I remember when my 7 year old got into it and the experience was amazingly similar ... then I found that the newly learnt swear words came from those videos. If it weren’t for the gratuitous language in the article too, I’d have loved to get him to read it!
Is that a problem? Swear words have their place in a language. You should explain when it’s appropriate and when not to use these words instead of pretending they don’t exist.
Should we teach our children about the history of mass murderers and millennia of crimes against humanity? What about the massive problems their generation will face, in geopolitical, environmental, and other problems?
Your logic, in a vacuum, makes sense... but most parents cherish the few years of their child’s innocence, and would prefer to avoid teaching them in 3rd grade that you think it can be appropriate to drop F bombs under certain logical conditions.
Moreover, opinions that start with “you should” are unlikely to convince your audience.
/endrant. Sorry your comment just struck me as rude lol.
Not sure what the question is here. We should absolutely teach them, at the appropriate age. Same argument as with swear words: They're going to learn about it anyway at some point.
You're misinformed if you think children above 1st graders have never heard the "f bomb." Also, what's the problem with them hearing a word? Can you explain how hearing an expressive curse word ruins your child's innocence? I mean, seriously, you sound like the type of parent that would never let their kid watch SpongeBob until their 16.
It's about use of the term being normalized. Children mimic the behaviour they observe. When they see people using curse words casually/often, they are less likely to see it as something to be avoided. This doesn't apply to all kids, but it does to some, hence the concern some parents have.
Yeah, but kids lack the ability to not have every other word be a swear word. And them becoming looked down on for their use of vulgar language isolates them and can become depressing.
So much this.
I was brought up being told swear words were the worst thing and never heard my parents utter a single one. All while classmates used them all the time.
All this did was cause me to use them all the time in literally every situation possible, outside of my parents earshot.
Now I'm almost 30 and I am still the most foul mouthed person I know. Its totally ingrained in me, I can't hold a conversation, a meeting, an interview, without swearing.
I played a lot of Mincraft as a teen and I have nothing but good things to say about the game.
It's very relaxing, you can be creative and explore and build, plus there's a whole depth of gameplay in Redstone circuits. The Pi edition also had Python scripting which was way too much fun.
I've not played the main verion since the release of 1.9 beta, and haven't followed the game closely.
But surely there are worse things for a child to be involved in?
It's tongue in cheek I think, and it reads to me like the parent is actually proud that his son is addicted to Minecraft instead of the comparatively mindless Fortnite.
I discovered Minecraft when I was 14 years old, back then it was the version 1.6 beta and I think it was one of the best discoveries of mine at the time. One of the most distinct features this game has in my opinion is the community it exposes you to, I had found early on a small server and the experience was really great, everyone was friendly and it was kind of like an mmorpg but you could build stuff! After some time the main reason I was playing it and was logging on the server is to talk with other players, with some of them I'm still talking, after almost 7 years of knowing them. I don't get the hate the Minecraft gets now as my experience was really great and it allowed me to develop my social skills and imagination.
I can see how you’re jumping to conclusions but I’m sure the original comment is a reference the widely acknowledged fact that women are more inclined to be interested in people rather than things.
"widely acknowledged" things can and often are very wrong
and doubling down on said wrongness reinforces it
I see how you subtly try to squirrel your opinion that women have certain biological inclinations towards modern social behaviors as a "fact", in phrenological style, but that's actually exactly what is being criticized here
As opposed to girls, really? Or are boys just more at risk of being very lightly tethered socially, or not grounded at all?
I played Ambermoon not just before school, but before breakfast, for months until I had completed it -- nothing got me out of bed like that game. But still, I just now went through the list of these 10 items again, and I honestly don't see my younger self in that, at all. Maybe I'm in denial, but I can't even think of social things I let go because of that, it was the other way around, I lost interest for a while during puberty, then my interest was re-kindled as I got bored of partying. If I wasn't spending so much time at computers, I would just be reading more, I'm pretty sure.
> The intellectual history of every genius is a series of obsessions.
Is that really true? Isn't that just calling doing things and having interests obsessions? I think Hannah Arendt was a genius for example, I'm not seeing the obsession though.
Every addiction can be called an obsession, but not every addiction an obsession.
