There is Minecraft the standalone game that you play either by yourself or on a private server with friends you know IRL. That's totally fine.

Then there is the wider Minecraft community based on a constellation of public and semi-public servers. This is a lot more like Roblox.

▲

LeifCarrotson 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Minecraft you know and love is a fantastic game, especially for kids. Top 10 all time, IMO, in terms of creativity and education and development. And you can easily set up a personal friends and family server/realm, and there are tons of free mods and maps.

The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.

▲

oezi 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I am probably not the right generation but all attempts to engage with Minecraft with my children have always ended badly. It seems very tedious and clunky. The learning curve seems steeper than playing factorio casually.

▲

A_D_E_P_T 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I tried playing it with my son, but I've never quite understood what you're supposed to do.

I grew up on RPGs and adventure games where you usually had an objective out there in the world. In comparison, Minecraft is extremely solipsistic; there are no structures in the world to meaningfully interact with, and it seems one is supposed to simply treat the world as a sort of Lego set.

▲

cess11 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You're supposed to build a place to live and sleep, and then you find some magma and water and create a portal to a less friendly place. Eventually you find the bad dragon and murder it.

	▲	immibis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That was added to the game after its creator got cynical about it. He said it needed an ending to justify being 1.0, then he sold it to Microsoft because he hated being popular and wanted the game destroyed, as well as money. The actual goal of Minecraft should be whatever it was in Alpha 1.1.2_01.

▲

black_knight 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are several ways of enjoying Minecraft. I play it a lot with my kids (5 and 10) at the moment. They love creative mode, spawning mobs and just building strange houses. When I played with my friends, sibling snd parents, it was all about survival mode everyone would create their own huge buildings and connect up via railway, visit each other and make fun stuff. Then there was the whole red stone rabbit hole…

▲

mghackerlady 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a cultural thing. The learning curve has always been bad but it was bypassed by the initial cultural penetration of people playing it on youtube and now the learning curve is a thing learnt through prior knowledge instead of trial and error

▲

hedora 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Microsoft forces login these days for single player play, and jams ads, social networking crap.

As a parent, I don’t have time for this bullshit, and assume they have malicious intentions. Also, at least once, there was some warning about a profanity filter that my kid dismissed without reading. It’s tied to my MS account, and only a matter of time before that is tied to github and linkedin.

So the kid says “doodie head” one too many times, and what, I lose my windows login / bitlocker key, gh repos and professional network?

Screw it.

	▲	autoexec 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Exactly, everything wrong with Minecraft started with Microsoft. They took a fun, harmless, and free game so that they could profit from it and they've been working at making it increasingly harmful ever since.
	▲	dwattttt 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Have you considered not tying your encryption keys to your child's online activities? I can understand the thrill of danger, but I'm not that much of a gambler myself.