Minecraft vs. Roblox (2020)

I was introduced to ROBLOX in late 2008 -- my account was created September 26. I spent the first several months just exploring the platform. It was only a few years old at that point, and had just started the curve upwards on its hockystick graph.

The games were way simpler at the time, and they were genuinely made mostly by kids and young adults, and it showed.

One cool thing I discovered is that not only could you choose to open-source a world, you could publish individual models for anyone to make use of. I saw my first lines of code by grabbing a public model and looking through it to see how it worked.

My first forays into coding was pure "script kiddy": I'd take an existing script, stick it in a new model, and tweak it until I was happy with it. This was often things like taking a model of a sliding door, re-sizing it, and adjusting the script's `for` loop so it would slide the door the full amount I wanted.

I slowly figured out stuff like loops, variables, scope, and flow from that, without ever learning the term or reading a book. I was so engrossed that I asked for and received the Lua Reference Manual for my birthday.

I grew out of the platform's intended audience age early in High School, but I had already transitioned to writing python and making Java mods for Minecraft at that point.

I'm now almost 3 years out of college and doing embedded software engineering full-time. And it does really retain a part of that initial joy; I get the same rush when I write an ISO 8601 parser and see it spit out JSON to AWS, really!

Occasionally I'll log on and check things out. Games are a lot more polished, thanks mainly to the developer program that enables revenue sharing, so people can actually have an income from their creations. The studio and platform have also matured a lot as well. I remember when custom GUIs and dynamic lighting were mind-blowing features we sort of hacked together using tricks like a bunch of semi-transparent spheres anchored at a user's origin to simulate fog.

That's not to say I'm free of this. I doubt any of us are truly free of this. That said, recognizing it's a thing means you can try to put something into your design practice/workflow where you sit back and think if there's a better way that's a "hack", and try to honestly examine the pros and cons and whether it's actually the better solution.

If you buy Minecraft from Microsoft on their Windows store thing I believe you can buy "both" together in some sense, which is a good deal, but obviously programs from the Windows store do not run on an iPad.

Although Microsoft has dipped their toes in the water and sometimes did some PR about it, you can't today mod Bedrock Edition and if you could it would always be a far more limited experience because of how Bedrock Edition works.

For Java Microsoft is doing the most essential work to make modifying it possible, as well as maintaining it, but a huge community actually takes that and runs with it. If you tried to just use what Microsoft makes available then anyone except a Java expert would probably be stuck with toy changes that barely scratch the surface of the game.

For example as a modded player it's hard for me to think about, but there's no electrical power analogue in Minecraft. The modders (not Microsoft, after all their game doesn't have electricity!) added a framework for a single unifying type of electrical power so one mod's steam turbines can power a different mod's plate pressing machine without either of them needing to spend a year designing an electrical energy system they don't really care about.

Finding out what is fun for you is such an important step in self-actualisation and a continued interest.

And, IMHO, Java is highly overrated anyway.

Kids I know have enjoyed it.

> the game looks and feels like something from Aliexpress

https://media1.tenor.com/images/883860f55cb3da5a24413c972dfc...

I personally disagree about the (subjective) looks at least with texture packs (https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=txp&sort=score&o...), but I’d say the feel was part of the charm when I played Roblox as a kid. There were and now probably are more of polished games like Phantom Forces, but my favorites always included unpolished ones like the old disaster survival games with shops of dozens if not hundreds of copypasta items from little half-broken handheld video game players and RC toys to the essential [anti-]gravity coil to hot sauce that made you run faster to freeze guns that let you entrap innocent bystanders in blocks of ice. And every few waves of disaster some slightly retextured blocky noob character would be spawned in the sky and fall down only for rapid unscheduled disassembly because its physics engine joints were broken, and if you were unlucky its spherical head would fly into and one-hit kill you on contact. The games felt like something a kid could make, and I tried to, but I couldn’t see the source for any I enjoyed and I never learned nearly as much as I did when given root on an (airgapped) old spare computer revived with Puppy Linux and loaded with Pygame, including example games which I learned to code by modifying. Later my favorite Roblox games became Armored Patrol and Urban Patrol, which had no micro transactions and used the physics engines to great effect — as long as you learned to enjoy being flung into the sky far enough to see the world unload, or finding the similarities between its mapgen and modern art. As I did:

https://ibb.co/dKFght1 https://ibb.co/CtxZ6wF https://ibb.co/2YqJWdL https://ibb.co/nP0m8kd

Fast forward to massive sprawling cities and worlds me and the kids have created, and also me insisting that sometimes we avoid "creative" because working for what you build and having there be danger and difficulty getting it built is more fun.

(me, a 44 year old :)

Think about sports. Are there more people that are bad at skiing in Austria compared to the Netherland? Yes (if you don't count the ones who never stood on skies). Are there more good skiiers in the Netherland compared to Austria? Absolutely not.

Grandad's had all the ingredients, and told you how to make, a couple explosive compounds.

Dad's had the ingredients, but not instructions.

The most dangerous thing I could do with mine was probably eat the copper salts.

I probably wouldn't have become a Nobel prize winning chemist with my n00b/safe set but it might have set something off.

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.

"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.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/234390/Teleglitch_Die_Mor...

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.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game...

After several months of re-typing in each game listing every time the computer got shut off, I was getting pretty damn fast. My parents finally got me the $30 audio cassette tape recorder for my birthday. That was a glorious day! Once I could save the code, I started changing little things in the games like the colors and number of lives. That expanded into adding new obstacles and new levels.

Ultimately, all the BASIC games were pretty primitive. All the unobtainable ROM cartridge games were coded in some magical incantations rumored to be called "Assembly Language". I knew a guy at school with the same computer who had a couple of game cartridges and I'd sometimes manage to talk him into loaning me one for a couple days. Giving the cartridges back sucked. Eventually I learned how to copy the ROM space memory by writing a BASIC program of PEEKs and POKEs. Many hours of experimentation later I was able to copy the 2k of ROM data into user memory (the BASIC code had to be short or the ROM would start overwriting it). Now I could run that game without the damn cartridge! Unfortunately, that was the only game game cartridge at Radio Shack that worked. All the other ROMS I tried had protection measures which I eventually figured out were trying to write to their own memory.

Then I found a listing for a BASIC program called an Assembly Language Monitor that would turn bytes back onto mnemonics. With that, a bunch of luck and several days of effort I was able to find the code in the game ROM that tried to overwrite its own memory and replaced it with NOPs. I felt like king of the world. I wasn't very productive as a software pirate because I spent many times longer figuring out how to copy the game than I ever spent actually playing the game. :-)

However, as I bumbled my way through each new obstacle I encountered as a game pirate I was writing more and more of my own tooling code. Eventually that slowly evolved into a career as a self-taught programmer, software architect and then tech startup entrepreneur. So, yeah. There's at least one case of a frustrated teenage game-player being an on-ramp into a successful tech career.

and [2] looks like 'earning' by promoting premium subscriptions, so I guess a referral scheme? which is not an activity suitable for children

You can't mod anything outside cosmetics and state in bedrock, whereas you can mod everything in java edition.