I hate being tuekish man. Thks is my last year in this country.
Will someone please explain to me how a video game exploits children.
You could start with this People Make Games video from a couple of years ago. https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?si=Ttg4-Bust1K-X-22
I said explain. It’s this old school thing we used to do where we JUST TELL A PERSON SOMETHING
No we didn’t. Telling people something was invented in 2016 by russian bots in Kamchatka on Twitter.
Watch the video or feed it into ChatGPT for a summary or Google a pre-existing summary.
Sometimes, there are already resources explaining more clearly and thoroughly than we could. And although I’m unsure if this case qualifies, there are definitely topics that can’t be reduced to a few sentences. Thus, a reputable link is often worth more to both sides: it saves the explainer time and effort while informing the target far better.
If you don’t want to engage with the content, I believe there are better ways to go about it than being rude to people who were likely trying to help.
I get what you are saying, and actually agree with out. But you don’t have to be an asshole about it. No one has the obligation to attend your tantrums.
Children make games on Roblox (real games, the thing people do working in the industry), Roblox makes money off those games and pays close to nothing to the children. Therefore, exploits children.
Kids make maps. Stuff in the maps is sold for Roblox bucks. Roblox bucks cost money to buy. The kid who makes the map gets the Roblox bucks, and can sell them. The problem is you only get 30% back when you sell a Roblox buck.
So kids spend time making big maps and servers, buying ads, getting shoutouts on YouTube/whatever, and Roblox takes a 70% cut from all of it
Its exploiting child labor and the impulsive brain chemistry of adolescence.
Stop expecting handouts with 0 effort especially when the answer is one tap away.
These guys explain it well, let them:
Awful. A government should not be allowed to block websites.
That statement doesn’t really make sense. Especially in this case, the website is a business and a store. A government definitely has the right to take legal action against a physical store operating within it’s jurisdiction, so why would the same not hold true for an electronic one?
It is the single most difficult thing as a parent to put my foot down about. Or it was at first.
My son LOVES watching the YouTubers playing the (horribly developed) games and enjoys making pretend games based on what he watches (some of it, sometimes we have to skip a video). He has a lot of friends at school that play it.
I will not let my son play it. Minecraft? Sure. Minecraft has a very different system, plenty of it crap, but it’s much easier to supervise and much less exploitive.
But he does let me know that he feels left out when his friends play it and he can’t. He doesn’t have any siblings, so I understand how it’s difficult to lack that connection to peers. He has other ways he gets to connect - mine craft, local playgyms, events for children, sports.
As a parent part of the empathy is feeling that sadness that comes from his disappointment in not being allowed to play it. But I think he has started to understand as he’s gotten a little older, that adults making money off of what a kid makes isn’t nice, or fair, or safe.
Turkey did well here. I don’t think we’ll ever have something similar in the states, but I hope regulation can come about eventually.
Damn, superstar. Save some A++ parenting for other people! Seriously, you must be raising a top-quality person…
I wish. There are things we have been unable to change, even with the assistance of a couple of child psychologists.
When he gets upset with other kids, particularly when they break rules, he is absolutely convinced he needs to be the executive of the rules and often hits or pushes the other kids.
He was doing it before my ex and I separated. It only seems to happen during the summer at the day care program, so it’s likely something more going on there.
Kids are still humans, and honestly I have to remind myself I’m doing the best I can. Because if I knew a better way to do things, I’d be doing that instead.
To me it’s not about raising a superstar, it’s raising someone who shares my values, and is capable of caring for themselves as an adult. Socializing and play is the most vital part of childhood development, so I do everything I can there.
Well put. I exaggerated, and not to minimize their issues, but the fact you clearly care and are willing to work at it makes me less worried for them.
All you can do is encourage good behavior/perspectives and discourage the bad. At some point, every child growing up will have to decide if they want to be like their parents or not. You’re clearly doing great, just keep going! And take care of yourself as well…
Yeah the same conversations have occurred in my household. I think you made the right choice here. I’m a huge gamer myself and developer, not on Roblox. Usually if anything it’s me being the lenient one when it comes to games in our home, vice my wife. This is one that I did not allow from day 1 regardless of the age of the kid. It was apparent to be a bad apple to me from my initial looks at it, and has only proven that point over the years. I can’t imagine though how hard it is for most parents who are not entrenched in that industry to navigate decisions like that.
If he likes the idea of making games, just find a playlist of Godot or Unreal 5 game building on youtube. Most of that stuff can be done low-code, and would be perfect for someone who wants to click around and make something. It can be frustrating at first… but if you find something that actually works, I bet it’d click
There’s also a block coding plugin for Godot now too!
https://github.com/endlessm/godot-block-coding
Perfect tool to get kids into game creation.
Can someone tell me how the kids are being forced to make video games. I have read several of these articles and can’t understand the logic. My kids played Roblox and created games on the platform they were never forced or coerced to make anything. Maybe it’s our messed up capitalistic society that expects everybody to monetize anything that’s fun.
The details are too much to go into here in a simple comment. For a full investigation into Roblox check out this video by People Make Games, a games journalism site:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
Essentially, Roox makes billions off the free labour of children. The entire eco system is set up to funnel kids into a cycle of consuming others content and producing their own. It’s also completely unregulated which has allowed some shady people, some of whom are, or directly work for, the owners of the platform to set up quasi developer studios where children are subjected to the same appealing treatment and exploitation of the regular games industry, while earning none of the revenue.
Well none of these sources tell me how the kids are forced into this. All these services are free, so I still don’t see the exploitation. Are you saying the kids are tricked into making games for Roblox, if so then maybe that’s on the parents. As a software engineer and having kids who played Roblox their entire lives, I still can’t make the leap of exploitive practices over just capitalism. Maybe show me another platform that kids can learn how the basics of game design while hosting the game at the same time.
More perfect union did a really great video about the exploitation. From what I can remember the crux of the argument goes roughly like this:
Kid plays game, kid is encouraged through game to create content for game. This content created by kid is sold through game to other kids. Kid who put the work into creating this gamemode is not compensated fairly.
The video goes on to explain a lot of other exploitative practices of roblox.
I watched a video a while back about this, but the details are fuzzy. I think it was the one I linked below if you want to look more into it. In essence, there aren’t a ton of cases where kids are actually being forced to work. However, there are strong incentives for kids to work on Roblox projects that the developers themselves push. The devs want a constant stream of content and money coming in, but they don’t want to pay adult workers at adult wages, so they offer Robux to players who make games. It is difficult for people to convert Robux to actual cash, and the money they receive is often significantly less than they would if they put the effort into any other form of work, so many of these kids are essentially making content for the developers for free or significantly less than they should earn. If there was no payout for content creators and the kids were doing that development just because they had passion for the game, it might be a different situation, but there are quite a few kids that believe they can make serious money doing this and don’t understand that the developers are exploiting them and paying very little. Adults can probably do more research and better understand the situation they are getting into, but kids often don’t have the same critical thinking skills as adults and will accept the lie being pushed by the developers and community that they can get rich by contributing to the game they love.
Video: https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ
Follow-up: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY
