7 ms·

Why won’t she get off Minecraft?

96 points by tux 11y ago

fezz 11y ago
Understated: Parents should get on minecraft with their kids. It's very useful as a family team building and can also encourage leadership if you let the kids be the boss of you in the virtual world. It's also great if you're traveling to get on minecraft together to have fun instead of a short phone conversation. (it also works well for divorced parents)
fuckedapanda 11y ago
minecraft - big legos for dumb kids
tw04 11y ago
I think the biggest problem is the online nature of it. When I was growing up, it was literally "you can play until the next spot where you can pause". That doesn't really work with an online game like Minecraft where there is no definitive beginning and end. There's no "round" or "level" to beat. And there's almost assuredly at least one friend who can keep playing until bedtime, even if all your friends can't. I think the only real way to "fix" the issue is to set strict time limits out of the gate so that your children learn early on to mediate their time.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  You need to be careful with those limits 'lest you end up ensuring your kid never learns to do anything else with the computer than playing games. Exploring and tinkering takes time. A kid won't start doing that if he/she knows he has only an hour a day tops, nor you can really do anything creative on such short time blocks.
  - tw04 11y ago
    Spending time on a computer != playing minecraft on xbox which is almost always what I see occurring when I hear parents talking about their kids spending too much time playing minecraft. Yes, Minecraft is available for PC. But I would say that is the vast, vast, vast minority of how kids under the age of 16 consume it. I see it almost universally on tablets, phones, and consoles.
- MaulingMonkey 11y ago
  On the other hand, "just one more level" x10 is an issue in round & level style games.
tzakrajs 11y ago
Playing too much Minecraft is considered an addiction because it has a real cost to the addict playing the game. Please note that "playing too much" is to the point that it is causing the child to do poorly in school or have other negative effects.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  Preface: I agree with you, especially wrt video games. I never understood or enjoyed video games, anyways. However, when defining addiction, I think "causing the child to do poorly in school" is a really, really dangerous standard. Several psychologists and teachers told my parents I was addicted to computers because I did poorly in high school and also spent a lot of time on the computer. Never-mind that I had worked through Cinderella, SICP, the first half of Dragon, and an undergrad crypto course in addition to a Discrete Mathemtics and Linear course by the end of high school... all while fueling my "addiction".) I think there's a lot of danger in conflating "interferes with good grades" with "harmful". Especially in high school. Taking grades seriously in high school would have been far more harmful than my computer "addiction".
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Exactly this. I both enjoyed video games and did a lot of programming in secondary/high school and all that time did in fact interfere with my school performance quite a bit. And I'm really thankful for my parents to not push me too hard back then, because things I learned let me end up in a great university and have a career in programming. And the games were both what taught me English and what made me interested in programming in the first place. A younger friend of mine gained his first digital electronics knowledge building 8-segment displays in Minecraft, and the time spent on setting up and managing Minecraft servers gave him skills he now directly uses every day, for money and for fun. The point is, school is bullshit (and kids smell it, they're incredibly good bullshit detectors). Pretty much anything a kid does on a computer that isn't literally browsing 9gag all day teaches them more than the same time spent doing homework. Parents need to be very careful here. School-related tasks are very inefficient way of spending time, but are easy for parents to focus on because they're quantified. You just have to look at the test scores and grades (and their first derivatives). The fact that they're totally unrelated to any education taking place is too much to think about. So if you see your kid spends a lot of time building, creating and exploring stuff on the computer, do him/her a favour and don't mind too much if they occasionally forget about their homework. And most important of all - don't introduce insane time limits like "1 hour of computer time a day, every other day". With such strict limits, there's literally nothing a kid can do except of watching funny pictures of cats on-line or playing games. Exploration and learning takes time, and is something you don't even start if you know you are on strict deadlines (note: this also applies to adults at and after work).
navait 11y ago
It would be completely foolish to deny that some games have addictive qualities to them - look at how developers such as Blizzard hire psychologists to make their games more appealing. That short work-reward cycle feels fulfilling, and drives many people to keep on playing despite it being harmful. > Non-gamers are bombarded by messages from the larger media-culture. >So parents hear constantly that games are harmful, that gamers are all potential crazed gunmen, isolated shut ins and so on. No they don't. Has the author noticed it's not 2007 anymore? To find substantial video-game addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They are not a part of mainstream culture, especially the crazed gunman stories. >This is why we have televisions, magazines and newspapers – they are technological devices to sell us advertising. Lots of media companies own video game studios. To be sure, video-game addiction is a minor problem compared to drugs, alcohol, and sex addiction. But sticking your head in the sand is not going to win you any allies, nor does a persecution complex. Instead, stick to the positive benefits that video games have, and DO NOT overstate them, like marijuana activists convinced the drug is a cure-all. The world has moved on. We(gamers) won. It's time to stop pretending we're a persecuted minority.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Has the author noticed it's not 2007 anymore? To find substantial video-game addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They are not a part of mainstream culture, especially the crazed gunman stories. I'm not sure if things have changed all that dramatically in 8 years. Video games remain a convenient scapegoat for various societal ills.