Yeah well, and I vouched for your comment just to tell you that all you're saying with that is that you didn't like my comment, but have got nothing concrete to criticize, and didn't like the quotes in my bio either, but have nothing concrete there either. It's off-topic alright, but you're obviously offended, and obviously dreaming when you think you could offend me.
Even in a terrible thread, personal attacks have no business on Hacker News. You've been breaking the guidelines a whole lot, so we have to ask you to please re-read them and comment only civilly and substantively. We ban accounts that won't.
Flamebait routinely gets upvoted. That's one of the weaknesses of the voting system, and part of why a site like this needs moderation. It can't live by upvotes alone.
Sure, but how does that apply here? Someone reports a less than perfect experience with it, and that casually gets connected to "haters that exist".
Are you sure people despise things for being popular, that they don't just react to popular things more often and more strongly because popularity means you encounter them more often?
On the other hand, popularity does sadly imply a certain amount of identifying with and irrationally defending of something, which ironically adds to the hateworthyness of it. Not because it's to blame for the people who like it, but because it comes with the people who like it and their dividing of everything into fans or haters.
I didn't read Cubbic as calling the author a "hater". They were just observing that a lot of Minecraft hate exists.
If you hate a game and dismiss everyone who plays it just because some of its fans are annoying, you are being just as irrational and identity-obsessed as the fans that piss you off.
So it doesn't apply here. But the "unrelated positive anecdote" and "unrelated observation 'Minecraft hate' exists" (without any indication what they mean with that, your guess is as good as mine) both are in "response" to this article.
My 8 year old hates Fortnite because that's the only game YouTubers want to talk about anymore. He, too, is obsessed with Minecraft and the number of videos out in recent months has definitely dwindled.
>I don't get the hate the Minecraft gets now as my experience was really great
My experience with minecraft was when notch was on /v/, and my dislike of the game is how notch basically has/had no idea what he was doing. He accidentally stumbled into a good formula, and arbitrarily followed community requests with no real plan, destroyed any interesting aspect of survival mode, until it became that creative held all popularity, and then the whole game slowly became a lego building-maker, with a thin veneer of survival on top (mostly amounting to a random sudden death, but otherwise completely ignorable once you figure out the main enemies). As /v/ got fed up with his constant hiatuses, he moved over to reddit and I quit paying attention.
But the game early on had a lot of potential, and it was mostly wasted. Its only notable aspect is an addictive feedback loop, and online play, at this point.
It has more wasted potential in it than spore — impressively disappointing.
And it got so close to something fruitful that it ruined any game that actually does attempt a proper survival mode — they’ve all become minecraft clones, or minecraftlikes, and cant escape the perpetual black hole of its name. Even now the genre of survival-building-sim is only just getting back onto its feet, but it’ll remain crippled probably for at least another decade
surely there are dozens of mods that can scratch the survival game itch. this sounds like some weird post facto hating it because its popular thing to me.
My main point is that its not a very good game. Anything about popularity is simply that survival games in general were ruined by minecraft’s popularity, in the same fashion that iphones ruined smartphones (all phones must now compare against it, and no phones can fall too far from it). But at least with iphones, it was actually a decent product to black hole around. But thats just how extreme popularity works. FF did it to jrpgs, FE did it to trpgs, cod did it to fps multiplayer, wow did it to mmos, dnd did it to tabletop rpgs, etc. In some cases they were genre-defining, but regardless, their impact on the genre lasts years, if not decades
But as long as we’re making arbitrary assumptions.. I don’t think I’ve ever actually met someone who “hated something because it was popular”, but I’ve met people who’ve accused it, and I’ve met people who think popularity implies quality, and I’m pretty sure there’s a correlation between the two, and I’ve currently got the feeling you’ve fallen prey to the same mistaken thinking.
But the to breaking that mindset with minecraft is this: multiplayer is a hack, that leads people to think a game is fun, when in fact its socialization thats fun, and the game is just a medium for it. The two are conflated, but I’m only trying to talk about the game.
You can take any game with little merit (see: habbo hotel, nearly any mmo, runescape, maplestory, most fps games, etc), add multiplayer to it, gather a community by external means (marketing, the natural social feedback loop, accessibility, etc), a semi-addictive feedback loop, and produce something that, years later, people will say: I had a lot of memories there, and it was great.
