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piefed.social
As much as I think this is all terrible and that Roblox SHOULD answer for some of this shit, the fact of the matter is, PARENTS ARE NOT TEACHING KIDS HOW TO BE SAFE IN THE INTERNET. They just throw a fucking tablet or phone or console or PC screen in front of their eyes and refuse to do ANYTHING resembling parenting, and when their kid inevitably gets groomed they blame the platform and ask for daddy government to do their parenting for them and ask for things like age verification, which at least on Discord is literally being used to profile people criticizing the Trump administration and ICE. Set parental controls, teach kids to not trust strangers and give them basic internet safety tips, and none of this shit will ever happen. Don’t sign away the rights of other adults because you’re a terrible fucking parent.
Komunitas
feddit.org
Love the uptick in Linux usage but Roblox is digital heroin for kids and has a serious problem with PDF files. Any advertising of roblox is not great.
Komunitas
sh.itjust.works
There are times my kids want to talk about Roblox/YouTube stuff that I’m not interested or I dislike. But I listen, because I’m a parent and I want my rugrats to share their interests with me. But yeah, I get where this comic is coming from.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I have a young, female family member who was preyed on through Roblox. Discord is the next place they take you to and sink their claws in.
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ttrpg.network
(Sugarland, Texas) A ruling Monday upheld the US military’s claim that their “Drone from Home” program - where civilians pilot military drones and hunt Iranian citizens - is both within the bounds of US federal law, and that the pilots are independent contractors, settling a separate claim by activist participants in the program that they should receive rank, benefits, and other perks “for their contribution to the war effort.” “Naturally we felt the courts would side with us,” said council for the government. “We already use civilian contractors for a lot of missions in foreign areas of interest. It’s a small step from paying these contractors for work in these areas, to allowing civilians to pay a fee to pilot drone aircraft for us, and for them to receive the thrill of helping the US government fulfill its mission, whatever the president says that mission is each day.” The program, originally a recruiting tool allowing future enlisted - already signed but awaiting boot camp - to perform missions, has expanded into a $30 million per year profit center for the military. Anyone who can afford the $1,000 fee and present at least credible evidence of US citizenship, can take control of a US military drone for 4 hours. “The kids really love it,” said one recruiter. “We’d let them try a demo, and then tell them we had the real thing if they signed the papers. Our recruiting numbers were maxed for months until they opened up general play.” Opponents of the program cite the poor security of the program, as well as the questionable legality of hunting other humans with robots, as reasons the program should be shut down. “We’ve already seen cases of children spending thousands of dollars on Roblox,” said one advocate. “What if your husband got your credit card and did the same thing?” But not all Americans feel the program lacks merit. Leo Sturbgetter, a cow detangler in Kansas, echos many Americans by saying “tell me what you want for $1,000. I don’t have a lot of limits, I need to get back in there.” The citizens of Iran declined to leave cover to comment.
Komunitas
lemmy.zip
We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people’s computers. What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers’ ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
Komunitas
lemmy.today
|Rank|Title|Release Year|Country of Origin|Free-to-Play| |-:|-|-:|-|-| |1|Roblox|2006|US|Yes| |2|Counter-Strike 2|2023|US|Yes| |3|League of Legends|2009|US|Yes| |4|Minecraft|2011|Sweden|In China| |5|Fortnite|2017|US|For modes other than Save the World| |6|Dota 2|2013|US|Yes| |7|Valorant|2020|US|Yes| |8|World of Warcraft|2004|US|No| |9|The Sims 4|2014|US|No| |10|Call of Duty: Black Ops 7|2025|US|No| |11|Escape from Tarkov|2025|Russia|No| |12|Overwatch 2|2023|US|Yes| |13|Marvel Rivals|2024|China|Yes| |14|PUBG: Battlegrounds|2017|South Korea|Yes| |15|World of Warcraft Classic|2019|US|No| |16|Grand Theft Auto V|2013|UK|No| |17|Diablo IV|2023|US|No| |18|Wuthering Waves|2024|China|Yes| |19|Genshin Impact|2020|China|Yes| |20|Apex Legends|2019|US|Yes| I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games. EDIT: Added release year after @[email protected] mentioned age. EDIT2: And country of origin, while I’m at it. EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Komunitas
group.lt
because reddit is made of AIDS & fail, the post they removed I’ve been pulling public records on the wave of “age verification” bills moving through US state legislatures. IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records, corporate registries, WHOIS lookups, Wayback Machine archives. What started as curiosity about who was pushing these bills turned into documenting a coordinated influence operation that, from a privacy standpoint, is building surveillance infrastructure at the operating system level while the company behind it faces zero new requirements for its own platforms. I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t. I am not the author of the earlier r/linux post by aaronsb and I’m not affiliated with them. I titled this to draw attention on this subreddit because the privacy implications go well beyond Linux. Every source cited here is a public record. What the bills actually require you to hand over Most reporting on these bills says something vague like “age checks at device setup.” The statutory language is more specific and more invasive than that. California AB-1043, signed October 2025 and effective January 1, 2027, defines “Operating system provider” under Section 1798.500(g) as “a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.” Every OS provider must then: provide an interface at account setup collecting a birth date or age, and expose a real-time API that broadcasts the user’s age bracket (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18+) to any application running on the system. Read that again. Every app on your device gets to query a system-level API that returns your age bracket in real time. This isn’t age verification at the point of accessing restricted content. This is a persistent age-broadcasting service baked into the operating system itself, queryable by every installed application. Colorado SB26-051 (passed the Senate 28-7, now in the House) copies the same definitions in the same order, same penalty structure ($2,500 per child for negligent violations, $7,500 for intentional ones), same exemptions. The template is the ICMEC “Digital Age Assurance Act,” and it’s been introduced or is pending in Illinois (three separate bills), New York, Kansas, South Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, Florida, and at the federal level. New York’s S8102A goes further. It requires device manufacturers to perform “commercially reasonable and technically feasible age assurance” at device activation and explicitly bans self-reporting. The AG picks the approved methods. That means biometric age estimation or government ID verification before you can use a device you purchased. Exemptions in all of these bills cover broadband ISPs, telecom services, and physical products. None contain any exemption for open-source software, non-commercial projects, or privacy-preserving verification methods. The status right now: | State | Bill | Status | | — | — | — | | CA | AB-1043 | Enacted, effective Jan 1, 2027 | | CO | SB26-051 | Passed Senate, in House committee | | LA | HB-570 | Enacted, effective July 1, 2026 | | UT | SB-142 | Enacted, first in nation | | TX | SB-2420 | Enjoined by federal judge | | NY | S8102A | Pending | | IL | HB-3304, HB-4140, SB-2037 | Pending | | Federal | KOSA, ASAA | Pending | The privacy architecture these bills create Here’s what concerns me most from a privacy perspective. These bills don’t just verify age once. They create a persistent identity layer inside the operating system that applications can query at will. The commercial age verification vendors who would provide this infrastructure (Yoti, Veriff, Jumio) charge $0.10 to $2.00 per check, require proprietary SDKs, demand API keys tied to commercial accounts, and operate cloud-only with no self-hosted option. Your age verification data goes to a third-party cloud service. Every time. Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you’re over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor’s cloud. The EU’s Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don’t act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions. | | EU approach | US bills | | — | — | — | | Who’s regulated | Platforms with 45M+ users | All operating systems | | FOSS exemption | Yes, five separate mechanisms | None | | Verification method | Open-source wallet, zero-knowledge proofs | Commercial vendors, biometric data to cloud | | Cost to non-commercial projects | $0 | $100K to $2M/year | | Privacy architecture | Selective disclosure, privacy by design | Full age data to vendor cloud | | Works offline | Yes | No, internet required per check | The US bills assume every operating system is built by a corporation with the infrastructure and revenue to absorb these costs. The EU started from the opposite assumption and built accordingly. Who wrote the legislation This is where it gets interesting. Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana’s HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her. The bill as drafted required only app stores (Apple, Google) to verify user ages. It did not require social media platforms to do anything. Meta deployed 12 lobbyists across 9 confirmed firms for this single bill, paying at least $324,992 (described as a “very conservative estimate”). The confirmed firms include Pelican State Partners (who also lobby for Roblox, letting Meta frame this as “broad industry support” rather than one company’s project), Adams and Reese LLP (the #1 ranked Louisiana government affairs firm), and State Capitol Solutions. Nicole Lopez, Meta’s Director of Global Litigation Strategy for Youth, testified at the House Commerce Committee in support. She also testified in South Dakota for a similar bill. She’s Meta’s national point person for these laws. HB-570 passed unanimously at every stage: House 99-0, Senate 39-0. So why did Meta need 12 lobbyists? Because the votes were never the concern. The lobbyists were there to control the text and block amendments. The key amendment battle came from Senator Jay Morris, who expanded the bill to include app developers alongside app stores after Google’s senior director of government affairs publicly questioned why “Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on passing these bills.” When Morris introduced his amendment, Meta went silent. The conference committee compromise maintained dual responsibility but kept the primary burden on app stores, which is what Meta wanted from the start. At that same Senate hearing, Morris directly questioned DCA Executive Director Casey Stefanski about who funds her organization. She reportedly deflected, said she “wasn’t comfortable answering,” then under continued pressure admitted tech companies provide funding but refused to name them. The advocacy group that doesn’t legally exist The Digital Childhood Alliance presents itself as a coalition of 50+ conservative child safety organizations (later inflated to 140+, though only six have ever been publicly named). It has been testifying in favor of these bills across states. Here is what public records show about its legal status: I searched all four regional extracts of the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File (eo1 through eo4.csv), which cover every tax-exempt organization registered in the United States. DCA is not there. No EIN exists for this organization. I also searched for incorporation records in Colorado, DC, Delaware, and Virginia, plus OpenCorporates (200M+ companies), ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, GuideStar, and Charity Navigator. No incorporation record exists in any of them. DCA’s domain was registered December 18, 2024 through GoDaddy with privacy protection and a four-year registration. The website was live and fully formed one day later: professional design, statistics, testimonials from Heritage Foundation and NCOSE staff, ASAA talking points already loaded. This is not a grassroots launch. This is a staging deployment of a pre-built site. 77 days later, Utah SB-142 became the first ASAA law signed in the country. DCA processes donations through For Good (formerly Network for Good, EIN 68-0480736), which is a Donor Advised Fund. For Good explicitly states in its documentation that it serves “501©(3) nonprofit organizations.” DCA claims 501©(4) status. DCA is classified as a “Project” (ID 258136) in the For Good system, not as a standalone nonprofit. I searched all 59,736 For Good grant recipients across five years, roughly $1.73 billion in disbursements. Zero grants to DCA, DCI, NCOSE, or any related entity. The donation page appears to be cosmetic. Bloomberg reporters exposed Meta as a DCA funder in July 2025. The Deseret News detailed the arrangement in December 2025. No version of the website, across 100+ Wayback Machine snapshots, has ever disclosed funding sources. Every blog post and testimony targets Apple and Google. Meta is never mentioned or criticized. DCA’s leadership traces directly to NCOSE (National Center on Sexual Exploitation):
Komunitas
lemmy.zip
Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.
