4 ms·

My kids have recently become interested in Roblox. I installed it on the PS5 but honestly I don't get the appeal. The games we tried are of very low quality. It

My kids have recently become interested in Roblox. I installed it on the PS5 but honestly I don't get the appeal. The games we tried are of very low quality. It doesn't have the complexity or interest of Minecraft. It doesn't have the polish of Astro's Playroom (or Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, which they are too young to play). It reminds me a little of Fortnite's non-battle-royal games, but much worse. Can you give some advice on how to approach it as a parent? I suspect there are some good games in there that we missed.

auadix 2y ago
I play with my kid and my advice is to not look for a game in Roblox, but to play Roblox as it is. It's not going to be about the quality, it's not polished and there are probably 8 game types to it: Clicking, Obby, Tycoon, Survival, Farming, Sports, Shooter and Story. All the games in one of those categories are a variation of itself, some are better balanced and the grind is fair, some will reach a point which the kid will give up and some have a very interesting trick that will soon be copied by all the others. Why do we play it? For him, because it's familiar, he knows what to do and how to master it. For me, mindless gaming that I don't have to put any effort to it. The time that I spend with him is very valuable, and there is a reversal here because its me entering to his world and not him to mine. He feel proud when he is better than me into something, the obbies are challenging even for someone who spent his life playing platform games, I just can't make the jumps and he can, so he comes to recue me taking my iPad and going for it. I do enjoy some of the games, Islands is very well done but the devs quit it, Wacky Wizards is very quirky and with endless potion combinations, Death Bumper Car is really crazy and frustrating, but fun to play together, The Space Simulator is a space mining that is really hard in some places and interesting challenge... there is a lot to find. Sometimes I just can't play the game and I will tell him that I didn't like it, he feels defeated because he was trying to invite me in to his world and I shut it down, sometimes I just suck it up and play the bad game, I think the important part is to remember that this is a world that they have more control than you, let them lead. :)
loa_in_ 2y ago
Your take sounds about right. It's minigames. You can play an exact equivalent minigame in minecraft 98% of the time, but it's easier just to pick one ready from the browser and get started immediately with people doing the same and nothing else. If I was a parent I 'd try to skim ideas from Roblox yourself, make it happen for your kids and their friends in Minecraft, join yourself, talk about it, record yourself playing it, share it with strangers; for full non-Robux-driven wholesome non-mindless experience. Essentially Roblox store is built upon outsourcing game making to kids and so the games themselves are appealing to kids, but also they carry as much merit as a 4th grader can put into them.
maxsilver 2y ago
It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven. Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough. The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule. ---- As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such) I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)
- simpaticoder 2y ago
  It sounds like the platform really matters for Roblox, if it's that much of a creative tool. BTW the first time I'd heard of "ActiveWorlds" (or Uru) was just now from your comment. And it also sounds like my kids don't have the problem Roblox solves! (And I don't really want them standing around in a chat room looking for things to do; absent a compelling reason to look at a screen, I encourage them to do real-world things.)

auadix 2y ago

I play with my kid and my advice is to not look for a game in Roblox, but to play Roblox as it is. It's not going to be about the quality, it's not polished and there are probably 8 game types to it: Clicking, Obby, Tycoon, Survival, Farming, Sports, Shooter and Story. All the games in one of those categories are a variation of itself, some are better balanced and the grind is fair, some will reach a point which the kid will give up and some have a very interesting trick that will soon be copied by all the others. Why do we play it? For him, because it's familiar, he knows what to do and how to master it. For me, mindless gaming that I don't have to put any effort to it. The time that I spend with him is very valuable, and there is a reversal here because its me entering to his world and not him to mine. He feel proud when he is better than me into something, the obbies are challenging even for someone who spent his life playing platform games, I just can't make the jumps and he can, so he comes to recue me taking my iPad and going for it. I do enjoy some of the games, Islands is very well done but the devs quit it, Wacky Wizards is very quirky and with endless potion combinations, Death Bumper Car is really crazy and frustrating, but fun to play together, The Space Simulator is a space mining that is really hard in some places and interesting challenge... there is a lot to find. Sometimes I just can't play the game and I will tell him that I didn't like it, he feels defeated because he was trying to invite me in to his world and I shut it down, sometimes I just suck it up and play the bad game, I think the important part is to remember that this is a world that they have more control than you, let them lead. :)

loa_in_ 2y ago

Your take sounds about right. It's minigames. You can play an exact equivalent minigame in minecraft 98% of the time, but it's easier just to pick one ready from the browser and get started immediately with people doing the same and nothing else. If I was a parent I 'd try to skim ideas from Roblox yourself, make it happen for your kids and their friends in Minecraft, join yourself, talk about it, record yourself playing it, share it with strangers; for full non-Robux-driven wholesome non-mindless experience. Essentially Roblox store is built upon outsourcing game making to kids and so the games themselves are appealing to kids, but also they carry as much merit as a 4th grader can put into them.

maxsilver 2y ago

It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven. Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough. The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule. ---- As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such) I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)

simpaticoder 2y ago
It sounds like the platform really matters for Roblox, if it's that much of a creative tool. BTW the first time I'd heard of "ActiveWorlds" (or Uru) was just now from your comment. And it also sounds like my kids don't have the problem Roblox solves! (And I don't really want them standing around in a chat room looking for things to do; absent a compelling reason to look at a screen, I encourage them to do real-world things.)