But it wasn’t great because the game was worth a damn in any sense a game is worth caring about. It was great because dealing with a group of friends in almost any situation can be made fun. Be it sports, games, drinking, causing trouble, working, etc.
You don’t need a good game to enjoy it, especially when its multiplayer. But simply being enjoyable is not sufficient to call it a good game (marvel films can keep your interest for two hours, but its difficult to argue that they’re good as films. They’re just good enough to talk about a little bit, and really only plot-wise, and kill two hours.)
Ofc, thats not to say multiplayer implies a game is bad. But it can certainly make up for it, by a long shot. It can be a really effective hack.
And to be clear, I had a lot of such good memories (runescape, maplestory, LoL, PoE were mine). But as games, they aren’t worth talking about. The primary value I derived from them was socialization, and an extension of that, economics/haggling. But in their own mechanics and styles, each had superior predecessors and successors, and were totally unnotable in that regard. But those other games weren’t where I had/made my friends.
It's really sad to see such a trite "kids are obsessed with video games" article on coming from ArsTechnica. What's especially irritating is how he admits to dropping out of medical school due to playing video games but insinuates that Minecraft is the root cause of his child's issues because it's more advanced. These moral panics started with Space Invaders in the 1980's [0]!
Any "addiction" without a strong physical component (alcohol, weed, sex, video games, etc.) is often just an outgrowth of an underlying mental health disorder. But since stigma is attached to mental health disorders, we are very quick to blame anything else. Unlike video games, it appears parents haven't gotten any smarter in past 40 years.
> these virtual worlds are training camps for the youth, preparing them for the day when the planet becomes uninhabitable
More likely, they train them to ensure the planet will become uninhabitable. I mean, Minecraft itself is fine, compared to most games it's great even -- but watching Minecraft videos on YouTube, that's what I'd curate heavily, that's what I'd watch like a hawk, where I'd make triple sure the communication lines are open.
I've long subscribed to a theory that they were being trained for something else entirely:
Microsoft bought Minecraft for the interface, and were using the game to train the workforce of the future, seeing its interactions as an ideal input method for some data-mining-type activities.
> Already feeling disillusioned with his place in the studio, the recent EULA situation was the final straw. Mojang was changing its EULA to better protect its players from exploitative servers, a real problem in the Minecraft community, and the internet “exploded with hate” towards Notch for a situation he says he “had nothing to do with.”
> Which is when he tweeted:
> > Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.
I could have totally understood Notch just wanting some FU money and/or being bored of Minecraft, but that he actually might have enjoyed working on it rather than selling to Microsoft, that sucks. Unless he's just blaming the community for something he wanted to do anyway (and I see no reason to assume that), this is something the Minecraft community did to itself.
I don't know what game changes are down to Microsoft, and right now the Java Edition is still fine, but I wouldn't exactly be shocked if Microsoft dropped free modding in favour of https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Marketplace at some point.
But that's of course speculation, so in the present, why I do find it sad is simply because of Microsoft... at least in my books, Notch making Minecraft out of nowhere was cool, Microsoft owning Minecraft isn't really.
I have multiple kids still playing Minecraft. Ages from 15 down to 8. They tried fortnite and didn’t like it as much. They really like building things and exploring.
The only game to pull them away...Breath of the Wild.
Exactly the same here with my 4 nephews (into minecraft, distracted by breath of the wild for a bit, then back to minecraft) with one exception: they're also into all things lego.
My niece, which is the same age as two of the nephews, is far more into her dolls than video games. Although, she does like the occasional game of mario kart or kirby and the rainbow curse.
Recently Fortnite also seems to be sporting a creative mode (where you can build without fighting/death), and support for custom-made games with custom rules. So maybe Fortnite can also be a creative outlet like Minecraft...
I believe that's actually the original fortnite. The story I heard is that all the "Battle Royale" stuff was patched in as a side project by a few devs, then quickly overtook the "real" game in popularity.
Notably, "Battle Royale" is available on iPad and Switch which presumably captures the younger/more casual kids. "Save the World" however is not available on iPad or Switch.