  - qmalxp 11y ago
    I haven't heard one media outlet claiming e.g. Dylann Roof was influenced by video games, and I think they would have a stronger case nowadays with games like Hatred on the market.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Dylann Roof is an atypical case. Not much was said about gun control either, which is unusual. The primary debate that was sparked was surrounding the Confederate battle flag(s). What do you mean by "nowadays with games like Hatred on the market"? What is special about Hatred? It wasn't a particularly violent game, it just got propelled into notoriety by demagoguery and the developers' guerrilla marketing. It's a near verbatim clone of Postal, and that came out in 1997.
johnchristopher 11y ago
> To your brain, Mincraft is a form of going outside. > Our bodies are just a way to move our sub-conscious around. We spend most of our lives in our own sub-conscious because our brain likes to do stuff. The brain is in charge, not the body, and the brain is just as interested in solving problems in Minecraft as it is getting hands to move lego-bricks around a table. Errrh. I like gaming but dualism is a poor excuse for that (and one I believe to be very wrong both empirically and philosophically).
- AgentME 11y ago
  I don't think the author was trying to go for anything metaphysical there.
  - harryjo 11y ago
    Worse, physical. The author is claiming that body exists to serve the mind, and as no needs of own. Nutrition and exercise/atrophy and vitamin D production give the lie to the claim that playing outside is equivalent to playing minecraft.
wvenable 11y ago
My son is 6 and many of the kids he interacts with at school and daycare play Minecraft. So just the last week or so, we picked up Minecraft for the iPad and for the PC. I had always been vaguely interested in playing it but never actually pulled the trigger. So my impression after a week is that it is weirdly fun and addictive. I've now put more hours into Minecraft than anyone else in the house. I got my wife playing it and she's still experimenting around. My son likes to play creative and just kind of fool around. I think he's a bit too young yet to really get into it. But he does love watching me play and we discuss everything together. It's probably the most engaged he's been with me on the computer. But I have stayed up way too late playing it...
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  I played it on PC years back (and when I thought the game making $30M was an insane amount of success). But shitty graphics support prevented me from running it on my laptops and I gave up. Yet I can still remember the large things I built, the houses and bridges and staying up all night. Now my girls are 7 & 8, and for the last year they've been building these huge things in creative. They're in love with Stampy (on YouTube... Annoying voice but he shows some neat tricks). This week they took vacations, and I agreed to play survival with them. (I must admit, it does scare me just a bit; the rush to setup before nightfall and the sound that something is nearby.) Well... Every night we've stayed up until 1am or so (kids are lightweights) playing Minecraft. Coordinating expeditions, streamlining resource usage, building sky palaces. It's a blast and my one daughter told my wife how much she enjoyed it and was so happy I did this. Now it's probably because I'm a terrible father and don't spend enough time with them, but they really enjoy this time. And they tell stories, laughing, about how the time a creeper blew me up, or when they accidentally attacked something or whatever. It's some serious "together" time. (And I can't imagine am easier way of being a decent parent.) I'm gonna install it on their laptops (I was lazy and used 360) and I'm hoping there's servers aimed for littler kids. Just because teenage boys seem to be real dicks online. (It's not language, we swear a fair amount while playing, I'd just like to increase the chance of them making real friends vs endless griefers.) There's gotta be other parents like me that'd be willing to run a private, verified identity, server, eh?
blazespin 11y ago
Creative / collaborative mode is good addiction, but when they start connecting to servers or griefing their siblings, it's not so good anymore. Survival mode isn't so great either,but can be ok if they are using it as a constrained creative mode. iPad is really the best format as it doesn't have all the distractions of PC minecraft. The UX is great for kids as well. Note minecraft can be awesome for siblings that fight all the time. You'll be amazed when they actually get along on building something. It's basically 21st century Lego.
- abustamam 11y ago
  I grew up playing with Lego with my siblings. We would fight over that ever-elusive piece of which we only had one of. I haven't played too much of Minecraft to understand the "pieces," but I think the problem we had with Lego would be solved :)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Sakes 11y ago
Video games can be good. Video games can be bad. Specifically pertaining to minecraft, I've never found a game that has the potential to offer so many educational experiences. You can start off stacking blocks with your kid. Fast forward a few years and you've downloaded something like computer craft and you are now creating your own game skins and literally programming simple AIs whether they are bots or enemy mobs.
- steve-howard 11y ago
  It's a much older demographic, but Kerbal Space Program is educational in a similarly sneaky way. First you build some rockets and they don't go very far, then you build some better ones, and at a certain point you wind up learning about orbital mechanics and rocketry equations. It really changed the way I think about space, while procrastinating! I haven't made mods for it yet, but there are people that go down that rabbit hole too. Quite a bargain for the $30 I paid.