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ibbit.at
For the last month Joseph and I have been playing as much Marathon as we can fit into our busy lives. During the pandemic, we bonded over playing Call of Duty: Warzone, and we’ve been chasing that high for years with little success. Bungie’s new extraction shooter finally gave it to us. We should be happy, and we are as long as we’re focused on the game we’re playing and not the industry that’s collapsing around it. Marathon’s commercial success, measured by outsiders mostly by the number of people Steam shows is actively playing the game at any given moment, has no bearing on our enjoyment. But I can’t help but follow those numbers because they are a reminder of how brutal the video game industry is right now, where it might be headed, and how viable Marathon and games like it are in the future. We don’t know how much Marathon cost to develop or what Sony Interactive Entertainment, which owns Bungie and is publishing the game, wants from it. The game has been a critical success, has reportedly sold 1.2 million copies, and players who have latched onto it like myself love how Bungie has been updating and balancing it after release. People are making horny fan art of Marathon characters. At the same time, I watch the number of concurrent players on Steam, currently hovering at between 20,000 and 30,000, and fret. Is that enough for Sony to support Marathon for the long haul, and is it enough for the rest of the industry that’s watching this unfold to decide that the kind of player who enjoys a game like Marathon is still worth catering to? Whether 20,000-30,000 concurrent players is a good number or not is relative and ultimately a decision only Sony can make. More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 and only 6,000 of them earned more than $100,000. With at least tens of millions of dollars worth of sales on Steam alone, Marathon is one of the highest earning games on that platform. Marathon’s numbers are also considerably higher than Sony’s other big competitive shooter, Concord, which barely cracked 700 concurrent players on Steam before it was shuttered in 2024, barely a month after it was released. Highguard, another multiplayer shooter that was unveiled at the end of 2025’s Game Awards, also shuttered just a bit over a month after it launched. It peaked at almost 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but it was free to play. One might naively assume that the basic math at Sony would be to see how much Marathon cost to develop and maintain, see how much money it’s making after launch, and to keep the party going as long as it’s turning a profit. The reality is probably a bit more cynical and complicated than that. Bungie is a big studio that employees hundreds of developers that Sony acquired for $3.7 billion. One line item on Marathon’s budget that’s extremely hard to calculate is the opportunity cost of Bungie making Marathon as opposed to the next Fortnite, now that it’s becoming increasingly clear that Marathon will not be doing Fortnite numbers. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a tremendously profitable business to be had there, given some patience and care. Ubisoft launched Rainbow Six Siege in 2015 to a tepid response, but has turned it into a decade-old cash cow with consistent support, updates, and a devious loot box-based monetization scheme. It essentially did the same thing for For Honor, a melee multiplayer game that I bet you forgot existed but that’s been going since 2017. But Sony is a publicly traded company that wants to show quarter over quarter growth, and a modestly healthy profit that also happens to keep hundreds of game developers employed is not what shareholders are salivating over. Sony wants to do Fortnite numbers, which is a very tall order considering that even Fortnite isn’t doing Fortnite numbers anymore. Our friends at Remap Radio have spoken at length about why discussions about player numbers teach us little about games and are often toxic. Part of the reason that games like Concord and Highguard can crash and burn so quickly is that the numbers become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s skepticism about the game before it launches, and when it fails to go viral, people write it off because why would they invest their time in an online game with player numbers that signal imminent and unceremonious execution by its financial backers, which only leads to even lower player numbers. It also shifts the conversation entirely away from what the game is, what people like about it, and why, and to its business model, infecting players with the quarterly earnings report view of the world. Games and players become expressions and subjects of business models, and the part where we play games because we enjoy them are reduced to a curious byproduct of Sony’s Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Games from major publishers become either mega hits or are quickly slapped with the “dead game” label before they’re taken offline. What the game actually was is barely relevant. Everyone I’m playing Marathon with is aware of the player numbers anxiety but is responding to it in different ways. Most of us are doing armchair video game industry analysis, while others are actively trying to enjoy Marathon’s popularity while we can precisely because it may be fleeting and eventually unavailable to play. Some of us are buying in-game cosmetic items not because we want them that bad, but as a signal to Sony that there’s money to be made here. Adding to this player count anxiety is the fact that the video game industry appears to be going through what is increasingly looking like a proper crash. I don’t think we’ll ever have another near extinction event like the video game crash of 1983, where for a moment it didn’t seem