As we all know, Roblox is garbage tier gameplay structured around psychological cues to get children to fill an endless pit with fake money bought with real money.
So I banned my kid from it. He used it a little bit socially with a few friends of his. What online or local multiplayer games should I help him to replace it with? (He’s 10, so please don’t recommend Diablo 4 or anything else that has quite that much gore)
He and his friends have an Xbox Series X|S at home.
Edit: keep your judgemental shit out of here. His whole social group (5 kids he knows from school) got banned on the same day. Me and the other parents are trying to be nice and replace it with better quality games so it isn’t just a punishment.
Edit2: Thanks guys. I got him Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge
For everyone saying OP should let their kid play Roblox and just ban spending money… just no.
Roblox exploits child labor for profit and they have terrible scummy business practices. If you have even marginal ethical qualms about child labor and/or capitalistic exploitation of vulnerable people, you should be keeping yourself and your family away from Roblox. In your mind they should be in the same category as multilevel marketing, crypto scams and door-to-door religion peddlers.
I actually think it’s fair to call them child predators. They’re exploiting kids for money instead of sexual gratification, but it’s the same power dynamic. Child exploitation is their business model.
My son just turned 6 and I was thinking of looking at the game (he really likes actual Lego, and his buddies are into Minecraft and Roblox), but another parent at a bday party a few weeks back asked if we played, and then warned my that I needed to keep a close eye on it, because the suggested games algo was pushing really sketch things to his daughter.
So I started looking and decided the shopping aspect was something I didn’t want to expose him to yet. But these revelations are making me glad we haven’t yet used it and never will.
This guy’s video could just as well be about foss development. Nearly every point has a direct parallel.
Nobody dangles a carrot of earning money in front of potential FOSS developers. Nobody goes into FOSS thinking they’re going to get a big payout.
FOSS is not pay-to-play. There’s no equivalent to Robux for FOSS developers.
FOSS developers are consenting adults who volunteer their time for freely distributed software projects, not kids creating content for a video game company that charges them for access and then makes a profit from their work.
This guy’s argument would literally be that Mario maker is encouraging child labor because it doesn’t pay kids who make levels in it.
That’s an entirely different thing, because Mario Maker doesn’t lure anyone with the bait of financial gain.
That’s horrible. These 10 year olds are learning programming and game design skills for nothing. Good thing THAT was nipped in the bud.
Intent makes a big difference. The value of Roblox as a platform and as a business is based on the work done by children to develop for it, and it was set up that way on purpose. They created an incentive model to encourage it.
Nintendo’s value as a company is not based on kids creating Mario Maker levels, nor does Nintendo push kids to do so with the promise of earning money.
Terraria, for something crafty-buildy with combat and very cartoony/2d blood and gore. 1-8 players.
Don’t Starve Together, survival crafting in a hand-drawn Tim Burton-esque style. 2-6 players.
Awesomenauts, 3v3 fast paced competitive game in the style of Saturday morning cartoons. 3-6 players.
Deep Rock Galactic, coop shooter where you play space dwarves and shoot bugs while doing missions together. Gore may be a bit strong for your liking, but it’s very stylized and only against bugs and robots. 1-4 players.
Risk of Rain 2, shooter where you try and escape a planet together with lots of different ways to play. 1-4 players.
Age of Empires 2, old school fast-paced medieval strategy game modernized with new graphics and such. 1-8 players.
Valheim, viking survival crafty buildy game in which you explore and conquer a dangerous world together. 1-10 players.
Cassette Beasts, technically not multi-player yet but they’re adding it as a free update January. It’s a Pokémon-esque game where you’ll all be trainers in the same overworld together capturing beasts and taking down challenges together. 1-8 players when it comes out.
All of these games are rated T for teen, but it sounds more like you’re opposed to M rated violence and language than T levels. They’re all also insular in that this friend group doesn’t need to involve other people to play together and can either play with or against each other or the computer.
Some really solid recommendations here. Thanks a ton. I’ve heard of Deep Rock Galactic but it didn’t pop into mind. And Risk of Rain 2 looks great.
I just want to avoid the porn games on steam, and any super-gory shit like dead space. I thought Diablo would be fun for him but it is a bit too much right now. It was different when super pixelated back in the D2 days.
I think there is a mod to allow more than 4 players in a session for Risk of Rain 2
The OP said that the friend group has Xboxes, and I assume that you can’t mod the games. I may be wrong though, I haven’t used an Xbox since the 360 and mostly game with the pc myself.
Self hosted Minecraft server for socializing. Mod the shit out of it
Factorio if you want your kid to have a severe addiction.
Red Alert 2 because I want the world to play it.
Ace Combat because it’s hype and plays well with a controller.
Bloons tower defense
I’m putting up a minecraft server for my kid and her friends, but I don’t really play myself other than than. Few creative builds so I’m curious if you could please expand for me what exactly you mean when you say to mod the shit out of it. Is it enough to create rules or am I going to have to actively moderate their play?
Minecraft / Terraria, 100%. Both games have available co-op, so they can play with their friends, and allow quite a bit of creative expression. Terraria is made by some of the best indie devs ever, if it helps, having been getting free updates for years, even though the devs said they had finished the game years ago.
For a more socially open experience, I could also recommend Sea of Thieves. It’s a game about manning a pirateship and collecting loot, where you can sometimes run into real people on their own adventures (or get your ship sunk by them, after all, they’re also pirates). There is co-op, too. A cash shop is available, but all items are strictly cosmetic, with many items available through gameplay alone.
Yeah I love Terraria. I’ll see if I can get his friends interested in it too. Heck I’ll buy them all copies for xmas.
You could try Dungeons and dragons. It could be fun for his friend group.
I wish someone had taught my friends and me how to play D&D when I was 10, but my parents were part of the “satanic panic” generation, and had zero interest in anything to do with fantasy or improv. Once you get out of highschool, finding a night that everyone can meet up for D&D gets exponentially harder, let alone finding someone who wants to put in the time to DM.
This!
My friend group would have thrived from something like that.
But our parents were always afraid of what we’d get up to in this very non-conceptual way, so instead we stayed close to home. And drank.
DnD is fantastic. I was planning to buy some campaign materials for xmas. Might as well get that started!
Oh yeah, DnD is a great idea, and if they aren’t into dragons (but who isn’t) there’s all kinds of variations of rpg games. Mutant Year Zero, Vaesen, Alien, Pathfinder, Starfinder, etc. The list goes on and on. And since you have mentioned you have a pc, you can use a virtual tabletop like Fantasy Grounds, for them to play where you don’t have to get them all together in the same room. I play a few different games each week with people I have only met in game. You could buy the FG Ultimate license for one pc, whomever is going to be the DM, and all the other kids could connect with the free beta license, and only the DM needs to own the books. Everyone else can just get on and read the manuals, or play the game with no expense.
Personally I have played dnd with those virtual tabletops and… they’re pretty bad. You spend about 3x as much time fiddling with it than you do playing. Plus you then get distracted by electronics when you should be getting into your character.
Dnd (and tabletop gaming in general) is really fun, but I can foresee problems when you try to replace the electronic gambling skinner box of Roblox with a game where the core features are math and imagination.
I’d say the main hangup with any tabletop game is availability. My family is already planning to do dnd sessions at home.
