Of course it would be all grandstanding and nothing will be fixed, but I am really surprised they are missing out on "owning" one of the more shady tech companies.
…instead I dragged out a bunch of old Xbox 360/One games and let him enjoy a world free of microtransactios, casino inspired skill trees and loot boxes, and weird sex predators.
At first he resisted, then he fell in love with Portal and Command and Conquer and forgot about Roblox.
I feel bad for kids now that are just getting sucked into these engagement hacked “games”. No fun.
I keep reading all these problems regarding gaming, but what people forget to include is that all these problems are about *multiplayers gaming*.
There is a whole giant universe of single player games out there that's beautiful and free from dark patterns. And a small universe of couch coop games.
Roblox arguing that it's not exploitative is a reasonable thing (I don't agree, but it's not a ridiculous argument). Arguing that it's a "gift" when they're taking a 75% cut is just offensive.
So many years wasted in school not paying attention because no interest in given subjects at the time. But since they didn't pay me, it wasn't technically "exploitation".
There's very little in school that isn't directly applicable. Like, not even just "it's good to be a well-rounded human", but you can literally directly apply almost everything you learn to your craft.
It seems like you are implying the reason we do stuff is to make money, or at least the main motivating factor for you, or you believe it is for most people.
I started working in a factory when I was about 13 casually, and by 14 I was putting in enough hours for my technical apprenticeship.
During those years I did get paid, and I was thankful for it, but I definitely wasn't doing it for the money, and I was still going to school and then to college in parallel.
I'm sure things are different these days. It just makes me sad to think personal progress is somehow conflated with earning money.
With regard to the article. I think given what we know about social networks and young minds, it's already been shown to be a toxic mix. Getting kids on the capitalistic treadmill so young seems extremely cynical and it really does concern me.
Sure, they get value out of it (I guess?) but the platform makes money off of it, and the creator does not.
Roblox could work that way too, and if kids today are anything like kids when I was one, there would still be a ton of content created regardless of compensation.
I think it's good that Roblox pays out. They don't have to.
But I'd never be stupid enough to call it a "gift" in the presence of a reporter. Where was the PR minder??
Not if you can't get past the 50-step impossible Arkose captchas they show to third-world countries, ones that require you to actually be a robot to get past them with 0 mistakes.
They're also intentionally blocking Linux support, which is growing fast in the global south due to the growing hardware demands of Windows. They allowed Linux for a while, but now they want people to run their new kernel-level anticheat
https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-studio-boss-children-making...
Ideological consistency is difficult.
[1] To be fair, my belief in this may also come from the Christian background of Europe.
BTW the lesson plan for chocolate asks students to design a new chocolate bar. Choose the ingredients and design a wrapper. The students/players can then vote on their favorite design etc.
[1] https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teaching-resources/teachi...
For children in the developed world their Roblox earnings are likely non-essential. If they don't want to work on Roblox mods, or whatever they do, then they just won't. Forcing your child to work on Roblox would be straightforward abuse same as any other kind of abuse.
For children in the developing world - perhaps there are some for whom Roblox development is mandatory. But, would that child be better off if we deprived them of Roblox? Wouldn't they just work somewhere else in worse conditions in a career with less of a future?
I don't see why kids earning money from Roblox is bad. The efforts to criticize it strike me as pattern matching. Child labor = children working in coal mines or as chimney sweeps = bad. Kids making Roblox games for fun is child labor therefore kids making Roblox games is bad. Doesn't strike me as a compelling argument.
> Third-party developers on Roblox are paid in Robux, the platform’s in-game currency
> user can buy 1,000 Robux for $12.50 but can cash out 1,000 Robux for just $3.50
> 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now with just a laptop, I can create something, make money
> we wanted to be a resource for legislators as they start thinking about laws
Probably there are already laws, but by my side there is even something of greater value than those laws, and it tells me that you're a piece of shit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_Acts
As for revoking children's right to toil, it took a lot longer.