like video games would even continue to be a thing, but a full one third of game developers in the U.S. were laid off last year, and the huge layoffs just keep on coming. The question of whether Marathon is a viable business for Sony naturally leads us to the question: What business does Sony even want to be in going forward? Is it a business that’s in continuity with the games we grew up playing on the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, or will the market force it to chase something like Roblox or other free-to-play models? Can this continuity even exist when a PlayStation 5 Pro now costs $899 and a PlayStation 6 will cost more? Those are prices for 30 and 40 year-olds with disposable income, not the younger audiences game publishers need to be winning over now for their future business. Sony and other video game publishers are already losing them to different kinds of games and forms of entertainment. “Marathon’s low gravity, bouncy physics, and methodical boot clunks echo Master Chief’s graceful, weighty gait circa 2004. It’s got modern conveniences like aim-down-sights, sprinting, sliding—and yet Marathon evokes a more civilized age,” Morgan Park wrote in his excellent review in PC Gamer. “Those qualities make it more accessible to a range of people who struggle to keep up in faster games while maintaining a skill range in other disciplines: timing, positioning, and perception. It’s fairly easy to track targets, but you’re still rewarded for nailing headshots, taking the high ground, and utilizing shell abilities. Does that make Marathon an unc game?” pic.twitter.com/WgxIBEHd3g — 定 (@de3dsoul) March 19, 2026 To answer Park’s rhetorical question for him, yes, Marathon is in fact an unc game, which explains both why I like it so much and why I’m worried about its future. As you probably know, unc, short for uncle, is a way to jokingly refer to old, potentially out of touch people. As far as I can tell, it entered the video game discourse in the form of this meme in which a soyfaced unc excitedly points at the hall of fame of so-called “unc slop,” or, in other words, games that old people say are very good. Some of the games in this collage of video game box art includes Half-Life 2, Dawn of War, World of Warcraft, STALKER, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Or, many of my favorite games of all time. Marathon could easily fit in that collage. It’s excellent, and, I worry, catering to a dwindling audience of uncs who are having a great time while the culture and business of video games is largely moving on and eventually leaving them behind. From 404 Media via this RSS feed
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lemmy.world
Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.
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ibbit.at
The free-to-play Roblox-like game was many people’s first foray into online VR gaming From Kotaku via this RSS feed
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ibbit.at
Although it may be hard to believe for current generations, there was a time when the Internet and the World Wide Web were not as integrated into society as it is today. The only forms of online ‘social media’ that existed came in the form of IRC, forums, BBSes, newsgroups and kin, while obtaining new software for your PC involved generally making your way over to a physical store to buy a boxed copy, at least officially. In this era – and those before it – age-verification already existed, with various goods ranging from tobacco and alcohol to naughty adult magazines requiring you to pass some form of age check. Much like how movies also got age-gated, so did video games, with a sales clerk taking a very good look at you before selling you that naughty puzzle game or boxed copy of Quake 3. Today we’re seeing a big fuss being made about online age-verification, with the claim being that it is ‘for the children’, but as any well-adjusted adult can attest to, this is essentially a big bucket of hogwash. Pearl Clutching The concept of restricting certain types of drugs, entertainment, and the operating of automobiles and trucks to specific age groups is a popular one. The general reasoning is that you have to set a limit somewhere because you cannot have toddlers driving lifted 4x4s, smoking a big fat cigar, and chugging down a cold one. As for where set this limit, there is rarely more than scarce evidence for a particular age past childhood being more reasonable than any other, with claims of harm often being dubious at best. Definitely not for kids: “Negroni Cocktails” by [NwongPR] To be fair, there is no ‘safe age’ for substances that are actively harmful to the body, such as the inhalation of tobacco smoke and the consumption of ethanol in alcoholic drinks. Consequently the age where for example imbibing ethanol is suddenly legal differs wildly, from 15 or younger to 25 or older, with 18 being a popular age. Here one line of reasoning pertains to when the individual in question can be considered to be mature enough to drink responsibly, thus preventing driving under influence and other irresponsible behavior. In the case of exposing children to ‘harmful content’, whether in the form of video games or audiovisual entertainment, things get if possible even fuzzier, as proving that such content is indeed harmful is a tough ask. Realistically what we should primarily focus on as responsible adults and parents is the prevention of childhood trauma, as any reasonable person ought to be able to agree that inflicting trauma on a child is a certifiably Bad Thing. In addition to this, there is also the importance of teaching children why certain types of behavior and excesses are bad, such as why you cannot drink soft drinks exclusively, why you need to eat your vegetables, why torturing small animals to death is absolutely