13 ms·

Minecraft vs. Roblox (2020)

142 points by lawrenceyan 6y ago

kiddico 6y ago
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.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  "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 6y ago
  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
  - twostorytower 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
      - Moru 6y ago
        You better not share network with this compromised computer if you value your data :-)
  - aequitas 6y ago
    > 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.
  - umvi 6y ago
    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_More_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/234390/Teleglitch_Die_Mor...
    - FooHentai 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      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.
  - crazydoggers 6y ago
    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-games-inside-roblox-war-on-porn https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game...
    - toolz 6y ago
      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.
      - bronson 6y ago
        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.
        greatquux 6y ago
        My nearly 7yo loves Minecraft too - both Java and Bedrock! He keeps asking me about Roblox but I've also heard of the whole monetizing thing and I keep telling him to stick to Minecraft as well.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    I have been playing with lua game development with my kids (not getting too much interest right now - if dad likes the idea there must be something wrong) but the ability to see the code running sounds good - can you point me at any links?
- mzg 6y ago
  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.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
cheb 6y ago
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 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-Operations 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
- mentos 6y ago
  Awesome, curious to know how old you are now and what were your most memorable experiences in Roblox?
  - Qub3d 6y ago
    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.
booleandilemma 6y ago
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.
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  Just imagine the average code quality once everyone is coding. The people who are mediocre coders now will be the all-stars of tomorrow.
  - lhoff 6y ago
    I mean you're probably right in the sense that the peak of the Gauß-Distribution is probably shifting to the left. The absolute numbers are probably a different story. When more people get introduced to coding, more people are getting good and very good at it. Think about sports. Are there more people that are bad at skiing in Austria compared to the Netherland? Yes (if you don't count the ones who never stood on skies). Are there more good skiiers in the Netherland compared to Austria? Absolutely not.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      I think the fact that you can do coding everywhere makes the comparison a bit skewed. How many awesome skiiers are there in the Netherlands that will never develop that skill?
  - MertsA 6y ago
    On the contrary, code quality sucks now because there's not enough talented programmers to go around. So many smart, quick witted kids are getting diverted into other professions. What if the total number of capable programmers doubled with the same amount of work? There's plenty of developers today who would be considered flat out incompetent if you held them to standards for any other industry. At the very least there's not enough qualified individuals on the job market to force those people out yet.
robotnikman 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  I play Destiny 2, which has pretty extensive public API for reading data from the game and interacting with player inventories, and we see a lot of people pop into the discord learning to program for the first time because they want to make something for the game they play.
867-5309 6y ago
>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 6y ago
  You can earn Robux in game [1] [2]. [1] https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313200-Ways-to-Get-Robux https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313200-Ways-... [2] https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/learn-roblox/monetization https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/learn-roblox/monetization
  - 867-5309 6y ago
    >[1] Question: Can I earn Free Robux? Answer: No. Robux are purchased for real world currency and are only sold by the Roblox company and [2] looks like 'earning' by promoting premium subscriptions, so I guess a referral scheme? which is not an activity suitable for children
- musicale 6y ago
  > they are both ultimately microtransaction based moneymakers This is what turns me off about both platforms, Roblox especially. Roblox needs a way to simply disable all microtransactions.
Steuard 6y ago
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.
_muff1nman_ 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  If by interoperability you mean 'PCs Macs and Linux boxes can all play Java edition', then that's still there. Mojang made the original version (now called 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.
  - lhoff 6y ago
    I would mostly agree. The only bad move was that they ported Pocket/Bedrock Edition to Windows 10. Thats where most of the confusion orginiates from.
    - madeofpalk 6y ago
      I'm incredibly greatful for Bedrock on Windows - I have friends that play it on PS4 and I play on PC on Bedrock and we all play together with cross play.
tobyhinloopen 6y ago
So who bought some RBLX
- trash3 6y ago
  If by buy you mean shorted it yeet
  - tobyhinloopen 6y ago
    Hah good luck on the short! I’m still not confident enough to touch shorting
jrm4 6y ago
