I was watching my 11 year old nephew play some game on Roblox, and he kept alt tabbing between the game and a black window full of text
I got closer, and sure enough, he had a window full of python code!
It turns out that Roblox had (has?) basically no anti-cheat measures built in, so you can download a hacking toolkit that gives you direct python control of all the game's memory
I told him that cheating is wrong and you're only cheating yourself of the satisfaction of a game well-played, and then walked him through using the toolkit to make a new cheat.
His popularity skyrocketed among his buddies after that, haha
I cheat all the time on roguelike games to avoid permadeath. Permadeath games are designed to be as massive of a time sink as possible.
"Oh, you invested 3 hours getting to level 8? Well, you died - start all the way from the beginning again and sink another 3 hours to have a few minutes of practicing level 8 before you die again..."
Screw that, I have a job and family, I don't have time to sink 100 hours to reach the end "legitimately" so I cheat and take away permadeath so that I can practice the endgame without the grind.
For example, I saved a backup copy of the temporary save file in Teleglitch[0] to allow me to start at the beginning of level if I die instead of the very beginning of the game, and as a result I could practice the later levels without having to grind through first levels over and over.
Imagine if you could only learn a piano piece by starting over from the beginning every time you mess up. It's absurd. The fastest way to master a piano piece is to practice the measure you are bad at until you have it down. I have no qualms cheating at video games that don't respect my time.
It's absolutely fair if cheating makes your gaming experience more enjoyable - feel free to! But rogue-likes/perma-death games are definitely not trying to waste your time. Many games focus on replay to enjoy the game in a different way, try a different strategy, discover a different aspect - you name it! See, for example, Faster Than Light: There are so many hidden aspects and pathways and possibilities to play the game; if you mastered it on the first try you probably would never think it's that great. Or see Dwarf Fortress: It's simply fun to find out how the castle is going to go down this time. Sure, it's sad when your homie-dwarves get slaughtered by a gold dragon, but it let's you move on. Making your castle invincible destroys the fun and removes the feeling of success when you master a large castle or fend of a dragon.
That's not to say your style is not okay - it's a single player game, do whatever you like! But I think "wasting time" or "absurd" is a blatant miss-characterization.
Sure. But I think we've all played games where you keep having to replay the part you've mastered over and over just to get to the part you haven't mastered.
It's like a multi-phase boss where you can do the first 2 phases with your eyes closed, but you die really fast on the 3rd phase because you haven't mastered it yet. The problem is when the first 2 phases take 10 minutes collectively. So basically you pay a time tax of 10 minutes, have a few precious seconds of practicing phase 3 before you die and have to pay another time tax. A lot of games (not just roguelikes) fall into this trap of having unavoidable time taxes.
Games that are conscious of time taxes like Guitar Hero, Celeste, Crypt of the Necrodancer, etc., usually give you some sort of "practice mode" where you can practice the part you are stuck on without paying the time tax. It's games that uncompromisingly force you to pay time taxes that I cheat at.
Similar for me and the wife in minecraft - /gamerule keepInventory true every time.
It’s not the kind of game I play for the challenge of staying alive, rather for the progression and development of base/gear/tech. Plus past mid game, there’s tools available to avoid death consequences anyway (totems etc).
Always gotta be careful in the use of cheats, mods, and game modifiers that the underlying challenges and enjoyment in the game aren't sucked out. But careful use can take away pointless grind and turn an impractical time sink into something that fits enjoyment into a smaller amount of free time.
This is also why I don’t let me son play roblox. The lack of oversight also means that their are lots of predators on there. I’ve seen kids basically being lured into virtual brothels and other nasty stuff.
And from what I can tell this flexibility isn’t going to change, since it’s what is making roblox so popular.
I can’t watch what my son is encountering in such a game every moment, so any online games for kids really need to have much better safety mechanisms.
Some more info, and you can also google roblox sex if you want to be disturbed.
As a former child of the internet, I can assure you that he will still do what he wants. When I was younger, my parents spontaneously decided to install a web filter which I bypassed in 5 minutes once it stopped being convenient to comply with it. I violated my screen time restrictions pretty much whenever I wasn't home. I became a better liar.
Kids are far craftier than you give them credit for, and even if you watched over your son's shoulder all day every day, I can assure you he would find a way to break your rules.
I'm personally of the persuasion that we're approaching this "internet safety" stuff from the wrong perspective. Why not teach your kids how to be responsible, set reasonable limitations (more expectations than limits), and discuss how they're using the internet in an open and honest way?
I got an impactful parenting tip from the Digimon movie, of all places. There was a moment in the story where a child had to go meet his friends to help save the world. His mother could tell that something was up, that the boy was being evasive, and she was pressuring him to tell him where he was going.
The grandfather stepped in, and said something to the effect of "stop pressuring the boy; you're obviously going to force him to lie to you, and that doesn't help either of you."
I'm not a parent so I'm not nearly invested enough to have put much into the problem, but having been a kid playing online games I have to wonder if you believe you can actually shield your kid from adult material anymore and if you can't then wouldn't it make more sense to just have some hard conversations and let the kid handle things as they come up?
Again, no judgement, I don't see optimal solutions here, just choosing the least worst option maybe.
I just can't imagine being a parent myself and feeling equipped to protect a child from adult material these days so it feels like the only viable alternative is to have adult conversations and enable the child to make decisions rather than the alternative of the child inevitably encountering adult situations and feeling the guilt/anxiety of having to hide that from their parents.
My nearly 7yo loves Minecraft too - both Java and Bedrock! He keeps asking me about Roblox but I've also heard of the whole monetizing thing and I keep telling him to stick to Minecraft as well.