As much as I don't understand the obsession with minecraft/fornite (prefer CSGO, etc), especially with really young kids, a trend that I find that could be comforting for worried parents is that these games are (generally) based on building things and being a bit creative. I think this trend will continue.
I think we all can forget as adults just how much these games, or any other fun activity can draw us in like no other. More so than I have experienced as an adult.
The imagination runs wild in creative environments, especially when you can do it with friends.
My youngest child was obsessed with Minecraft. To the point I decided to check it out, ended up running a server where he and I and my two adult children could play. This lasted a year or so, before they moved to Fortnite. I joined them. I'm a good shot but can't keep up with the end-game build battles. Point is, games come and go. My kid and your kid is no better or worse for liking any particular game at any time. Just know it's coming...and going and enjoy it while you can.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadI saw one instance of a censored swearing expression
Thatll still get you a PG rating, for reference
Your logic, in a vacuum, makes sense... but most parents cherish the few years of their child’s innocence, and would prefer to avoid teaching them in 3rd grade that you think it can be appropriate to drop F bombs under certain logical conditions.
Moreover, opinions that start with “you should” are unlikely to convince your audience.
/endrant. Sorry your comment just struck me as rude lol.
All this did was cause me to use them all the time in literally every situation possible, outside of my parents earshot.
Now I'm almost 30 and I am still the most foul mouthed person I know. Its totally ingrained in me, I can't hold a conversation, a meeting, an interview, without swearing.
I played a lot of Mincraft as a teen and I have nothing but good things to say about the game.
It's very relaxing, you can be creative and explore and build, plus there's a whole depth of gameplay in Redstone circuits. The Pi edition also had Python scripting which was way too much fun.
I've not played the main verion since the release of 1.9 beta, and haven't followed the game closely.
But surely there are worse things for a child to be involved in?
What "hate"? The author describes his son showing signs of addiction, and ends up laughing it off.
Thankfully girls, poor smooth-brained things that they are, don't have to deal with the issue of passion, or genius, right?
and doubling down on said wrongness reinforces it
I see how you subtly try to squirrel your opinion that women have certain biological inclinations towards modern social behaviors as a "fact", in phrenological style, but that's actually exactly what is being criticized here
As opposed to girls, really? Or are boys just more at risk of being very lightly tethered socially, or not grounded at all?
I played Ambermoon not just before school, but before breakfast, for months until I had completed it -- nothing got me out of bed like that game. But still, I just now went through the list of these 10 items again, and I honestly don't see my younger self in that, at all. Maybe I'm in denial, but I can't even think of social things I let go because of that, it was the other way around, I lost interest for a while during puberty, then my interest was re-kindled as I got bored of partying. If I wasn't spending so much time at computers, I would just be reading more, I'm pretty sure.
> The intellectual history of every genius is a series of obsessions.
Is that really true? Isn't that just calling doing things and having interests obsessions? I think Hannah Arendt was a genius for example, I'm not seeing the obsession though.
Every addiction can be called an obsession, but not every addiction an obsession.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'll be more wary in the future...
Are you sure people despise things for being popular, that they don't just react to popular things more often and more strongly because popularity means you encounter them more often?
On the other hand, popularity does sadly imply a certain amount of identifying with and irrationally defending of something, which ironically adds to the hateworthyness of it. Not because it's to blame for the people who like it, but because it comes with the people who like it and their dividing of everything into fans or haters.
If you hate a game and dismiss everyone who plays it just because some of its fans are annoying, you are being just as irrational and identity-obsessed as the fans that piss you off.
And, yes, I've seen that happen a lot.
My experience with minecraft was when notch was on /v/, and my dislike of the game is how notch basically has/had no idea what he was doing. He accidentally stumbled into a good formula, and arbitrarily followed community requests with no real plan, destroyed any interesting aspect of survival mode, until it became that creative held all popularity, and then the whole game slowly became a lego building-maker, with a thin veneer of survival on top (mostly amounting to a random sudden death, but otherwise completely ignorable once you figure out the main enemies). As /v/ got fed up with his constant hiatuses, he moved over to reddit and I quit paying attention.