  - lfowles 11y ago
    And then you build planes... When I first bought KSP, I had no idea you could even get into orbit. So many different levels of accomplishments to strive for, especially now with career mode.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Oh yes, for me it was best money spent for a video game ever. I've clocked almost 400 hours and I still really didn't get into making planes - I'm launching rockets, building space stations and (with help of a bunch of cool mods) setting up colonies on moons. This game has it all - you need to learn being precise (targeted landings if you want to build a structure somewhere or picked up kerbonauts you crashed the previous time), you need to plan and do logistics (hello fuel shipments), and you need patience (rendezvous and docking). And, as OP said, you quickly end up learning a lot about orbital mechanics, rocketry and space exploration. You don't need to know the maths, but you'll end up learning it anyway, because formulas are the easiest way to compress your intuition about "why bigger ships need helluva bigger rockets" or "why when I go faster I go slower". Oh, and a fun thing I observed watching the community - because KSP runs on Unity 4, which has an unusable 64bit version for Windows, and the game itself starts quickly eating your RAM when you go for installing part or visual mods to the point of crashing the 32bit version, a lot of people install Linux for the first time in their lives just to play a working 64bit version of KSP. Yay for more education :).
golemotron 11y ago
I wonder if anyone ever asked whether playing with blocks is addictive?
- derefr 11y ago
  I've been waiting forever for someone to write the ultimate eloquent screed on medium irrelevancy, so I could link it in response to a thousand conversations including this one. It would cover things like: • How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices; • how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not; • how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets; • further, how talking to friends is talking to friends, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • but also how there are also structured leagues that kick out creepy people, both for soccer and Starcraft; • and, most importantly, that "playing on the computer" isn't an activity. The simplest and most useful metaphor is that the computer is a place, like "school" or "the park" or "a friend's house", where your child goes and all sorts of activities happen. Those activities are not better or worse for happening on a computer; they're exactly as they were when they weren't happening on a computer. Ideally, parents would treat the computer, the medium, as an irrelevant distraction to finding out what their child is up to. One is not "chatting on Facebook"; one is just chatting with friends, or with a kid in my class, or perhaps with some random person who started talking to me. That information, the important information, gets buried under the medium.
  - golemotron 11y ago
    Good point. I think all the handwringing over computer games is society saying "This stuff is kind of new, maybe we should be cautious." Happens every time technology advances, particularly when kids are the users. The thing that is particularly bad in our age is that we're demonizing many realms of experience with the language of addiction. It's stupid. I hope we get over it.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Except the argument doesn't hold water. There is a difference between playing with toy blocks or virtual blocks. The toy blocks develop physical skills, and teaches physical experimentation. The virtual blocks develops keyboard/gamepad skills and usually illustrates unphysical simulation. The toy blocks allow arbitrary social interaction with other kids, the virtual blocks constrain social interaction to the limits of the device or setting. I've been in that camp -- I got a degree from DigiPen before I decided to do something more meaningful with my life. But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play.
vonseel 11y ago
Addiction isn't defined by the "pleasure source" (drug, game, shopping) and doesn't require criminal or financially draining effects. Addiction is being so obsessed with an activity that it consumes one's life and he/she neglects other priorities in pursuit of its pleasure.
legohead 11y ago
Feels like the author doesn't want to admit gaming addiction is real. So because Minecraft is a 'good' game, you can't get addicted to it? bollocks I grew up playing (and becoming addicted to) MUDs, which are, from an outside perspective, quite good for you. They promote reading, high imagination, social interactions, a sense of accomplishment, etc. and there are MUDs which focus on or require player building (MOOs/LPs etc). What did my addiction to MUDs get me? Bad grades in school, and no 'real life' experience. I had no idea how to take care of myself, which would cause me issues later in life when I did start forming RL relationships. And while my online social ability was amazing, in real life I could barely talk to people (I believe there could be a lot written about this very subject). I didn't make friends, much less girlfriends. All I cared about was getting through the school day so I can could get home and play MUDs. The one thing it did give me was programming, since I became so interested in them I began programming them.
- lfowles 11y ago
  > I grew up playing (and becoming addicted to) MUDs, which are, from an outside perspective, quite good for you From an outside perspective? In my experience, it's only the people playing MMOs that tout the benefits :)
  - yzzxy 11y ago
    MUDs are significantly different in that you have to read, solve, and think a lot more rather than the "watch six timers tick down and then hit a button" gameplay loop of most modern MMOs. But I would also agree that playing RPG games of any description for a large portion of your day is a net negative.
    - lfowles 11y ago
      The bullet points for your resume are going to come from your guild interactions. Did you lead a 40 man raid of people (poorly! ;) ) clicking their timed buttons? Did you cull drama over the DKP allotment? Did you organize a recruiting drive to boost membership when guild levels were introduced? Etc...
