As we all know, Roblox is garbage tier gameplay structured around psychological cues to get children to fill an endless pit with fake money bought with real money.

So I banned my kid from it. He used it a little bit socially with a few friends of his. What online or local multiplayer games should I help him to replace it with? (He’s 10, so please don’t recommend Diablo 4 or anything else that has quite that much gore)

He and his friends have an Xbox Series X|S at home.

Edit: keep your judgemental shit out of here. His whole social group (5 kids he knows from school) got banned on the same day. Me and the other parents are trying to be nice and replace it with better quality games so it isn’t just a punishment.

Edit2: Thanks guys. I got him Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge

  • @toastal@lemmy.ml
    3•6 months ago

    Don’t do Minecraft when Minetest is open source. It’s not meant to be installed as vanilla per se tho as mods are for building gameplay and vanilla is just a sandbox/canvas to build Minecraft-like or addjacent games. Especially if you can get him on PC, I could be a hopskip away from creating his own open mods (as opposed to the content farm of underpaid “devs” for Roblox which have wild stories if you look it up).

    Veloran is also a good alternative for free software with an adventure MMO aspect that might appeal to the guy.

    Being projects without a profit motive & a strong community where the players are the developers is a safer route where you would never expect loot boxes, microtransacitions, dark/addictive patterns because those aren’t fun & money isn’t an incentive. With the source available your son is more than welcome to read it to figure out how games work, contribute ideas/code, & learn to make mods which are all great, real-life skills learned while accidentally gaming & trying to make the game better for yourself & friends—and if he’s not a future coder, there are assets & stories to build, or just playtesting a friend’s mod.

    • @modcolocko
      12•6 months ago

      Minetest simply doesn’t have the content catalog of Minecraft, for a game that the appeal is the fact you can pretty much never get bored of it, that’s a massive drawback.

    • haui
      4•6 months ago

      Sound idea. Additionally, it’s now possible to stream games to the tv quite easily. So pc is really the better alternative to get away from psychological abuse through console and game manufacturers.

      Also, Minecraft on console is no better than roblox imo. It is a microtransaction pile of sh*t. You could argue that minecraft java works but I get the strong feeling that it wont stay like this forever since bedrock makes more money and allows for stronger manipulation through nonexistent mod support and everything is monetized there.

      • @toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1•6 months ago

        If it’s set up correctly. The biggest selling point of a console is that it boots you to “play game” mode as the default & games have better expectations since the hardware is standardized. That said, in the case of Steam, there’s nothing to say you can’t install Linux & have it boot directly into Big Picture mode (but you’ll still need to remember to get software updates for the OS as they aren’t integrated like a console).

        • haui
          2•6 months ago

          Two things I see differently:

          • the hardware of a pc is standardized as well and the performance of a console is not better afaik
          • there is something called unattended upgrades for linux which takes that away as well. You also don’t ever need the newest version of linux
          • @toastal@lemmy.ml
            1•6 months ago

            I mean the IBM PC was standardized but you are welcome to install whatever video card or as much or little RAM as you want which means developers can’t specifically target your setup (with fewer testing Linux), but a lot of things not requiring the bleeding edge run just fine. Unattended upgrades is a good idea, but that is if the distro supports it—and that’s still a better experience than Microsoft Windows updates.

    • @WetBeardHairs@lemmy.mlOP
      1•6 months ago

      We’re already firmly invested in minecraft. I have the java edition on my computers - and he has bedrock on the xbox. It sucks that they arent compatible, but he’s too young for a pc.