Should parents worry about Minecraft?

[Breakdown]

BBC article about the the potential parent troubling perils of Minecraft.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32051153

My favourite bit -

Even Joe, on his well-ordered server, has had his property stolen by a Russian member. He doesn't know where his stuff went, but suspects it was disposed of in molten lava. When parents think of online bullying, they probably don't think of hard-earned virtual property being trashed, or their children being digitally mugged.

Throwing things in molten lava, the perfect crime.

 

[Here Comes Tomorrow]

I wish I could throw my friends stuff into lava when I was a kid.

 

[baddude1337]

A pretty amusing read, given the things people were complaining about were things, as parents, they should be governing. And the writer totally shrugged off the comment about looking at what they are making, which is the entire point Minecraft..

 

[Danny Dowling]

Minecraft, although I'm personally not into it, is a great tool for flexing creativity and should be used to positively engineer a hard working ethic, especially within younger players.

However, to have those efforts digitally destroyed and wasted away is not only bullying (which is a very negative thing and not good for confidence etc.) but it's also not a good way to show how things end up when they're given due care and time. It teaches bad life lessons. Would be nice if Russians didn't come along and ransack their hard work and drop their things in lava, it could genuinely negatively impact the persons perspective of the world.

But yeah pretty much all of this article is just another witch hunt lol

 

[CritialGaming]

I'm in the camp of letting children do what interests them, so long as it has a positive background to it. Video gaming, drawing, writing, photography, whatever, all should be encouraged. The problem is that people are more willing to let their kids zone out in a video game so long as they are quite and don't come bothering anybody.

Really though, parents should take part in these activities and games with their kids. Join your kids in Minecraft and build something together. Promote healthy creativity and teamwork collaboration. Plus it counts as that pesky quality time kids seem to grow into decent humans when they get enough of it.

Also if little Timmy wants to build a dick anyway you can at least show him how to build it properly.

 

[Erttheking]

Well yeah they should be worried. That shit is like crack. Or to quote Penny Arcade "Like giving someone everything you need to make crack, which honestly I think is worse"

On a more serious note, not unless they're freaking Amish!

 

[Treeberry]

The last I heard about it Minecraft is on its way to getting banned in Turkey. Apparently it encouraged violence in children. This coming from the same country where the guy in charge also wanted to ban women from laughing in public and claims the American moon landing never happened.

Seriously, what happened Turkey? You used to be cool.

(Is it just me or does it seem like more legitimately scary not-fun crazy people are either in power or gaining power more these days?)

Anyway, this reminds me of how Runescape (yeah, yeah) actually helped me with maths when I was a kid through the ingame economy and crafting system.

 

[L. Declis]

Oh, Psychic Taco, you crazy... No, it's the Onion... no, it's the BBC.

Bloody hell.

I suppose if Turkey has banned it, it must be worth worrying about. Imagine if these parents were confronted with Lego? Or the arguments that Poke'mon cards used to have?

 

[SneakyBastard]

Parents should be afraid of minecraft if they are afraid of not giving enough attention to their kids. Parents that don't have time for their kids because they're playing games is not good. I saw it in several households in my life. Don't be that person!

 

[MHR]

Parents should definitely be afraid of minecraft. Their kids might beat them to the child-locks on all their entertainment sources and set the passwords to minecraft references that only the kids themselves would know. Then it's a whole process of having to actually learn about what their kids are doing in order to unravel that whole mess.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Parents should definitely be afraid of minecraft. Their kids might beat them to the child-locks on all their entertainment sources and set the passwords to minecraft references that only the kids themselves would know. Then it's a whole process of having to actually learn about what their kids are doing in order to unravel that whole mess.

Great South Park reference!

OT: Not really. Minecraft is about creativity. What they should do is find that Russian jerk and sue him in real life for emotional damages, along with banning him from the server. Really what needs to be done is for servers to use daily snapshots to restore stuff to prevent these kinds of things from happening. The only time Minecraft could become potentially harmful is if the kid is ditching school to play it all day every day. Still... If we take Yahtzee as an example this could spur the kid into game development and give him/her a potentially great career in the future. So it's up to the parent and this moral panic stuff needs to stop.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

Even Joe, on his well-ordered server, has had his property stolen by a Russian member. He doesn't know where his stuff went, but suspects it was disposed of in molten lava. When parents think of online bullying, they probably don't think of hard-earned virtual property being trashed, or their children being digitally mugged.

Throwing things in molten lava, the perfect crime.

The horror! When will children learn to just say no to Minecraft?

 

[-Ezio-]

of course. everyone knows minecraft is a gateway hobby. next those kids'll be out messing with gardening. or WORSE...architecture.

 

[Scow2]

The only concern I'm seeing here is the time investment.

 

[Evil Smurf]

Minecraft is a gateway game into other good games, and once kids have a taste for gaming, they'll be a sissy nerd! Oooooh!

 

[Strazdas]

or, you know, a solution to the problem described in op would be to just play singleplayer or in a server thats locked to friends only instead of getting rid of minecraft.

As far as russians stealing things (it always has to be russians doesnt it?), i think its a good lesson to the kid that not everything in the world goes the way you want it to. there are bad people that you should look out for. id rather my kid learn it in minecraft items than from a mugger on a street, how about you?

 

[Padwolf]

I don't think it is a problem, I think it's been great for kids. Though I think the parents should join in, do more actively to ee what their kids are interested in. Not a lot of parents are. While I had a job in GAME I was disgusted by the amount of parents who had no idea at all what their kids were playing on, and didn't care to know. One woman was buying her kid GTA and her kid was in a pushchair. Apparently he had played them all! The woman had no idea what GTA was and had never spent time playing on games with her kid. And Minecraft is a great entry way for kids to get into good games, and it's a good way for the parents to join in and see what they are building, help them with their building and just have a lot of fun together. My nephew is autistic, and Minecraft has been absolutely fantastic for him in letting out his creativity. Some of the things he has built have been amazing.

 

[freaper]

I'm pretty sure most of it was tongue-in-cheek, but I can kinda get behind the point that children need a more diverse range of stimuli, including offline social interactions. I'm not so sure literature should be regarded as a definite better form of entertainment, I don't agree with the author's idea that you actually inhabit some character's mind, or that that should therefore be healthier, but variation is always preferable.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

A lot of it is pretty damned ridiculous, but it's not entirely unjustified. It's not healthy for children to spend all their free time playing games, as much as we love them (the games, not kids. Who even likes children anyway?). However, parents need to actually parent. My parents refused to let me spend all of my time playing Pokemon when I was younger- sure I bitched at the time, but now I'm older I see that it was sensible of them.

Whilst Minecraft is pretty innocent and most of the online interaction is fine, it's understandable enough that parents might be wary. There's a lot of idle chatter time playing online in Minecraft, and you'll always run into the odd loon. The best thing for parents to do (as with everything your kids do) is to take an interest. Ignorance breeds fear and all that, you're better off knowing what it's actually like. Back when I moderated on a fairly busy server we occasionally had parents come on and ask us to keep an eye on their kids, or make sure general chat channels weren't inappropriate. I'm sure any responsibly run server would be happy enough to help (although honestly, I only ever played on that one server, so I've no idea what other ones might be like).