baby 11y ago
it's impossible to be addicted to video game? I'm sorry I had to stop reading. I feel like there is no point upvoting or even constructing a thoughtful comment to this article.
sjtrny 11y ago
The addiction to Minecraft (or most other online games) is purely social. Soon a new game will come along that the next lot of kids will all play together. There is nothing about Minecraft itself that makes it addictive. I've lived through this myself hopping from game to game with my high school friends.
lookbothways 11y ago
The elephant in the room here is that children in the 21st century have little to no freedom or personal control. The days of packs of children running around town or exploring the woods are long gone, due to fears of dangerous men and accidents. Children wake up, are shuttled to school, then either come back and are locked in their homes for the rest of the day, or else are shuttled off to another extracurricular activity. Nothing is unsupervised, and nothing is spontaneous. No where is this more clear than in the concept of a "play date," that a parent must schedule a meeting between two children instead of just, you know, letting them walk down the street and ring a doorbell when they feel like it. The internet is like a parallel universe based around the exact opposite rules. You can look at whatever you want, talk to whoever you want, say whatever you want, do whatever you want, and no one is going to stop you. There is no wonder that so many suburban children become "internet addicts" these days, given that it is the sole element of freedom in their lives. And Minecraft is the ultimate embodiment of this freedom. There is no structure or goal to it, just the freedom to wander about a crude approximation of the natural world, go on adventures by yourself or with friends, and build things with your own two hands. In short, it is a safe, sterilized version of the ancient childhood experience of wandering the woods, building forts, and carving out a society secret from the adults. It is the solution to problems we created ourselves out of fear of the world.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  I think _why_ of it is probably a bit more complicated but still I think you have got the _what_ down pat. When I was growing up in the sixties I spent most of the summer outside from breakfast time to teatime at least. My parents had no idea where I was, who I was with, or what I was doing. If the sun was shining and I was still indoors my mother would want to know if anything was wrong and once she had decided that there was nothing wrong I would be shooed out to get on with my life while she got on with hers. But now children have no society of their own; they have invaded the adult space and adults have invaded their space. Fifty years ago children learned about the world from other children and transmitted their own culture to each other but now there is nowhere to hide and nowhere where you cannot be contacted by outsiders (adults). Damn, I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm just glad I was born where and when I was and I feel sorry for those who will never feel the freedoms that I felt; I just hope that I'm missing something and that today's children will look back in fifty years on their own golden age.
illza 11y ago
Similar to just about anything I read these days about parenting, I found some things I agreed with and a few that I don't. What has always been troubling to me however, is "our" (society, media, whomever) propensity to blame our children's activities for the disconnect between what they enjoy doing and what we, as parents, think they should be doing. There are benefits that can be obtained from playing games, video or otherwise. I, personally, have used pokemon to teach reading, story-telling, math, strategy, problem solving, and a myriad of other things to my oldest son. His brother isn't far behind him. We play minecraft, smash bros, mario kart; I even recently introduced him to portal 2. Some of what I let him do is for fun. Some is to gauge his interest in things. Other times I use the time to teach him something new. But the biggest factor of this strategy working is and will almost always be parental involvement. Most of the backlash I see/hear/read about from other parents is due primarily to an unwillingness to get interested in what their children are interested in. They'll buy them the game and go enjoy some "peace and quiet" and never think twice about it. There's something to be said of a parent really taking an interest and learning about a new universe with their children. I'm far from perfect, but that's what I've been attempting, and it's working out pretty well so far. There was a quote in an Orson Scott Card book, "The Lost Gate" where the main character speaks of his sort-of adopted mother/trainer/mentor where he mentions that "Love ... it's a term for the woman in my life who loves me enough to read the novels I'm reading just so she can try to figure out what they're teaching me." TL;DR - Games aren't inherently good or bad. But it's up to the parent to actually do the parenting. They can't just throw a "good video game" in front of their children and expect them to magically grow into engineers or doctors.
vacri 11y ago
> Saying Minecraft is addictive is similar to trying to argue millions of people addicted to soccer and therefore soccer creates the violence and racism on the terraces and so on. Unfortunately, playing a lot of Minecraft won't help you detect humongous logical fallacies like these. Whether it's addictive or not is orthogonal to the knock-on effects of that addiction. The article has more than a few of these woozy rationalisations, which is sad as there are some decent points in there.
kerrsclyde 11y ago
Perhaps it is a bad thing that kids are never bored. As a kid I was often bored - playing outside with friends was the only interesting thing to do. My kids have unlimited YouTube/App's/Minecraft to enjoy. Some of my later interests came as a result of having to occupy myself, I don't see this process happening with them.
ChrisArchitect 11y ago
please add a (2012) to this article title. Minecraft and it's evolution in the mainstream has come a long way since then. Discussion here is still relevant and current, just sayin - old old url.