As a parent who's kid is into both, if there's a choice, I'm pretty sure I'd recommend Minecraft; In Minecraft, the default vanilla gameplay itself is quite intelligent and creative. No such guarantee with Roblox, where, depending on the game, there's a decent chance the kid will get sucked into endless mindlessness. That being said, I'll be taking a look into Roblox for scripting/programming, I haven't done so yet and I'm all about teaching her how to "cheat" -- and actually, this is a place where Minecraft feels like it has faltered a bit, or I'm looking in the wrong places -- I had a great deal of success teaching other kids (I run a nonprofit) Python with the "MCPI" api, and I can't seem to see if that's been updated or if there is a modern equivalent?
- Kye 6y ago
  Minecraft mods are made in Java. I saw something about work on a full modding system for the Windows/mobile version, beyond the limited cosmetic stuff available now, but I don't know how that's progressed.
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    There is a JSON/JS API for "behaviour packs", but I havent looked too much into it.
- jiri 6y ago
  I have prepared for my kids smooth gradual "helpers" in Minecraft - I did place command blocks for them first, later I created server mod with custom commands and teach them to write commands. They learnt to try and combine stuff in "command line" and they loved it. It worked great for them, I believe they acquire basic procedural knowledge sofar but they don't reach "java" level yet. I'll see.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  me, a 28 year old, just started playing Minecraft and I feel so bad for sleeping on it for so long. It's surprisngly such an incredible deep and complicated game (in a good way) - I was so wrong for thinking for so long that it's "just a kids game"
lhoff 6y ago
One aspect is overlooked in the article. When you are playing Minecraft you sooner or later want to have your own Server. There are of course "as a Service" offerings but i personally know 3 or 4 people who got into Linux / Admin stuff because they were running minecraft servers for there friends.
- stjo 6y ago
  I started learning about networking after having to deal with shady VPNs and configuring NATs - just so that I could be the kid in my class with his own minecraft server
- Aeolun 6y ago
  The one admin frontend (mcadmin? forgot the name) for minecraft servers is a heap of magic too.
franklyt 6y ago
An advertisement?
opan 6y ago
Minetest may be a better comparison to Roblox here. Modding has first-class support and is a basic part of the game, everything can be serverside unlike Minecraft where mods have to match up, Minetest's mods also use LUA like Roblox (and Garry's Mod). Bonus points, Minetest is free as in freedom software, so out of all these, I'd be most comfortable recommending it to someone.
boogies 6y ago
> Should my child learn Minecraft or Roblox? No, they should learn Minetest¹, which is more limitless than Minecraft and more accessibly scriptable than Roblox, with an infinite world in all dimensions and basic modeling² and coding³ tools that work within a running game, but more importantly is Free software. Free as freedom from micro-transaction pushing companies, and free as in freedom to learn and tinker in the depths of the engine core and transform the entire world⁴. 1: https://www.minetest.net/education/ https://www.minetest.net/education/ 2: https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ 3: https://mesecons.net/luacontroller/ https://mesecons.net/luacontroller/ 4: Literally: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=15643 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=15643
- Datagenerator 6y ago
  This. Freedom to setup your own server and tinkering with the LUA scripts is very accessible. Removing some creatures to allow small children to play without getting scared? Ten minutes tops, really useful. The mountain generator, how does it work and what happens if we alter the recursive functions? Just play and learn with Minetest :)
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    It's Lua, not LUA (http://lua.org/about.html#name http://lua.org/about.html#name)
- hoseja 6y ago
  This feels a little like Windows vs Mac vs Linux, respectively.
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  Also none of your kid's friends will know or want to play it and the game looks and feels like something from Aliexpress.
  - boogies 6y ago
zwm 6y ago
I can't advocate for Roblox because of their lack of moderation on excessive pornography posters hidden in many of the maps. This was a couple of years ago, so maybe things have changed. Roblox wins in freedom to build anything you can imagine versus Minecraft's limited blocky, lego-like (retro) builds. There's a trade off. Personally, Minecraft's command blocks and server commands helped my child feel at home with java programming. I never forced or talked about programming until he started asking me questions about programming mods to extend his game plays after he outgrew the command blocks and / commands.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Command blocks and mods aside, Minecraft is more or less large-scale pixel (voxel) art with added elements of (optionally) having to survive while collecting your voxels and being able to program your environment with DIY mechanical/electrical constructions (which could range from assisting own survival to showing off). I personally find these limitations both useful equalizing forces (in multiplayer) and engaging creativity-boosting constraints. Having seen screenshots of Roblox, I generally find the visuals pretty horrible. Considering its “free to play” model constructed to extract money from players, as opposed to Minecraft’s buy-once-own-forever, the choice seems straightforward.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    Addendum: for a glance of things achievable mostly in vanilla with enough creativity, check out a montage around the beginning of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816mQFkks1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816mQFkks1Y.
shmerl 6y ago
* Minecraft: works on Linux. * Roblox: tough luck, get lost.
dirktheman 6y ago
I have two children interested in programming, and they equally love Roblox and Minecraft. I chose Roblox since Minecraft requires the Java edition (€26,-) for both children: they each have to have their own account. Strange decision from Microsoft.

142 points by lawrenceyan 6y ago

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.

