Imprisoned in online world of a kid’s own design
It horrifies how much my kids are addicted to these games, and I worry constantly about how it will affect them.
My 11-year-old son has a secret door in his kitchen, where he keeps a small prison. The prison has a toilet, sink and bed — and no one can access the room except my son.
“There were two little girls in there,” my daughter told me, “begging him to let them out because they couldn’t pay. They were like 6 years old!”
Pay?
“If you trespass on Louie’s house, he comes running out and takes you to the kitchen,” my 9-year-old Selma said. “He puts you in his jail until you pay a trespass fee.”
“He even does it if you step on his grass!” hollered my 8-year-old George.
Great. Does he ask you to put the lotion in the basket like Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs?”
But don’t worry, this is not actually happening in our kitchen. This is all in Louie’s Bloxberg world, an offshoot game of Roblox, a gaming and social media platform that is popular with both kids and teenagers.
“It’s a really good game, Mom,” Louie assured me, “and I don’t do that anymore.” Imprison little kids that is.
My kids tell me “Welcome to Bloxberg” teaches them about taxes, building, money — awesome “life skills” as George puts it. The fact that George is citing “life skills” for the first time in his young life means he’s bringing out the big guns.
“How exactly does it teach life skills?” I asked, like an idiot.
“So like if you have a big house, you pay more,” George told me. “That’s just like real life. I learned that from Bloxberg!”
“You learned that from living in Greenwich,” my husband, Ian, pointed out.
“Louie has a big house so he has to pay a lot. I made my house very small,” Selma said.
“I wish we had thought of that,” I said, looking at Ian.
It was the tiny house thing, but the pre-pubescent version gone virtual.
“Did you check the property tax deduction?” Ian asked, but no one was paying attention because Ian doesn’t exist on Bloxberg. Neither does tax reform.
Monitoring, fighting and bribing my kids to limit “iPad time” (which later becomes “iPhone time,” I’m told) is the bane of my existence. It’s pretty much all I do. It horrifies how much my kids are addicted to these games, and I worry constantly about how it will affect them. When they were younger, I forced my kids to spend summers and vacations without screen time. Now the battle is much harder.
“I am not sure it’s as bad as you think,” Ian told me during a dinner with friends a few months ago. When books first became widely available, some folks expressed concern about kids reading too much, he said.
Having your “nose stuck in a book” meant not experiencing the real world in real time. This is why Socrates didn’t want Plato to write anything down. That obviously didn’t work. So if Socrates couldn’t enforce his rules, what makes Ian think I can?
Plus, if the future will be informed by the online experience, should I really be holding my kids back?
Alex Knapp, a staff writer for Forbes, argues that I’m probably worrying too much. “What’s unique about Roblox is that the gaming company isn’t in the business of making games — it just provides the tools and platforms for kids to make their own unique creations,” he wrote recently.
“Kids, as it turns out, are pretty good at making games that attract other kids,” he added.
“See Mom,” Louie said triumphantly. He recently informed me he will take a two-year gap before college to stay in his bedroom and play online.
Is this good for our kids’ brains? Louie loves Roblox’s game Jailbreak, thus building on his troubling passion for incarceration. That can’t be good.
Roblox was created off the shoulders of tech startup called Knowledge Revolution. Basically, Knowledge Revolution created an online platform where kids took physics way beyond the textbook and made it all fun. That must be good.
So where does that leave you on a beautiful spring Saturday with your kids’ noses buried in an iPad? Maybe a little less incarcerated?
I’ll see you in that jail in the kitchen.