96 points by tux 11y ago

fezz 11y ago

Understated: Parents should get on minecraft with their kids. It's very useful as a family team building and can also encourage leadership if you let the kids be the boss of you in the virtual world. It's also great if you're traveling to get on minecraft together to have fun instead of a short phone conversation. (it also works well for divorced parents)

fuckedapanda 11y ago

minecraft - big legos for dumb kids

tw04 11y ago

I think the biggest problem is the online nature of it. When I was growing up, it was literally "you can play until the next spot where you can pause". That doesn't really work with an online game like Minecraft where there is no definitive beginning and end. There's no "round" or "level" to beat. And there's almost assuredly at least one friend who can keep playing until bedtime, even if all your friends can't. I think the only real way to "fix" the issue is to set strict time limits out of the gate so that your children learn early on to mediate their time.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
You need to be careful with those limits 'lest you end up ensuring your kid never learns to do anything else with the computer than playing games. Exploring and tinkering takes time. A kid won't start doing that if he/she knows he has only an hour a day tops, nor you can really do anything creative on such short time blocks.
- tw04 11y ago
  Spending time on a computer != playing minecraft on xbox which is almost always what I see occurring when I hear parents talking about their kids spending too much time playing minecraft. Yes, Minecraft is available for PC. But I would say that is the vast, vast, vast minority of how kids under the age of 16 consume it. I see it almost universally on tablets, phones, and consoles.
MaulingMonkey 11y ago
On the other hand, "just one more level" x10 is an issue in round & level style games.

tzakrajs 11y ago

Playing too much Minecraft is considered an addiction because it has a real cost to the addict playing the game. Please note that "playing too much" is to the point that it is causing the child to do poorly in school or have other negative effects.

nmrm2 11y ago
Preface: I agree with you, especially wrt video games. I never understood or enjoyed video games, anyways. However, when defining addiction, I think "causing the child to do poorly in school" is a really, really dangerous standard. Several psychologists and teachers told my parents I was addicted to computers because I did poorly in high school and also spent a lot of time on the computer. Never-mind that I had worked through Cinderella, SICP, the first half of Dragon, and an undergrad crypto course in addition to a Discrete Mathemtics and Linear course by the end of high school... all while fueling my "addiction".) I think there's a lot of danger in conflating "interferes with good grades" with "harmful". Especially in high school. Taking grades seriously in high school would have been far more harmful than my computer "addiction".
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Exactly this. I both enjoyed video games and did a lot of programming in secondary/high school and all that time did in fact interfere with my school performance quite a bit. And I'm really thankful for my parents to not push me too hard back then, because things I learned let me end up in a great university and have a career in programming. And the games were both what taught me English and what made me interested in programming in the first place. A younger friend of mine gained his first digital electronics knowledge building 8-segment displays in Minecraft, and the time spent on setting up and managing Minecraft servers gave him skills he now directly uses every day, for money and for fun. The point is, school is bullshit (and kids smell it, they're incredibly good bullshit detectors). Pretty much anything a kid does on a computer that isn't literally browsing 9gag all day teaches them more than the same time spent doing homework. Parents need to be very careful here. School-related tasks are very inefficient way of spending time, but are easy for parents to focus on because they're quantified. You just have to look at the test scores and grades (and their first derivatives). The fact that they're totally unrelated to any education taking place is too much to think about. So if you see your kid spends a lot of time building, creating and exploring stuff on the computer, do him/her a favour and don't mind too much if they occasionally forget about their homework. And most important of all - don't introduce insane time limits like "1 hour of computer time a day, every other day". With such strict limits, there's literally nothing a kid can do except of watching funny pictures of cats on-line or playing games. Exploration and learning takes time, and is something you don't even start if you know you are on strict deadlines (note: this also applies to adults at and after work).

navait 11y ago

It would be completely foolish to deny that some games have addictive qualities to them - look at how developers such as Blizzard hire psychologists to make their games more appealing. That short work-reward cycle feels fulfilling, and drives many people to keep on playing despite it being harmful. > Non-gamers are bombarded by messages from the larger media-culture. >So parents hear constantly that games are harmful, that gamers are all potential crazed gunmen, isolated shut ins and so on. No they don't. Has the author noticed it's not 2007 anymore? To find substantial video-game addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They are not a part of mainstream culture, especially the crazed gunman stories. >This is why we have televisions, magazines and newspapers – they are technological devices to sell us advertising. Lots of media companies own video game studios. To be sure, video-game addiction is a minor problem compared to drugs, alcohol, and sex addiction. But sticking your head in the sand is not going to win you any allies, nor does a persecution complex. Instead, stick to the positive benefits that video games have, and DO NOT overstate them, like marijuana activists convinced the drug is a cure-all. The world has moved on. We(gamers) won. It's time to stop pretending we're a persecuted minority.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Has the author noticed it's not 2007 anymore? To find substantial video-game addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They are not a part of mainstream culture, especially the crazed gunman stories. I'm not sure if things have changed all that dramatically in 8 years. Video games remain a convenient scapegoat for various societal ills.
- qmalxp 11y ago
  I haven't heard one media outlet claiming e.g. Dylann Roof was influenced by video games, and I think they would have a stronger case nowadays with games like Hatred on the market.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Dylann Roof is an atypical case. Not much was said about gun control either, which is unusual. The primary debate that was sparked was surrounding the Confederate battle flag(s). What do you mean by "nowadays with games like Hatred on the market"? What is special about Hatred? It wasn't a particularly violent game, it just got propelled into notoriety by demagoguery and the developers' guerrilla marketing. It's a near verbatim clone of Postal, and that came out in 1997.