I think one the problems is that it's quite difficult to identify where a child is choosing to "work", and where a child has been coerced into the activity. There's a reason why we have a concept of ages of consent, where a child cannot consent to certain things, because their brain has failed to develop sufficiently yet in order to either understand the implications of their choices, or to understand whether this is actually their choice, or one that has been bestowed upon them.
Yes.
> The efforts to criticize it strike me as pattern matching. Child labor = children working in coal mines or as chimney sweeps = bad. Kids making Roblox games for fun is child labor therefore kids making Roblox games is bad.
Only if it really is something the child is doing for fun. In many cases, I don't believe it is. Please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ. I apologize for linking a relatively lengthy video, but this one really shaped how I feel about Roblox.
This is in fact the same basis for why we ban children working as chimney sweeps. I'm sure many children do have fun sweeping chimneys on occasion—I can certainly remember a time when I thought it was fun to wash windows—but add payment to the mix and it generally devolves into something else.
But is it really so clear that a child not working is somehow a better outcome than a child not being hungry and being able to provide shelter for themselves?
A 12-Year-Old Sued Roblox and WON https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dff7sHUzDww
There is a girl in my neighborhood who is constantly making and selling things door to door. I've bought a bracelet, cookies, and slime from her. Is this wrong? She's probably 10-12 years old and, I assume, earning less than minimum wage. Should I call the police? Child protective services? Do we need a law to stop her from doing this?
I would say that it isn't wrong for children to do things like this. It's behavior driven by the child that isn't harmful and might be beneficial. Why should you want to stop that? Same logic applies to Roblox.
This entire economy is unnecessary. I love that roblox allows anyone to learn/make/distribute, but the f2p nature of the game makes it slimy in a way that others are not.
Being able to make money, especially as a kid would've been ultimate compliment or appreciation to me. Anyone can say kind words, "good job", but if I make money, somehow what I do is actually valuable to other people. Obviously, especially amazing if it is something that I am passionate about, and skilled at. I don't believe this about most people, neither do I disbelieve it, I'm just talking from how I would've felt as a kid. And certainly many of my friends. It would've highly developed my self-confidence.
> With regard to the article. I think given what we know about social networks and young minds, it's already been shown to be a toxic mix. Getting kids on the capitalistic treadmill so young seems extremely cynical and it really does concern me.
I think there are actually much worse things to worry about. If you want to worry about child exploitation, then indeed worry about factory workers who are forced into those conditions, making shoes, but not about kids who are able to use their creativity to provide value because they love doing that.
That being said, if a child is doing labour for a company (in this case Roblox, but the same could be said for Instagram, Tiktok, etc.), why is it considered more ethical to NOT pay that child for their work?
I know an argument could be made that adding financial incentives encourage more kids to participate in said child labour, but NOT paying them doesn't dissuade them from doing so.
And how is Roblox's practice different from the creator funds of social media sites that rely on user-generated content to justify their existence? It's all very murky to me.
I think my problem with this model is Roblox taking such a large cut from their workforce, not that they pay them at all.
It's great you want to culture your kids. But many bright young individuals grew up without any of that.
There's also a ton of studies that show video games help with problem solving cognition, so I'd be curious your thoughts on that.
What percentage of kids do you think make Roblox mods?
What percentage of those modders do it for money?
Does Roblox provide childcare, lunch, physical education, face-to-face interaction, enforced time structures and social hierarchies, and/or extracurricular activities?
I honestly do not believe they're remotely comparable. They serve such drastically different purposes it feels like comparing baseball to banking. We might be able to call one better, but I believe which one will vary wildly between kids.
I haven't actually tried playing Roblox or researching it, so I don't know about the percentages, but I'm mainly speaking about the idea of using creativity, to create fun games you enjoy creating and the end results being:
a) other people are playing what you created
b) you get paid (even if in small amounts) for what you created
Would have been amazing for my otherwise low self esteem childhood.