Turing_Machine 6y ago
"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 6y ago
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
- twostorytower 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
    - Moru 6y ago
      You better not share network with this compromised computer if you value your data :-)
- aequitas 6y ago
  > 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.
- umvi 6y ago
  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_More_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/234390/Teleglitch_Die_Mor...
  - FooHentai 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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.
- crazydoggers 6y ago
  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-games-inside-roblox-war-on-porn https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game...
  - toolz 6y ago
    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.
    - bronson 6y ago
      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.
      - greatquux 6y ago
        My nearly 7yo loves Minecraft too - both Java and Bedrock! He keeps asking me about Roblox but I've also heard of the whole monetizing thing and I keep telling him to stick to Minecraft as well.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  I have been playing with lua game development with my kids (not getting too much interest right now - if dad likes the idea there must be something wrong) but the ability to see the code running sounds good - can you point me at any links?
mzg 6y ago
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.
munchbunny 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

cheb 6y ago

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 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-Operations 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

mentos 6y ago
Awesome, curious to know how old you are now and what were your most memorable experiences in Roblox?
- Qub3d 6y ago
  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.

booleandilemma 6y ago

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.

entropicdrifter 6y ago
Just imagine the average code quality once everyone is coding. The people who are mediocre coders now will be the all-stars of tomorrow.
- lhoff 6y ago
  I mean you're probably right in the sense that the peak of the Gauß-Distribution is probably shifting to the left. The absolute numbers are probably a different story. When more people get introduced to coding, more people are getting good and very good at it. Think about sports. Are there more people that are bad at skiing in Austria compared to the Netherland? Yes (if you don't count the ones who never stood on skies). Are there more good skiiers in the Netherland compared to Austria? Absolutely not.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I think the fact that you can do coding everywhere makes the comparison a bit skewed. How many awesome skiiers are there in the Netherlands that will never develop that skill?
- MertsA 6y ago
  On the contrary, code quality sucks now because there's not enough talented programmers to go around. So many smart, quick witted kids are getting diverted into other professions. What if the total number of capable programmers doubled with the same amount of work? There's plenty of developers today who would be considered flat out incompetent if you held them to standards for any other industry. At the very least there's not enough qualified individuals on the job market to force those people out yet.

robotnikman 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
madeofpalk 6y ago
I play Destiny 2, which has pretty extensive public API for reading data from the game and interacting with player inventories, and we see a lot of people pop into the discord learning to program for the first time because they want to make something for the game they play.

867-5309 6y ago

>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 6y ago
You can earn Robux in game [1] [2]. [1] https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313200-Ways-to-Get-Robux https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313200-Ways-... [2] https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/learn-roblox/monetization https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/learn-roblox/monetization
- 867-5309 6y ago
  >[1] Question: Can I earn Free Robux? Answer: No. Robux are purchased for real world currency and are only sold by the Roblox company and [2] looks like 'earning' by promoting premium subscriptions, so I guess a referral scheme? which is not an activity suitable for children
musicale 6y ago
> they are both ultimately microtransaction based moneymakers This is what turns me off about both platforms, Roblox especially. Roblox needs a way to simply disable all microtransactions.

Steuard 6y ago

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.

_muff1nman_ 6y ago

> 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 6y ago
If by interoperability you mean 'PCs Macs and Linux boxes can all play Java edition', then that's still there. Mojang made the original version (now called 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.
- lhoff 6y ago
  I would mostly agree. The only bad move was that they ported Pocket/Bedrock Edition to Windows 10. Thats where most of the confusion orginiates from.
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    I'm incredibly greatful for Bedrock on Windows - I have friends that play it on PS4 and I play on PC on Bedrock and we all play together with cross play.

tobyhinloopen 6y ago

So who bought some RBLX

trash3 6y ago
If by buy you mean shorted it yeet
- tobyhinloopen 6y ago
  Hah good luck on the short! I’m still not confident enough to touch shorting

jrm4 6y ago

As a parent who's kid is into both, if there's a choice, I'm pretty sure I'd recommend Minecraft; In Minecraft, the default vanilla gameplay itself is quite intelligent and creative. No such guarantee with Roblox, where, depending on the game, there's a decent chance the kid will get sucked into endless mindlessness. That being said, I'll be taking a look into Roblox for scripting/programming, I haven't done so yet and I'm all about teaching her how to "cheat" -- and actually, this is a place where Minecraft feels like it has faltered a bit, or I'm looking in the wrong places -- I had a great deal of success teaching other kids (I run a nonprofit) Python with the "MCPI" api, and I can't seem to see if that's been updated or if there is a modern equivalent?