johnchristopher 11y ago

> To your brain, Mincraft is a form of going outside. > Our bodies are just a way to move our sub-conscious around. We spend most of our lives in our own sub-conscious because our brain likes to do stuff. The brain is in charge, not the body, and the brain is just as interested in solving problems in Minecraft as it is getting hands to move lego-bricks around a table. Errrh. I like gaming but dualism is a poor excuse for that (and one I believe to be very wrong both empirically and philosophically).

AgentME 11y ago
I don't think the author was trying to go for anything metaphysical there.
- harryjo 11y ago
  Worse, physical. The author is claiming that body exists to serve the mind, and as no needs of own. Nutrition and exercise/atrophy and vitamin D production give the lie to the claim that playing outside is equivalent to playing minecraft.

wvenable 11y ago

My son is 6 and many of the kids he interacts with at school and daycare play Minecraft. So just the last week or so, we picked up Minecraft for the iPad and for the PC. I had always been vaguely interested in playing it but never actually pulled the trigger. So my impression after a week is that it is weirdly fun and addictive. I've now put more hours into Minecraft than anyone else in the house. I got my wife playing it and she's still experimenting around. My son likes to play creative and just kind of fool around. I think he's a bit too young yet to really get into it. But he does love watching me play and we discuss everything together. It's probably the most engaged he's been with me on the computer. But I have stayed up way too late playing it...

MichaelGG 11y ago
I played it on PC years back (and when I thought the game making $30M was an insane amount of success). But shitty graphics support prevented me from running it on my laptops and I gave up. Yet I can still remember the large things I built, the houses and bridges and staying up all night. Now my girls are 7 & 8, and for the last year they've been building these huge things in creative. They're in love with Stampy (on YouTube... Annoying voice but he shows some neat tricks). This week they took vacations, and I agreed to play survival with them. (I must admit, it does scare me just a bit; the rush to setup before nightfall and the sound that something is nearby.) Well... Every night we've stayed up until 1am or so (kids are lightweights) playing Minecraft. Coordinating expeditions, streamlining resource usage, building sky palaces. It's a blast and my one daughter told my wife how much she enjoyed it and was so happy I did this. Now it's probably because I'm a terrible father and don't spend enough time with them, but they really enjoy this time. And they tell stories, laughing, about how the time a creeper blew me up, or when they accidentally attacked something or whatever. It's some serious "together" time. (And I can't imagine am easier way of being a decent parent.) I'm gonna install it on their laptops (I was lazy and used 360) and I'm hoping there's servers aimed for littler kids. Just because teenage boys seem to be real dicks online. (It's not language, we swear a fair amount while playing, I'd just like to increase the chance of them making real friends vs endless griefers.) There's gotta be other parents like me that'd be willing to run a private, verified identity, server, eh?

blazespin 11y ago

Creative / collaborative mode is good addiction, but when they start connecting to servers or griefing their siblings, it's not so good anymore. Survival mode isn't so great either,but can be ok if they are using it as a constrained creative mode. iPad is really the best format as it doesn't have all the distractions of PC minecraft. The UX is great for kids as well. Note minecraft can be awesome for siblings that fight all the time. You'll be amazed when they actually get along on building something. It's basically 21st century Lego.

abustamam 11y ago
I grew up playing with Lego with my siblings. We would fight over that ever-elusive piece of which we only had one of. I haven't played too much of Minecraft to understand the "pieces," but I think the problem we had with Lego would be solved :)

deleted 11y ago

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Sakes 11y ago

Video games can be good. Video games can be bad. Specifically pertaining to minecraft, I've never found a game that has the potential to offer so many educational experiences. You can start off stacking blocks with your kid. Fast forward a few years and you've downloaded something like computer craft and you are now creating your own game skins and literally programming simple AIs whether they are bots or enemy mobs.

