I love my kids, but at the roblox age, kids are assholes. Self Centered. Egotistical assholes. Their brains don't know any better and while you can teach them everything you could hope they learn, they have this chemical in their body that basically says "my parents are idiots and I know better" and they're going to make mistakes and do stupid things. The amount of unfettered mistakes and stupidity one can do on the internet is boundless. I didn't grow up with such boundless access to the world.
These roblox systems do not reflect reality at all as we used to know it. Kids used to draw something that their parents would hang on the fridge and they didn't make 350 bucks from it, nor did the entire world have access to my fridge to see their creations. If we played D&D it was with 4 kids in the same street or same neighborhood - our worlds were much smaller/finite. If some rando approached us - it was weird and we knew to say "no thanks" and move on - bit in the context of the internet - everyone is a rando.
At first, it was kind of cool to see kids create roblox groups, then use those groups to sell things and distribute the funds - but they became infiltrated and before long kids were addicted and they had to login and they had to create and they had to work.. and they stopped being kids... and old farts manipulated and took over these communities to profit off child labor.
But.. from a parents perspective. It just meant turning the roblox off. Pulling it cold turkey. You can block chat - then they hop on discord. And discord just makes things infinitely worse. Block discord and they're on twitter, instagram, pinterest, facebook, snapchat, tiktok.
THat desire for instant gratification and community at all costs then has them looking for other people in similar situations and that usually means self diagnosing things, searching for aesthetics or trying to define themselves in really weird ways with such fluidity that no one can keep up. Not even them.
So yeah, you can't teach this to kids.. Parents aren't equipped to handle it either.
Modern "free-to-play" games are so dangerously designed working not on just the core dopamine reward ratio (already known by Las Vegas for slot machine payouts), but incorporating false peer group pressure, "planned bullying" to get players to pay out rather than play for free, sunk cost fallacy, and probably a half dozen others.
As a counterpoint, my kid was playing a game on Roblox that taught them basics of avoiding fraud before allowing them to play. It was a game about trading animals. It is not all bad.
These roblox systems do not reflect reality at all as we used to know it. Kids used to draw something that their parents would hang on the fridge and they didn't make 350 bucks from it, nor did the entire world have access to my fridge to see their creations. If we played D&D it was with 4 kids in the same street or same neighborhood - our worlds were much smaller/finite. If some rando approached us - it was weird and we knew to say "no thanks" and move on - bit in the context of the internet - everyone is a rando.
At first, it was kind of cool to see kids create roblox groups, then use those groups to sell things and distribute the funds - but they became infiltrated and before long kids were addicted and they had to login and they had to create and they had to work.. and they stopped being kids... and old farts manipulated and took over these communities to profit off child labor.
But.. from a parents perspective. It just meant turning the roblox off. Pulling it cold turkey. You can block chat - then they hop on discord. And discord just makes things infinitely worse. Block discord and they're on twitter, instagram, pinterest, facebook, snapchat, tiktok.
THat desire for instant gratification and community at all costs then has them looking for other people in similar situations and that usually means self diagnosing things, searching for aesthetics or trying to define themselves in really weird ways with such fluidity that no one can keep up. Not even them.
So yeah, you can't teach this to kids.. Parents aren't equipped to handle it either.