Kye 6y ago
Minecraft mods are made in Java. I saw something about work on a full modding system for the Windows/mobile version, beyond the limited cosmetic stuff available now, but I don't know how that's progressed.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  There is a JSON/JS API for "behaviour packs", but I havent looked too much into it.
jiri 6y ago
I have prepared for my kids smooth gradual "helpers" in Minecraft - I did place command blocks for them first, later I created server mod with custom commands and teach them to write commands. They learnt to try and combine stuff in "command line" and they loved it. It worked great for them, I believe they acquire basic procedural knowledge sofar but they don't reach "java" level yet. I'll see.
madeofpalk 6y ago
me, a 28 year old, just started playing Minecraft and I feel so bad for sleeping on it for so long. It's surprisngly such an incredible deep and complicated game (in a good way) - I was so wrong for thinking for so long that it's "just a kids game"

lhoff 6y ago

One aspect is overlooked in the article. When you are playing Minecraft you sooner or later want to have your own Server. There are of course "as a Service" offerings but i personally know 3 or 4 people who got into Linux / Admin stuff because they were running minecraft servers for there friends.

stjo 6y ago
I started learning about networking after having to deal with shady VPNs and configuring NATs - just so that I could be the kid in my class with his own minecraft server
Aeolun 6y ago
The one admin frontend (mcadmin? forgot the name) for minecraft servers is a heap of magic too.

franklyt 6y ago

An advertisement?

opan 6y ago

Minetest may be a better comparison to Roblox here. Modding has first-class support and is a basic part of the game, everything can be serverside unlike Minecraft where mods have to match up, Minetest's mods also use LUA like Roblox (and Garry's Mod). Bonus points, Minetest is free as in freedom software, so out of all these, I'd be most comfortable recommending it to someone.

boogies 6y ago

> Should my child learn Minecraft or Roblox? No, they should learn Minetest¹, which is more limitless than Minecraft and more accessibly scriptable than Roblox, with an infinite world in all dimensions and basic modeling² and coding³ tools that work within a running game, but more importantly is Free software. Free as freedom from micro-transaction pushing companies, and free as in freedom to learn and tinker in the depths of the engine core and transform the entire world⁴. 1: https://www.minetest.net/education/ https://www.minetest.net/education/ 2: https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ https://content.minetest.net/packages/random_geek/meshport/ 3: https://mesecons.net/luacontroller/ https://mesecons.net/luacontroller/ 4: Literally: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=15643 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=15643

Datagenerator 6y ago
This. Freedom to setup your own server and tinkering with the LUA scripts is very accessible. Removing some creatures to allow small children to play without getting scared? Ten minutes tops, really useful. The mountain generator, how does it work and what happens if we alter the recursive functions? Just play and learn with Minetest :)
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  It's Lua, not LUA (http://lua.org/about.html#name http://lua.org/about.html#name)
hoseja 6y ago
This feels a little like Windows vs Mac vs Linux, respectively.
Toutouxc 6y ago
Also none of your kid's friends will know or want to play it and the game looks and feels like something from Aliexpress.
- boogies 6y ago

zwm 6y ago

I can't advocate for Roblox because of their lack of moderation on excessive pornography posters hidden in many of the maps. This was a couple of years ago, so maybe things have changed. Roblox wins in freedom to build anything you can imagine versus Minecraft's limited blocky, lego-like (retro) builds. There's a trade off. Personally, Minecraft's command blocks and server commands helped my child feel at home with java programming. I never forced or talked about programming until he started asking me questions about programming mods to extend his game plays after he outgrew the command blocks and / commands.

strogonoff 6y ago
Command blocks and mods aside, Minecraft is more or less large-scale pixel (voxel) art with added elements of (optionally) having to survive while collecting your voxels and being able to program your environment with DIY mechanical/electrical constructions (which could range from assisting own survival to showing off). I personally find these limitations both useful equalizing forces (in multiplayer) and engaging creativity-boosting constraints. Having seen screenshots of Roblox, I generally find the visuals pretty horrible. Considering its “free to play” model constructed to extract money from players, as opposed to Minecraft’s buy-once-own-forever, the choice seems straightforward.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Addendum: for a glance of things achievable mostly in vanilla with enough creativity, check out a montage around the beginning of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816mQFkks1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816mQFkks1Y.

shmerl 6y ago

* Minecraft: works on Linux. * Roblox: tough luck, get lost.

dirktheman 6y ago

I have two children interested in programming, and they equally love Roblox and Minecraft. I chose Roblox since Minecraft requires the Java edition (€26,-) for both children: they each have to have their own account. Strange decision from Microsoft.