3 ms·

I know the business need but I've been very bothered by the fact that online gaming for kids has defaulted to mmo-style open servers. My daughter asked to play

by Pxtl 4y ago

I know the business need but I've been very bothered by the fact that online gaming for kids has defaulted to mmo-style open servers. My daughter asked to play Roblox and after looking into their system I said no. I'm more than happy to let my kids online... to play with their friends, with content that was created by their friends or curated by professionals. Not to play with strangers in a slushpit if user-contributed content curated by an algorithm. So I get why Minecraft is doing this, but imho it's the wrong approach. Make it easier for parents and kids to run a private server. Publish curated plugins for kids to load into said servers. Let us parent, and let the pubs be pubs. Instead MS seems to be following the Roblox approach of "trust our algo and our banhammer". Which, no.

JetAlone 4y ago
I've been mulling over your desired situation which is probably shared with plenty of parents. I think you want a system with a walled-garden with a "friend code" like Nintendo has, that can be physically shared through a scanner. You want to be able to supervise who your kids are friends with, and you want it to be extremely difficult to share that information online. Then the kids are strictly, systematically only able to contact and play with each other if they are friends. Maybe friends of friends. Parents get to review content, or professionals are paid to curate content that is allowed in this system. When someone new becomes friends with your kid, you are notified and can ask who that is. If they seem to not be any of your kid's IRL friends, then you, as the parent, have the power to block that person from your child's games, report them, and notify the other parents of any of your children's friends that you have done so to this user. It's local, involves the parents' supervision at a higher level. It can probably be abused by kids getting their parent's supervision module and blocking one of their friends and notifying all the parents as a mean joke or something. Or by parents who want to exclude certain children based on not liking their parents, and wanting to make an example of them as a "bad influence". It's also vulnerable to the child lying and saying a stranger is one of their IRL friends. The friend code "badge" getting lost is another serious concern. A tool to use the friend code scanner at events like birthday parties to get surprise packs could be a "fun" thing that serves a double purpose of displaying each kid's profile, to help keep an offline list that verifies each kid's online identity to their parents, by pairing it with a photo (which never goes online) taken at the time of scanning. And there could be a tool to let you quickly scan that list and compare to the friend network of your kid and their friends. Maybe if there's somebody who consistently never shows up on the "party lists", flags could be raised and the parents could be notified to separately ask their children who that is - if answers are inconsistent, something's probably wrong. Now, this system would take effort to implement, and effort to get existing games to agree to integrate - and they do need to integrate. Trying to create games to fit snugly into this system from the ground up would be insanely difficult. Maybe it absolutely must run servers of popular games in a "black-box", with this security system on top of it. To the kid's perspective, it needs to feel like barely an extra step to sign in and play through those servers, and on the computers they have access to, the vanilla version of the game needs to be thoroughly inaccessible. Parents would need to be willing to pay significant money into this.
kuschku 4y ago
> So I get why Minecraft is doing this, but imho it's the wrong approach. Make it easier for parents and kids to run a private server. Publish curated plugins for kids to load into said servers. That exists. That's what Realms is. A moderated, private server, for your kids. It's existed for years.

by Pxtl 4y ago

JetAlone 4y ago

I've been mulling over your desired situation which is probably shared with plenty of parents. I think you want a system with a walled-garden with a "friend code" like Nintendo has, that can be physically shared through a scanner. You want to be able to supervise who your kids are friends with, and you want it to be extremely difficult to share that information online. Then the kids are strictly, systematically only able to contact and play with each other if they are friends. Maybe friends of friends. Parents get to review content, or professionals are paid to curate content that is allowed in this system. When someone new becomes friends with your kid, you are notified and can ask who that is. If they seem to not be any of your kid's IRL friends, then you, as the parent, have the power to block that person from your child's games, report them, and notify the other parents of any of your children's friends that you have done so to this user. It's local, involves the parents' supervision at a higher level. It can probably be abused by kids getting their parent's supervision module and blocking one of their friends and notifying all the parents as a mean joke or something. Or by parents who want to exclude certain children based on not liking their parents, and wanting to make an example of them as a "bad influence". It's also vulnerable to the child lying and saying a stranger is one of their IRL friends. The friend code "badge" getting lost is another serious concern. A tool to use the friend code scanner at events like birthday parties to get surprise packs could be a "fun" thing that serves a double purpose of displaying each kid's profile, to help keep an offline list that verifies each kid's online identity to their parents, by pairing it with a photo (which never goes online) taken at the time of scanning. And there could be a tool to let you quickly scan that list and compare to the friend network of your kid and their friends. Maybe if there's somebody who consistently never shows up on the "party lists", flags could be raised and the parents could be notified to separately ask their children who that is - if answers are inconsistent, something's probably wrong. Now, this system would take effort to implement, and effort to get existing games to agree to integrate - and they do need to integrate. Trying to create games to fit snugly into this system from the ground up would be insanely difficult. Maybe it absolutely must run servers of popular games in a "black-box", with this security system on top of it. To the kid's perspective, it needs to feel like barely an extra step to sign in and play through those servers, and on the computers they have access to, the vanilla version of the game needs to be thoroughly inaccessible. Parents would need to be willing to pay significant money into this.

kuschku 4y ago

> So I get why Minecraft is doing this, but imho it's the wrong approach. Make it easier for parents and kids to run a private server. Publish curated plugins for kids to load into said servers. That exists. That's what Realms is. A moderated, private server, for your kids. It's existed for years.