should be easy as well)
- Kinrany 6y ago
  Godot is not comparable: Roblox is a platform, not an engine.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    They’re linking a platform for web-based Godot games.
    - Kinrany 6y ago
      Fair. What I mean is, without the multiplayer aspect it cannot compete at being a social network centered around virtual experiences.
  - chc4 6y ago
    Roblox is a game engine, though. All of the games hosted on Roblox are made in Roblox Studio, which is comparable to the Unity editor.
djaychela 6y ago
I disagree that the games are mostly crap... I have 4 step kids who game, and 3 do on roblox a lot. Some of the games may be objectively poor, but they enjoy playing in them anyway, and some of them are spectacular. I spent quite a few hours playing with them during the original UK lockdown,which was doubly good as I don't live with them so didn't see them for 3 months. In that time we "did" many things,including "going" to a theme park, and spent many hours exploring and seeing how bad I am at it. Without roblox we wouldn't have had that experience. In terms of scams, I'd rather they learnt using their pocket money than their wages when they are older.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  Can you link some examples? It's hard to navigate Roblox without participating in the social network-ish aspects.
  - tra3 6y ago
    I like naval warfare [0]. Its simple but still fun. You can spawn boats, subs, and planes. There's a collaborative aspect of course. Lots of fun. [0]: https://naval-warfare-roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Battleship https://naval-warfare-roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Battleship
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    "Theme Park Tycoon" is a Rollercoaster Tycoon clone that's really nice. It's pretty much single-player, but you can check out other players' theme parks which is very cool. "Islands" is mostly a Minecraft ripoff but you're building air castles (you can fall off an "island" and die). This lets the kids do all kinds of invented in-game games, such as building an obstacle course for one another, playing hide and seek etc. "Fishing Simulator" starts out as a pretty dull pirate-themed fishing game but turns out to have a lot of depth, adventure game style. It also has amazing content for Roblox standards. "Build A Boat For Treasure" is a lot less fancy than the above, but it has a very cool concept. You design & build your own boat, then go sit in it, and take it through a river full of obstacles. The way you build it determines how it deals with the obstacles because when you sail away you can hardly navigate it anymore. So you need to design for robustness etc, which turns out to be pretty hard. A lot of the games are shit, but also a lot of the games look shit but have super original ideas. Eg there's a game that you're in a building and then some disaster happens (tsunami, volcano eruption, whatever) which slowly destroys the building and whoever survives the longest in the collapsing building wins. I'm really not sure if that's a ripoff of anything, it strikes me as genuinely original. It's not very deep, but it's good fun.
jimmyvalmer 6y ago
You've clearly forgotten what being a kid means. Any game kids want to spend money on is inherently "good" and not "sh_t" according to the one metric that matters: is it fun or not?
- antiterra 6y ago
  You've clearly forgotten how disappointing things can be when you're a kid. How you waited for Christmas or saved for weeks only to find the thing you got is garbage. I've heard plenty of stories about kids being absolutely gutted for not getting what they thought they were getting for virtual currency in Roblox and Minecraft. That's also not mentioning how different aspects of a game can be fun or unfun. It could be that kids just want some item in aspirationally in a game but actually have no interest in playing the game itself. Much like how kids can have zero interest in the Pokemon card game but desperately crave spending $4 for the pleasure of 1 minute of unwrapping new cards. That's also not factoring in the social pressure and envy kids feel when their friends talk about things they have.
  - jimmyvalmer 6y ago
    > You've clearly forgotten how disappointing things can be I must have because I don't remember being at all "gutted" when I obsessed over the one $20-or-less item my parents allotted me each Christmas. This is quite contrary to what I see amongst kids today who spend all of a couple hours with their physical gifts and go right back to the Minecraft/Roblox marathon.
    - guidoism 6y ago
      My kids are so much happier on Minecraft because there's no built-in pay-money-to-get-better mechanism. Minecraft has a HUGE value in the price you pay to the amount of awesome gameplay you get. Even with Realms it's cheap compared to what you get out of it.
      - ManifestTendy 6y ago
aidenn0 6y ago
I had never hear of Roblox before today, but this comment makes me want to introduce my kids to it. If they blow all of their savings on it now, when their savings is like $50-$100, the lesson learned could save them blowing thousands of dollars of savings on similar scams later in life.

marianov 6y ago

related: is there some resource to know what a game/social network concerns may be? My small kids requested: Minecraft, Roblox, Among Us, tik tok , Hogwarts Mystery and the list goes on. My due diligence process is overbooked.

webwielder2 6y ago
https://www.commonsensemedia.org https://www.commonsensemedia.org
CharlesW 6y ago
> related: is there some resource to know what a game/social network concerns may be? If you search for "roblox parents" you'll find several good resources.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
I have always used https://www.pluggedin.com/ https://www.pluggedin.com/ It's run by a Christian org but to their credit they seem to be the only group that actually cares about what kids see and hear in movies and tv. And they cover the most popular movies and tv really quickly.
Scramblejams 6y ago
If you go for Roblox, I recommend using the parental controls to enable curated games only. It wasn't on by default for my <13 yo, which annoys me to no end. If you don't turn it on, you'll end up with your kids in games with freeform sketching and all sorts of questions you weren't planning to answer until later. :-)

webwielder2 6y ago

"Pisses off adults" is historically a pretty good metric for evaluating success.