not okay, and that Being Nice to Others is totally something to strive for. Because children since time immemorial have sought to escape the suffocating hold of age restrictions, this raises the question of whether we can prove that this is in fact traumatic or in any way affects their behavior in a negative manner. Dodging Restrictions Although in the case of the pre-digital-everything age, sales clerks and adults had a lot more insight into what content you consumed, nobody really believed that with the right contacts you couldn’t get access to all the dirty magazines, violent video games and Parental Guidance (PG) or Adult Only (AO) rated movies. The reason that I was playing Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D and similar titles as a kid in the 1990s wasn’t due to me somehow passing as a certified adult or having an adult purchase it for me in a store, but because a computer-enthusiastic older cousin would copy them zipped up with ARJ across a bunch of floppy disks for me and my younger brother to enjoy. Think warez, but with a personal touch. This kind of black market culture has always been pretty strong, from 1980s mix tapes and copy parties to buying copied audio CDs off someone at school by the late 90s, whether filled to the brim with explicit lyrics or not. This made ‘age restrictions’ mostly limited by one’s technological means and in how far one’s parents were aware of your illicit activities. Having your own TV and VHS/DVD player or multimedia-capable PC in your bedroom really broadened one’s horizons. Considering that as a child I was also reading adult literature of the (mostly) non-nekkid variety, including the works of Stephen King and Jan Wolkers, as well as Lord of the Rings, there were many things that I did back then that were age-inappropriate. The main question remains whether any of that harmed or benefited me. This is a highly subjective question to ask, of course, but we do have some science to provide a more objective take on this subject. Doomed To Violence Violent crime in the United States between 1960 and 2022. (Source: Wikipedia) Back in the 1990s the idea that violent video games were causing children to become more violent got a lot of traction, mostly due to fighting games and first person shooters like Doom entering the scene. To some people, the premise that playing these games in which you use a variety of weapons and techniques to violently turn pixelated monsters and opponents into pixelated piles of viscera would not have any effect on the developing brain of children and teenagers seemed inconceivable. The 1993-1994 US Senate hearings on video games came in the wake of the release of controversial games like Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, and by the 1994 hearing, also Doom. Effectively this is where video game ratings became an integral part of this new kind of media, with the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) being established for the US and Canada. Yet despite the premise being that exposure to violence and pornography at a young age causes individuals to perform criminal behavior, the crime statistics do not bear this out. In fact, there was a much sharper rise since the 1950s in violent crime across the US, peaking at around 1990, when incidentally lead in the form of tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive was phased out. This lends credence to the hypothesis that exposure to significant amounts of lead from a young age in one’s environment impaired cognitive development and resulted in said crime wave. The cyclical process of ADHD and video games use. (Credit: Virginia Lérida-Ayala et al., 2023, Children) In a 2023 systematic review article by Virginia Lérida-Ayala et al. the causes of behavioral disorders in children and teenagers within the context of internet and video games are considered. Of note is that Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) is featured in the DSM-5, involving compulsive use of video games to the point that it impairs one’s ability to function. This negative aspect is of course also contrasted with the positive effects of video games when it comes to things like socializing, cognitive skills and improved self-esteem. In the review article it is found that playing a very large number of hours of video games per day is correlated strongly with negative effects, yet with the caveat that it’s important not to confuse the order of causality. A strong connection is found between ADHD and escaping into video games, in order to avoid the complexities of emotional and social interactions. Much like with other types of addictions and substance abuse, they can often act as an escape from reality, in which case the solution does not lie in technological solutions like age restrictions or forcefully limiting the number of hours that a user can play as doing so would merely force the individual to find other forms of escape. Yet even in these extreme cases of IGD the result is generally not violent or even criminal behavior, but rather a withdrawal from society. This contrasts with the final point being raised, with that of aggression and other forms of dysfunctional behavior, which when left uncontrolled can result in negative feedback from the child or teen’s environment. Yet here too underlying psychological issues such as OCD, depression, social anxiety disorder and so on would seem to be generally present. In short, it would appear that violent and otherwise age-restricted content do not reprogram a child or teenager’s brain, but it can provide a coping mechanism for those who are dealing with certain mental and psychological issues. Or in other words, when a child or teen is feeling generally happy and content, there should be no negative effects from them indulging in video games and movies, even if they may be deemed to