My daughter is starting to use her Chromebook more and more independently. I'm very happy she's developing the skills, but also nervous about who and what she might encounter. I am convinced the danger is overblown by far, but seeing how trusting kids are I know I have to be safe rather than sorry. They think the world is a safe and good place and while it's much better in western countries than, say, India or Iraq, truth is that the world is a dangerous world for little girls everywhere. The internet takes away some of the physical aspects (direct bodily harm) but there's enough things that can happen to ruin your mind, psyche, life, and some abusers are skillful to even get victims to expose or harm themselves, setting up further harm for a lifetime (think of all the teenage girls who's photos are shared online for decades, with many of their friends having seen them, and with facial recognition this can all only get worse).
I'm less worried for the boys. I'm also less worried about the 'sex stuff' they might see (say, stumble upon erotica, porn, fetish porn, etc) as all those will come with time. I'm more worried about violence and /r/watchpeopledie kind of things. Imagine a seven or ten year old that can't sleep after watching Caspar or Moana, encountering a video of an innocent person being pushed in front of a train, or lynched, or ... It's absurd to me how that's legal on the US platforms that prudely censor every nipple...
But beyond this, there's a categorical difference to seeing something and being urged/pushed/forced into seeing it and the other person taking some perverse pleasure from it, as described by the previous poster. Goatse is disgusting but funny to some degree, but being lured into someone's virtual torture or rape den...?
It's like upskirt porn - totally uninteresting from the sexual perspective, its all about power, abuse, invading in the private sphere and mind of the victim. I don't want to expose my kids to that risk. The most previous thing I have in my world are my kids and especially their minds.
I want them to explore the digital, but the powers of abuse unleashed online - it's just incredible. From the random middle aged man paying for child rape in the Philippines or pretending to be a 12 year old boy and tricking kids into revealing their lives up to the abuse among classmates, friends and strangers - the internet is a damgerous place for kids. And I can manage and anticipate some risks for my kids. I dread what my daughters' friends will encounter when their only protection is a barely digitally literate single mom.
I've raised a boy and several girls in the internet age. I had your attitude from the get go. I wish I had been better educated and had done it different.
What I've learned raising children in the internet age is that boys are vulnerable during the formative years to porn addiction and the dopamine spiral that causes humans to seek harder stuff more often.
The girls are more susceptible to depression from social comparison through social media. There is a correlation, perhaps even a causation, with a drastic increase in suicide and self harm attempts of preteen and teen girls and the prevalence of social media consumption.
It shouldn't be too surprising that the formative years, when kids' brains are still developing and most vulnerable to impulse decisions, are formative for actual brain development through experience as well. It doesn't work to treat kids exactly like adults because they aren't as well equiped ad adults to handle adult situations.
Giving up on restrictions to experience and material during these formative years is, imo, like trying to teach children how to responsibly consume meth.
In my case, the answer is to tell them that there are some decisions that should absolutely wait until their prefrontal cortex is fully developed because of the developmental impact it has on them. Until then, there will be restrictions on certain things in this house under my roof.
I try to build a trust relationship that encourages them to be open and honest about what they've been exposed to do what I can help them navigate. And when we've calibrated wrongly, there's also therapy that had proven to be helpful for three of my six kids. It's also not cheap so I feel lucky that I'm able to afford the extra help when needed.
> I told him that cheating is wrong and you're only cheating yourself of the satisfaction of a game well-played
As a kid, cheating was often the only way I could actually play a game and enjoy it. It was cheating or not play at all. I used to play all kinds of games with printed walkthroughs.
Later when I got more proficient I needed cheats less and less and berated myself of using them.
Now as an adult I sometimes still "cheat", because it's not worth it cursing at the screen over and over for not finding that one solution to a puzzle. Or my kids get bored watching when I get stuck in a place for too long.
So no, for me cheating is not wrong. Cheating in online competitive games, thats a different story though.
Be careful - this was me back in the Diablo II days when I was in middle school. It's great because it got me into technology but the downside is it's extremely easy for kids to stumble upon a virus this way. Hopefully you have some safety measures in place.
Getting a virus on your (adult) personal computer can be a really big pain due to potentially forcing you into losing valuable data (tax records) or needing to sink a lot of time into recovery or reconfiguration; back up your data! For a kid I'd generally run with the assumption that they're going to software brick their computer at some point and just hope they don't overheat the computer in the process. Be prepared to reformat and reinstall operating systems, and, if you can, grab a cheapo computer dedicated to your young ones and keep them away from the "important things" computer.
There is alot of content to be potentially loss that could be important through out someone's life that aren't financial.
As an example there are basically no hard copies of photos and videos now so a kid could potentially lose any memory of their child hood they didn't share on a social network or that their parents didn't document for them.
Facebook encouraged uploading of full albums when it was popular but all of current tools heavily encourage curation to project an image or that for fun images are ephemeral.
There are tools that help mitigate this like dropbox and iCloud, but as far as I know they only save images taken on the device and not images sent to you.
I have been playing with lua game development with my kids (not getting too much interest right now - if dad likes the idea there must be something wrong) but the ability to see the code running sounds good - can you point me at any links?
I got closer, and sure enough, he had a window full of python code!
It turns out that Roblox had (has?) basically no anti-cheat measures built in, so you can download a hacking toolkit that gives you direct python control of all the game's memory
I told him that cheating is wrong and you're only cheating yourself of the satisfaction of a game well-played, and then walked him through using the toolkit to make a new cheat.
His popularity skyrocketed among his buddies after that, haha