6 ms·

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,

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.

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.