But the game early on had a lot of potential, and it was mostly wasted. Its only notable aspect is an addictive feedback loop, and online play, at this point.
It has more wasted potential in it than spore — impressively disappointing.
And it got so close to something fruitful that it ruined any game that actually does attempt a proper survival mode — they’ve all become minecraft clones, or minecraftlikes, and cant escape the perpetual black hole of its name. Even now the genre of survival-building-sim is only just getting back onto its feet, but it’ll remain crippled probably for at least another decade
But as long as we’re making arbitrary assumptions.. I don’t think I’ve ever actually met someone who “hated something because it was popular”, but I’ve met people who’ve accused it, and I’ve met people who think popularity implies quality, and I’m pretty sure there’s a correlation between the two, and I’ve currently got the feeling you’ve fallen prey to the same mistaken thinking.
But the to breaking that mindset with minecraft is this: multiplayer is a hack, that leads people to think a game is fun, when in fact its socialization thats fun, and the game is just a medium for it. The two are conflated, but I’m only trying to talk about the game.
You can take any game with little merit (see: habbo hotel, nearly any mmo, runescape, maplestory, most fps games, etc), add multiplayer to it, gather a community by external means (marketing, the natural social feedback loop, accessibility, etc), a semi-addictive feedback loop, and produce something that, years later, people will say: I had a lot of memories there, and it was great.
But it wasn’t great because the game was worth a damn in any sense a game is worth caring about. It was great because dealing with a group of friends in almost any situation can be made fun. Be it sports, games, drinking, causing trouble, working, etc.
You don’t need a good game to enjoy it, especially when its multiplayer. But simply being enjoyable is not sufficient to call it a good game (marvel films can keep your interest for two hours, but its difficult to argue that they’re good as films. They’re just good enough to talk about a little bit, and really only plot-wise, and kill two hours.)
Ofc, thats not to say multiplayer implies a game is bad. But it can certainly make up for it, by a long shot. It can be a really effective hack.
And to be clear, I had a lot of such good memories (runescape, maplestory, LoL, PoE were mine). But as games, they aren’t worth talking about. The primary value I derived from them was socialization, and an extension of that, economics/haggling. But in their own mechanics and styles, each had superior predecessors and successors, and were totally unnotable in that regard. But those other games weren’t where I had/made my friends.
Any "addiction" without a strong physical component (alcohol, weed, sex, video games, etc.) is often just an outgrowth of an underlying mental health disorder. But since stigma is attached to mental health disorders, we are very quick to blame anything else. Unlike video games, it appears parents haven't gotten any smarter in past 40 years.
0: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1981/may/...
I'd say addiction is viewed just as poorly if not worse. Like anything, I guess it depends on who you're asking.
More likely, they train them to ensure the planet will become uninhabitable. I mean, Minecraft itself is fine, compared to most games it's great even -- but watching Minecraft videos on YouTube, that's what I'd curate heavily, that's what I'd watch like a hawk, where I'd make triple sure the communication lines are open.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=minecraft+monst...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=minecraft+learn...
Microsoft bought Minecraft for the interface, and were using the game to train the workforce of the future, seeing its interactions as an ideal input method for some data-mining-type activities.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/minecraft/notch-selling-minecraft-m...
> Already feeling disillusioned with his place in the studio, the recent EULA situation was the final straw. Mojang was changing its EULA to better protect its players from exploitative servers, a real problem in the Minecraft community, and the internet “exploded with hate” towards Notch for a situation he says he “had nothing to do with.”
> Which is when he tweeted:
> > Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.
I could have totally understood Notch just wanting some FU money and/or being bored of Minecraft, but that he actually might have enjoyed working on it rather than selling to Microsoft, that sucks. Unless he's just blaming the community for something he wanted to do anyway (and I see no reason to assume that), this is something the Minecraft community did to itself.
But that's of course speculation, so in the present, why I do find it sad is simply because of Microsoft... at least in my books, Notch making Minecraft out of nowhere was cool, Microsoft owning Minecraft isn't really.
The only game to pull them away...Breath of the Wild.
My niece, which is the same age as two of the nephews, is far more into her dolls than video games. Although, she does like the occasional game of mario kart or kirby and the rainbow curse.