Roblox pisses me off so so much as a parent. There are some good games but it's mostly wading through an ocean of shit. And the vast majority of games that are popular are clickers that incentivize children to pay money to get more for each of their clicks.
And it's full of scams. Kids spend $10 for a hat or something in the game and it doesn't end up working in all the games and there's no recourse. It's a true free-for-all wild-west.
What we can learn from it is: 1. Making games easy to make and distribute. It's honestly amazing what kids are doing these days. I give Roblox a lot of credit for this. 2. Roblox has become an awesome way for kids to communicate with each other, they share their username at the playground.
I disagree that the games are mostly crap... I have 4 step kids who game, and 3 do on roblox a lot. Some of the games may be objectively poor, but they enjoy playing in them anyway, and some of them are spectacular.
I spent quite a few hours playing with them during the original UK lockdown,which was doubly good as I don't live with them so didn't see them for 3 months. In that time we "did" many things,including "going" to a theme park, and spent many hours exploring and seeing how bad I am at it. Without roblox we wouldn't have had that experience.
In terms of scams, I'd rather they learnt using their pocket money than their wages when they are older.
Yeah, like I said, there are some decent games, and the stuff that bubbles up to the top of the list are fine I guess, but if you ever try actually searching for a game you will find a cesspool of crap that doesn't work or barely works or is just stupid and all of these games have exactly the same name because there's no QC. 99.9% of the "games" in Roblox are unplayable.
"Theme Park Tycoon" is a Rollercoaster Tycoon clone that's really nice. It's pretty much single-player, but you can check out other players' theme parks which is very cool.
"Islands" is mostly a Minecraft ripoff but you're building air castles (you can fall off an "island" and die). This lets the kids do all kinds of invented in-game games, such as building an obstacle course for one another, playing hide and seek etc.
"Fishing Simulator" starts out as a pretty dull pirate-themed fishing game but turns out to have a lot of depth, adventure game style. It also has amazing content for Roblox standards.
"Build A Boat For Treasure" is a lot less fancy than the above, but it has a very cool concept. You design & build your own boat, then go sit in it, and take it through a river full of obstacles. The way you build it determines how it deals with the obstacles because when you sail away you can hardly navigate it anymore. So you need to design for robustness etc, which turns out to be pretty hard.
A lot of the games are shit, but also a lot of the games look shit but have super original ideas. Eg there's a game that you're in a building and then some disaster happens (tsunami, volcano eruption, whatever) which slowly destroys the building and whoever survives the longest in the collapsing building wins. I'm really not sure if that's a ripoff of anything, it strikes me as genuinely original. It's not very deep, but it's good fun.
"Roblox Ninja Warrior" - this was fun mostly because the kids could do the courses as they are better at moving than I am. However, they'd sometimes fall off, which is funnier.
"Famous Fashion" was funny - a theme is set and you have to dress up your character to suit, and then everyone votes. I thought I'd be bored in 5 minutes, played it for about 90.
"Universal Studios" was the theme park. Amazingly done.
"Pinewood Space Shuttle" was good fun - particularly if you fall off the shuttle while it's in orbit.
"Starcourt Mall" (Stranger Things) was nice to go there, as we've watched the series together.
"Ragdoll Engine" - as the name implies, just mucking about with the physics of your character.
"Epic Minigames" and "Lab Experiment" have small games in them and they were both pretty fun, plus you're playing against other people. I actually won a round, which the kids never expected, so I became a legend. For 38 seconds.
I don't disagree with you — Both theoretically and in reality where success means forking over your money to a massive corporation in order to shut your kids up. Do I sound cranky? :-)
But I have been learning Godot, and it makes creating games extremely easy and fun. And Godot now has https://gotm.io/, you can easily upload games there to be played in the browser. It's really amazing how simple this is.
I imagine that this could be the future of game creation and distribution. We used to have flash, then it went away, and now we'll have something much much cooler.
You've clearly forgotten what being a kid means. Any game kids want to spend
money on is inherently "good" and not "sh_t" according to the one metric that
matters: is it fun or not?
You've clearly forgotten how disappointing things can be when you're a kid. How you waited for Christmas or saved for weeks only to find the thing you got is garbage. I've heard plenty of stories about kids being absolutely gutted for not getting what they thought they were getting for virtual currency in Roblox and Minecraft.
That's also not mentioning how different aspects of a game can be fun or unfun. It could be that kids just want some item in aspirationally in a game but actually have no interest in playing the game itself. Much like how kids can have zero interest in the Pokemon card game but desperately crave spending $4 for the pleasure of 1 minute of unwrapping new cards.
That's also not factoring in the social pressure and envy kids feel when their friends talk about things they have.
> You've clearly forgotten how disappointing things can be
I must have because I don't remember being at all "gutted" when I obsessed
over the one $20-or-less item my parents allotted me each Christmas. This is
quite contrary to what I see amongst kids today who spend all of a couple
hours with their physical gifts and go right back to the Minecraft/Roblox
marathon.
My kids are so much happier on Minecraft because there's no built-in pay-money-to-get-better mechanism. Minecraft has a HUGE value in the price you pay to the amount of awesome gameplay you get. Even with Realms it's cheap compared to what you get out of it.
Well there's no beating Minecraft for value. Except you are aware that Roblox is a completely free game? Not all of the player-made content has PTW elements forced into it.
Except that in this case the vast majority of the money my kids have spent have been a huge failure. They expect something to work a certain way when they buy it and because of zero QC it doesn't and they end up losing their money and crying.
They are learning that the world is a cruel place and people are out to get them. (I'm only partially joking)
If you go for Roblox, I recommend using the parental controls to enable curated games only. It wasn't on by default for my <13 yo, which annoys me to no end. If you don't turn it on, you'll end up with your kids in games with freeform sketching and all sorts of questions you weren't planning to answer until later. :-)
It's run by a Christian org but to their credit they seem to be the only group that actually cares about what kids see and hear in movies and tv. And they cover the most popular movies and tv really quickly.
I had never hear of Roblox before today, but this comment makes me want to introduce my kids to it. If they blow all of their savings on it now, when their savings is like $50-$100, the lesson learned could save them blowing thousands of dollars of savings on similar scams later in life.
And it's full of scams. Kids spend $10 for a hat or something in the game and it doesn't end up working in all the games and there's no recourse. It's a true free-for-all wild-west.
What we can learn from it is: 1. Making games easy to make and distribute. It's honestly amazing what kids are doing these days. I give Roblox a lot of credit for this. 2. Roblox has become an awesome way for kids to communicate with each other, they share their username at the playground.