steve-howard 11y ago
It's a much older demographic, but Kerbal Space Program is educational in a similarly sneaky way. First you build some rockets and they don't go very far, then you build some better ones, and at a certain point you wind up learning about orbital mechanics and rocketry equations. It really changed the way I think about space, while procrastinating! I haven't made mods for it yet, but there are people that go down that rabbit hole too. Quite a bargain for the $30 I paid.
- lfowles 11y ago
  And then you build planes... When I first bought KSP, I had no idea you could even get into orbit. So many different levels of accomplishments to strive for, especially now with career mode.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Oh yes, for me it was best money spent for a video game ever. I've clocked almost 400 hours and I still really didn't get into making planes - I'm launching rockets, building space stations and (with help of a bunch of cool mods) setting up colonies on moons. This game has it all - you need to learn being precise (targeted landings if you want to build a structure somewhere or picked up kerbonauts you crashed the previous time), you need to plan and do logistics (hello fuel shipments), and you need patience (rendezvous and docking). And, as OP said, you quickly end up learning a lot about orbital mechanics, rocketry and space exploration. You don't need to know the maths, but you'll end up learning it anyway, because formulas are the easiest way to compress your intuition about "why bigger ships need helluva bigger rockets" or "why when I go faster I go slower". Oh, and a fun thing I observed watching the community - because KSP runs on Unity 4, which has an unusable 64bit version for Windows, and the game itself starts quickly eating your RAM when you go for installing part or visual mods to the point of crashing the 32bit version, a lot of people install Linux for the first time in their lives just to play a working 64bit version of KSP. Yay for more education :).

golemotron 11y ago

I wonder if anyone ever asked whether playing with blocks is addictive?

derefr 11y ago
I've been waiting forever for someone to write the ultimate eloquent screed on medium irrelevancy, so I could link it in response to a thousand conversations including this one. It would cover things like: • How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices; • how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not; • how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets; • further, how talking to friends is talking to friends, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; • but also how there are also structured leagues that kick out creepy people, both for soccer and Starcraft; • and, most importantly, that "playing on the computer" isn't an activity. The simplest and most useful metaphor is that the computer is a place, like "school" or "the park" or "a friend's house", where your child goes and all sorts of activities happen. Those activities are not better or worse for happening on a computer; they're exactly as they were when they weren't happening on a computer. Ideally, parents would treat the computer, the medium, as an irrelevant distraction to finding out what their child is up to. One is not "chatting on Facebook"; one is just chatting with friends, or with a kid in my class, or perhaps with some random person who started talking to me. That information, the important information, gets buried under the medium.
- golemotron 11y ago
  Good point. I think all the handwringing over computer games is society saying "This stuff is kind of new, maybe we should be cautious." Happens every time technology advances, particularly when kids are the users. The thing that is particularly bad in our age is that we're demonizing many realms of experience with the language of addiction. It's stupid. I hope we get over it.
- maaku 11y ago
  Except the argument doesn't hold water. There is a difference between playing with toy blocks or virtual blocks. The toy blocks develop physical skills, and teaches physical experimentation. The virtual blocks develops keyboard/gamepad skills and usually illustrates unphysical simulation. The toy blocks allow arbitrary social interaction with other kids, the virtual blocks constrain social interaction to the limits of the device or setting. I've been in that camp -- I got a degree from DigiPen before I decided to do something more meaningful with my life. But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play.

vonseel 11y ago

Addiction isn't defined by the "pleasure source" (drug, game, shopping) and doesn't require criminal or financially draining effects. Addiction is being so obsessed with an activity that it consumes one's life and he/she neglects other priorities in pursuit of its pleasure.

legohead 11y ago

Feels like the author doesn't want to admit gaming addiction is real. So because Minecraft is a 'good' game, you can't get addicted to it? bollocks I grew up playing (and becoming addicted to) MUDs, which are, from an outside perspective, quite good for you. They promote reading, high imagination, social interactions, a sense of accomplishment, etc. and there are MUDs which focus on or require player building (MOOs/LPs etc). What did my addiction to MUDs get me? Bad grades in school, and no 'real life' experience. I had no idea how to take care of myself, which would cause me issues later in life when I did start forming RL relationships. And while my online social ability was amazing, in real life I could barely talk to people (I believe there could be a lot written about this very subject). I didn't make friends, much less girlfriends. All I cared about was getting through the school day so I can could get home and play MUDs. The one thing it did give me was programming, since I became so interested in them I began programming them.

lfowles 11y ago
> I grew up playing (and becoming addicted to) MUDs, which are, from an outside perspective, quite good for you From an outside perspective? In my experience, it's only the people playing MMOs that tout the benefits :)
- yzzxy 11y ago
  MUDs are significantly different in that you have to read, solve, and think a lot more rather than the "watch six timers tick down and then hit a button" gameplay loop of most modern MMOs. But I would also agree that playing RPG games of any description for a large portion of your day is a net negative.
  - lfowles 11y ago
    The bullet points for your resume are going to come from your guild interactions. Did you lead a 40 man raid of people (poorly! ;) ) clicking their timed buttons? Did you cull drama over the DKP allotment? Did you organize a recruiting drive to boost membership when guild levels were introduced? Etc...

baby 11y ago

it's impossible to be addicted to video game? I'm sorry I had to stop reading. I feel like there is no point upvoting or even constructing a thoughtful comment to this article.

sjtrny 11y ago

The addiction to Minecraft (or most other online games) is purely social. Soon a new game will come along that the next lot of kids will all play together. There is nothing about Minecraft itself that makes it addictive. I've lived through this myself hopping from game to game with my high school friends.

lookbothways 11y ago

The elephant in the room here is that children in the 21st century have little to no freedom or personal control. The days of packs of children running around town or exploring the woods are long gone, due to fears of dangerous men and accidents. Children wake up, are shuttled to school, then either come back and are locked in their homes for the rest of the day, or else are shuttled off to another extracurricular activity. Nothing is unsupervised, and nothing is spontaneous. No where is this more clear than in the concept of a "play date," that a parent must schedule a meeting between two children instead of just, you know, letting them walk down the street and ring a doorbell when they feel like it. The internet is like a parallel universe based around the exact opposite rules. You can look at whatever you want, talk to whoever you want, say whatever you want, do whatever you want, and no one is going to stop you. There is no wonder that so many suburban children become "internet addicts" these days, given that it is the sole element of freedom in their lives. And Minecraft is the ultimate embodiment of this freedom. There is no structure or goal to it, just the freedom to wander about a crude approximation of the natural world, go on adventures by yourself or with friends, and build things with your own two hands. In short, it is a safe, sterilized version of the ancient childhood experience of wandering the woods, building forts, and carving out a society secret from the adults. It is the solution to problems we created ourselves out of fear of the world.

kwhitefoot 11y ago
I think _why_ of it is probably a bit more complicated but still I think you have got the _what_ down pat. When I was growing up in the sixties I spent most of the summer outside from breakfast time to teatime at least. My parents had no idea where I was, who I was with, or what I was doing. If the sun was shining and I was still indoors my mother would want to know if anything was wrong and once she had decided that there was nothing wrong I would be shooed out to get on with my life while she got on with hers. But now children have no society of their own; they have invaded the adult space and adults have invaded their space. Fifty years ago children learned about the world from other children and transmitted their own culture to each other but now there is nowhere to hide and nowhere where you cannot be contacted by outsiders (adults). Damn, I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm just glad I was born where and when I was and I feel sorry for those who will never feel the freedoms that I felt; I just hope that I'm missing something and that today's children will look back in fifty years on their own golden age.

illza 11y ago

Similar to just about anything I read these days about parenting, I found some things I agreed with and a few that I don't. What has always been troubling to me however, is "our" (society, media, whomever) propensity to blame our children's activities for the disconnect between what they enjoy doing and what we, as parents, think they should be doing. There are benefits that can be obtained from playing games, video or otherwise. I, personally, have used pokemon to teach reading, story-telling, math, strategy, problem solving, and a myriad of other things to my oldest son. His brother isn't far behind him. We play minecraft, smash bros, mario kart; I even recently introduced him to portal 2. Some of what I let him do is for fun. Some is to gauge his interest in things. Other times I use the time to teach him something new. But the biggest factor of this strategy working is and will almost always be parental involvement. Most of the backlash I see/hear/read about from other parents is due primarily to an unwillingness to get interested in what their children are interested in. They'll buy them the game and go enjoy some "peace and quiet" and never think twice about it. There's something to be said of a parent really taking an interest and learning about a new universe with their children. I'm far from perfect, but that's what I've been attempting, and it's working out pretty well so far. There was a quote in an Orson Scott Card book, "The Lost Gate" where the main character speaks of his sort-of adopted mother/trainer/mentor where he mentions that "Love ... it's a term for the woman in my life who loves me enough to read the novels I'm reading just so she can try to figure out what they're teaching me." TL;DR - Games aren't inherently good or bad. But it's up to the parent to actually do the parenting. They can't just throw a "good video game" in front of their children and expect them to magically grow into engineers or doctors.

vacri 11y ago

> Saying Minecraft is addictive is similar to trying to argue millions of people addicted to soccer and therefore soccer creates the violence and racism on the terraces and so on. Unfortunately, playing a lot of Minecraft won't help you detect humongous logical fallacies like these. Whether it's addictive or not is orthogonal to the knock-on effects of that addiction. The article has more than a few of these woozy rationalisations, which is sad as there are some decent points in there.

kerrsclyde 11y ago

Perhaps it is a bad thing that kids are never bored. As a kid I was often bored - playing outside with friends was the only interesting thing to do. My kids have unlimited YouTube/App's/Minecraft to enjoy. Some of my later interests came as a result of having to occupy myself, I don't see this process happening with them.

ChrisArchitect 11y ago

please add a (2012) to this article title. Minecraft and it's evolution in the mainstream has come a long way since then. Discussion here is still relevant and current, just sayin - old old url.