Norion said:
SvennoJ said:
Yep this exactly. My youngest is always on Roblox, it's his way to play / stay in touch with his nephew and now also other local friends. However Roblox is basically 99% gambling simulators, making numbers grow, opening loot boxes.
He's not allowed to spend any Robux on MTX so he's found all kinds of ways to play the system, mostly with ever more complex macros doing the 'playing' for him while he does something more productive / interesting. I don't if that kind of ingenuity is good or not (not good for the environment anyway). But his friends do it too and so they can keep up with the MTX players... You either pay with money or time.
He has plenty real games to play on Steam plus he can play anything out of my physical game library of over thousand games. But he's gen alpha, grown up with you tube and streamers all encouraging those games. I can tell him how good a game is but he'll take YouTube's word over mine every time, depressing lol. He used to play on his Switch Lite, but since he got a PC he hasn't touched the Switch anymore.
It's mostly the communication part of playing on PC vs Switch. He's always on Discord with his friends. And of course the TV is on as well, Gen Alpha can't do one thing at a time, secondary (sometimes tertiary) screen required while also talking to friends. And that rules out games that actually require your full attention...
It's not just Roblox of course, Path of Exile (2) is the same thing once you reach the end game. End game just being a word for stick around and gamble after finishing the actual game. At least Roblox crap is not as addictive as Everquest, WoW, Diablo etc can be. Those are real dangerous time sinks. At least with Roblox it's always a new game, new macros to make, flavor of the day/week. But it's definitely grooming kids to think of gaming as opening loot boxes :/ |
At least he'll know how to use a PC. Many kids and teens are completely hopeless with that nowadays due to only using touch screen devices. I'm still on the young side at 27 but am old enough to where I didn't get my first smartphone till I was 15 so I thankfully used laptops growing up instead of those. |
A lot of jobs are also moving to tablets rather than PCs/laptops. When digital charting started in health care, it was laptops. Now, all the EMRs I use are primarily adapted for tablets. Although writing a narrative note or an email on a touch screen is a huge pain in the ass, and they don't always provide keyboard covers for tablets.