guidoism 6y ago
I don't disagree with you — Both theoretically and in reality where success means forking over your money to a massive corporation in order to shut your kids up. Do I sound cranky? :-)

lumenwrites 6y ago

I'm not very familiar with Roblox. But I have been learning Godot, and it makes creating games extremely easy and fun. And Godot now has https://gotm.io/ https://gotm.io/, you can easily upload games there to be played in the browser. It's really amazing how simple this is. I imagine that this could be the future of game creation and distribution. We used to have flash, then it went away, and now we'll have something much much cooler. Shameless plug, some of the games I've made: https://gotm.io/godotacademy https://gotm.io/godotacademy (playable only on desktop, I still haven't figured out what's necessary to make them work well on mobile, but that should be easy as well)

Kinrany 6y ago
Godot is not comparable: Roblox is a platform, not an engine.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  They’re linking a platform for web-based Godot games.
  - Kinrany 6y ago
    Fair. What I mean is, without the multiplayer aspect it cannot compete at being a social network centered around virtual experiences.
- chc4 6y ago
  Roblox is a game engine, though. All of the games hosted on Roblox are made in Roblox Studio, which is comparable to the Unity editor.

djaychela 6y ago

I disagree that the games are mostly crap... I have 4 step kids who game, and 3 do on roblox a lot. Some of the games may be objectively poor, but they enjoy playing in them anyway, and some of them are spectacular. I spent quite a few hours playing with them during the original UK lockdown,which was doubly good as I don't live with them so didn't see them for 3 months. In that time we "did" many things,including "going" to a theme park, and spent many hours exploring and seeing how bad I am at it. Without roblox we wouldn't have had that experience. In terms of scams, I'd rather they learnt using their pocket money than their wages when they are older.

Kinrany 6y ago
Can you link some examples? It's hard to navigate Roblox without participating in the social network-ish aspects.
- tra3 6y ago
  I like naval warfare [0]. Its simple but still fun. You can spawn boats, subs, and planes. There's a collaborative aspect of course. Lots of fun. [0]: https://naval-warfare-roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Battleship https://naval-warfare-roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Battleship
- skrebbel 6y ago
  "Theme Park Tycoon" is a Rollercoaster Tycoon clone that's really nice. It's pretty much single-player, but you can check out other players' theme parks which is very cool. "Islands" is mostly a Minecraft ripoff but you're building air castles (you can fall off an "island" and die). This lets the kids do all kinds of invented in-game games, such as building an obstacle course for one another, playing hide and seek etc. "Fishing Simulator" starts out as a pretty dull pirate-themed fishing game but turns out to have a lot of depth, adventure game style. It also has amazing content for Roblox standards. "Build A Boat For Treasure" is a lot less fancy than the above, but it has a very cool concept. You design & build your own boat, then go sit in it, and take it through a river full of obstacles. The way you build it determines how it deals with the obstacles because when you sail away you can hardly navigate it anymore. So you need to design for robustness etc, which turns out to be pretty hard. A lot of the games are shit, but also a lot of the games look shit but have super original ideas. Eg there's a game that you're in a building and then some disaster happens (tsunami, volcano eruption, whatever) which slowly destroys the building and whoever survives the longest in the collapsing building wins. I'm really not sure if that's a ripoff of anything, it strikes me as genuinely original. It's not very deep, but it's good fun.

jimmyvalmer 6y ago

You've clearly forgotten what being a kid means. Any game kids want to spend money on is inherently "good" and not "sh_t" according to the one metric that matters: is it fun or not?

antiterra 6y ago
You've clearly forgotten how disappointing things can be when you're a kid. How you waited for Christmas or saved for weeks only to find the thing you got is garbage. I've heard plenty of stories about kids being absolutely gutted for not getting what they thought they were getting for virtual currency in Roblox and Minecraft. That's also not mentioning how different aspects of a game can be fun or unfun. It could be that kids just want some item in aspirationally in a game but actually have no interest in playing the game itself. Much like how kids can have zero interest in the Pokemon card game but desperately crave spending $4 for the pleasure of 1 minute of unwrapping new cards. That's also not factoring in the social pressure and envy kids feel when their friends talk about things they have.
- jimmyvalmer 6y ago
  > You've clearly forgotten how disappointing things can be I must have because I don't remember being at all "gutted" when I obsessed over the one $20-or-less item my parents allotted me each Christmas. This is quite contrary to what I see amongst kids today who spend all of a couple hours with their physical gifts and go right back to the Minecraft/Roblox marathon.
  - guidoism 6y ago
    My kids are so much happier on Minecraft because there's no built-in pay-money-to-get-better mechanism. Minecraft has a HUGE value in the price you pay to the amount of awesome gameplay you get. Even with Realms it's cheap compared to what you get out of it.
    - ManifestTendy 6y ago

aidenn0 6y ago

I had never hear of Roblox before today, but this comment makes me want to introduce my kids to it. If they blow all of their savings on it now, when their savings is like $50-$100, the lesson learned could save them blowing thousands of dollars of savings on similar scams later in life.