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The Minecraft Parent
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Agger has an interesting article in the New Yorker about parenting in the internet era and why Minecraft is the one game parents want their kids to play. He says, "Screens are no longer simply bicycles for the mind; they are bicycles that children can ride anywhere, into the virtual schoolyard where they might encounter disturbing news photos, bullies, creeps, and worse. Setting a child free on the Internet is a failure to cordon off the world and its dangers. It's nuts. ... The comfort of games is that they are partially walled off from the larger Internet, with their own communities and leaderboards. But what unsettles parents about Internet gaming, despite fond memories of after-school Nintendo afternoons, is its interconnectivity. Minecraft is played by both boys and girls, unusually. ... At its best, the game is not unlike being in the woods with your best friends. Parents also join in."
According to Agger, the significance of Minecraft is how the game shows us that lively, pleasant virtual worlds can exist alongside our own, and that they are places where we want to spend time, where we learn and socialize. "To me what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise," says new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "It's this open-world platform. If you think about it, it's the one game parents want their kids to play." We need to meet our kids halfway in these worlds, and try to guide them like we do in the real world, concludes Agger. "Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft's ownership, but it's a historic game that has shown many of us a middle way to navigate the eternal screens debate."
According to Agger, the significance of Minecraft is how the game shows us that lively, pleasant virtual worlds can exist alongside our own, and that they are places where we want to spend time, where we learn and socialize. "To me what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise," says new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "It's this open-world platform. If you think about it, it's the one game parents want their kids to play." We need to meet our kids halfway in these worlds, and try to guide them like we do in the real world, concludes Agger. "Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft's ownership, but it's a historic game that has shown many of us a middle way to navigate the eternal screens debate."
Creativity is one important skill children need to develop. I think this kind of effusive praise willfully ignores that sometimes these activities can and do take the place of other important childhood activities in some cases.
And that brings me to how I kind of lament the lack of textual information in modern games. I learned a rather large amount of reading(and vocabulary) skills by trying to understand what games were saying as a child.
The universality of voice acting harms how much children can develop by reading.
It's not whether there's a substantial benefit towards building a certain mindset. It's that the game itself is inherently non-linear, allowing people to explore their own minds when playing.
For us adults who are set in our ways, minecraft might not be as fun as a sandbox as it might be as a player in an environment someone else built, but for a kid who really gives no shits about anything other than fucking around and doing what the mind and heart desire, minecraft is a pretty good playpit.
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"Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft's ownership,"
Within 18 months:
Java codebase abandoned in favor of either from-scratch VB.net (or some other proprietary nonsense) rewrite, or a porting of the xbone codebase back to windows.
Support quietly dropped (if not dropped, no new updates published) for non-microsoft branded platforms.
Some new architecture to monetize DLC and/or server mods.
"premium" version with a subscription based revenue model.
Two or three smaller-scale spinoff games based around the minecraft IP published for xbone
You haven't played it, have you?
It's like a box of legos. I've played with my daughter and my friend's kids, and in our little server, we've build castles, towers, giant highways in the sky, a glass dome, funny little traps for each other, underwater houses, a giant rocketship, houses, and many other things I can't recall at the moment. You can literally build your own little world in that game.
I was watching two of my friend's sons build their own little arena for each other so they could spawn zombies and spiders and ender dragons to challenge each other to see who could do better.
As the article says, it totally gives you the creative, imaginative experience of "exploring the woods" without having to have the woods to explore (handy if you live in the city!)
The creativity involved from my limited exposure seems close to nonexistant.
I don't really see any benefit from it, compared to any other game. Are parents just deluding themselves? Or is there some substantial creative benefit that I'm not seeing?
It's not the game itself that is terribly creative, the creativity comes from those playing it. As others have said, the game doesn't have much going on it unless you make something happen, and that's definitely something you want to encourage in children.
This is 2014, and we're in the decade of reboots. This is the reboot of "sit your kids in front of the TV to watch the Children's Channel" thinking. The glowing, phosphorus parent of the 80s, now back with less Big Bird.
Put your kids outside. Don't put them on the bicycle of the Internet; put them on a *real* bicycle. I walked the 1/3 mile to school when I was 6; I could bicycle 1.2 miles in that time, a good 10 minutes walking by myself, well out of sight of my parents. When I was 8, I had a bicycle with a coaster brake, and would disappear outside for hours at a time--by myself, since I had no friends. Sometimes I came back home after the older 5th graders beat the shit out of me for some Freudian satisfaction related to their small penises (too impatient for puberty I guess), I'm sure; but, for all the baseball bats and tennis shoes they applied, they never managed to put a bruise on me, so I made out alright.
This is all a bunch of wanting your kids locked in a room doing a single thing, in a place you know, with the ability to look in and verify they're still doing that one thing and nothing else, so that you don't have to show any concern. My massive internal simulator predicts, via armchair child psychology, that this will not provide a robust set of varied experiences for the child, and so will slow their mental growth and reduce their ability to thrive. History will prove me correct--has proven me correct--but I'm sure nobody will listen and, when it's all well proven that this actually happened, will instead find the next substitute single activity and claim it's different, somehow, and fail to predict the same result.
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The best description of Micecraft I've heard is Digital Lego.
In creative you can build anything.. My son and I built the Great Pyramid of Geza to scale on the Reddit creative server.
Play with redstone.. lean the basic electronic circuits with switches and logic gates.
Then switch to survival, join a community.. work with others as a team.. So many things you can do in one little game..
Well not to call it little.. the map can have more land than 9 million earths.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Anything you let your children do should involve a little bit of effort on the parents part ro make sure its really safe...
Not old, not entitled, not egotistical, loves minecraft.
Please re-examine your warped sense of reality and generalizations based on someone's UID number!
and every single parent I've ever met who has these loosey-goosey standards, and tries to reason with a fucking 3 year old -- has unmanageable, entitled little monsters for children.