I don't know or have thought enough about what the perfect way to educate kids would be.
I just don't appreciate an article jumping on a company that to me seems to reward creativity, because of some odd understanding of moral truths like Corp = Evil and Children receiving money = Evil.
Which in many cases IT really could be like child factory workers in cases where they are forced to do that due to economical circumstances, having no other options.
But I don't know about the company enough. Maybe they are truly evil. Maybe this article is just wrong about the delivery, but Roblox is evil.
I disagree even though math was my favourite subject in the school. I think I truly only enjoyed math and physics. They were the only subjects I felt like I could actually problem solve and not have to memorise facts I can't relate to or do not know what to do with. But really the maths taught at school also seemed like not really related to creativity, but more like memorise this formula => rote practice with this formula, on and on from there. While if it was about game dev, or programming, it would've been more about learning to problem solve in a bit more creative ways.
> Every good game designer cribs extensively from history and literature.
This highly depends on the game, the designer and multitude of different factors. I despised history when I was in school, but now that I've got older I've grown natural interest towards it which has allowed me to learn it with magnitudes higher effectiveness compared to when I was a child. Without my own life, and trying my own things, I didn't have interest in history, because I hadn't lived, so I didn't have anything to relate it to. I was clueless about people's motivations in history. It was just a compilation of random facts that I was forced to learn. Understanding people, their motivations, goals is the most important part of history, and without understanding those aspects, I just don't understand how I could be interested in history enough to not think of it as random facts.
Why do you disagree though? Math is helpful in game design for: pathfinding, vector math, several graphics effects, physics, smoothing animations, setting up in game currencies, setting up probabilistic gameplay elements, random number generation, terrain generation, calculating enemy field of views, calculating trajectories, creating player controllers, and many other logic pieces in games.
If you want to be a good game designer, it would behoove you to have a strong math background.
What you need is motivation, passion and creativity to achieve a certain goal. It's not a prerequisite to have a strong math background to be able to create a game.
All of these things can be Googled - and even easier nowadays ChatGPT can help you out with learning those things without this type of background required.
Especially as a kid.
I wish I had something like Roblox as a kid. What I used to do was I drew on papers like a story game where different decisions led you to different next set of papers, because I didn't have a computer and/or no one taught me actual coding.
When did you go to school? I think we do a lot better nowadays. As much as people dislike e.g. Common Core, this complaint—a focus on rote algorithms instead of the concepts behind them—was a major reason for the changes.
It is unclear to me whether it is better nowadays, but times are changing quickly, it is hard to even predict future, or future jobs presently, so I think I honestly would be more stressed now if I hadn't set my life, career up, as I was able to do when I was younger.
I just remember school strictly as torture, and my real life beginning when I was able to do actual work and career, that developed my confidence because I was able to achieve real world success at something I naturally enjoy doing.
No point in dwelling on the past, but since we are having this topic, I still would like to question about all the wasted years in the youth.
I think when I started out, it probably was much easier to get coding jobs without any experience, compared to now, so if I was in present time, it would have been much more difficult for me, because ultimately due to all the difficulties I had a very non standard route of getting where I am.
The grandparent comment was talking about how all the different subjects in school can help give you very useful prerequisite knowledge that enables you to become a strong game developer. You made it sounds as if the math isn’t necessary, but I think we both agree knowing math will aid you tremendously in game development. You don’t need to know it to start developing games, but somebody that already has that knowledge will be leagues ahead of you in a lot of topics.
Heck, even the simplest data structure in almost every game engine a Transform (aka transformation matrix) is a loaded mathematical term. The guy that understands linear algebra and how you can combine a series of matrices to apply different kinds of transformations to a geometric object will “get it” way quicker than somebody who has no math knowledge. Then, when they want to do fancier stuff, like transform something relative to something else (like a custom 3rd person camera that hovers above and behind the main character), they don’t have to waste time trying to understand how linear algebra and using matrix multiplication can achieve that effect.