be not quite age-appropriate. Traces Of Trauma There are many ways in which a child can suffer trauma, but the primary question is whether exposure to age-restricted content can actually induce trauma. This somewhat goes back to the previous section where it’s important to not confuse the order of causality, as after all often trauma can precede problematic behavior rather than be caused by it. Not really a children’s movie. Yet if we look at the list of the types of trauma, it’s not immediately obvious in what way voluntarily opting to listen to explicit lyrics, play violent or erotic video games, would in any way be ‘traumatic’. When contrasted with the list of childhood traumas, such a thing would seem to be rather benign as it’s done out of curiosity tinged with a hint of adventure due to it being ‘for adults’ or at least much older children. When I look back upon my own experiences playing those violent games – with an occasional stop to pass a stripper in DN3D a few bucks to have them show me some very naughty pixels – it fills me more with a feeling of nostalgia rather than an overwhelming urge to acquire firearms or frequent a strip club. I will admit that catching that the scene from Child’s Play where Chucky has been thrown into the lit hearth and comes walking out whilst on fire caused child me to fear walking into the dark garage later on. I would fortunately quickly get over that, though I’m still not a fan of snuff-type films like the Saw ones. Ultimately, when it comes to childhood trauma, this doesn’t appear to be much of a reason to age-restrict certain types of content. Anonymity Is Good Since the arrival of so-called ‘social media’ the central tenet of never giving out your personal information which was front and center during the 1990s and 2000s got quite literally flipped around. Suddenly we had massive corporations practically begging you to give every last scrap of your personal information, every intimate detail of your daily life and with it every last second of your attention span. They even made an ‘everything device‘ for it in the form of a smartphone that practically ensures that you’ll never be alone with your thoughts again. The upshot of this reversal is that instead of a mostly comfortable anonymous experience, suddenly every second that you’re awake has been turned into the equivalent of a schoolyard during recess, the watercooler banter at the office and similar social interactions. Along with this comes social anxiety, real-life bullying, and worse, with multiple studies indicating the real harm to children and teenagers in particular, but also to adults. A recent response to this has been the introduction of social media bans for under-16 year olds, which by itself sounds like a good idea, but this fails to address the many problems that this introduces: from illicit access as demand remains, to the privacy nightmare that ensues as suddenly access to social media requires more stringent identification than accessing a pornographic website. This raises many questions, such as whether ‘social media’ and the FOMO it introduces is a legitimate addiction, and whether we shouldn’t make being online more anonymous rather than enforce a rather dystopian ‘real name’ policy onto the populace. Contrast this to the old ‘don’t trust strangers’ adage that used to get hammered into the minds of young children, to prevent them from taking up offers from overly friendly people with candy-filled vans. Modern-Day Safety Credit: Chun Fei Lung In how far do children today understand the dangers of the Internet? In a 2019 research article by Jun Zhao et al. a group of UK school children aged 6 – 10 were asked a range of questions in focus groups to see how they see these risks. Now that many children are practically raised by iPads and equivalents, it’s more relevant than ever that the adults in their environment teach them to be safe and to reinforce good online privacy behavior. The paper was also summarized in an article by Chun Fei Lung, for those whose attention spans are beginning to drift at this point. A major take-away is that children will generally recognize situations that feel ‘scary’ or ‘annoying’, and they agreed that they should ask one of their parents about it before doing anything else. Perhaps the scariest part is how trusting these children were when it came to platforms they were familiar with. We have seen issues recently pertaining to platforms like Roblox where such trust was exploited by unscrupulous adults, leading to age verification being implemented through the services of Persona. This same identity verification company has also been hired by Discord and has seen its services used in the UK and Australia for their respective online safety legislation. This then gets us to the crux of modern day online safety, where online anonymity has been replaced with identify verification through private companies. It’s hard to shake the feeling that parental involvement and education campaigns by governments wouldn’t be significantly more effective here. As well as pose a significantly lower risk of having your identity stolen. Of course, none of this is an easy issue to solve, and there will always be unscrupulous folk around, but treating age verification as some kind of technological silver bullet to a societal issue will always end in tears. 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piefed.zip
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piefed.social
https://archive.ph/2026.03.24-212512/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-24/roblox-s-hit-game-steal-a-brainrot-battles-its-many-imitators
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lemmy.blahaj.zone
Yeah he’s been going on about this for years, they’re super determined to make Roblox into an “All Ages” platform with things like public voice chat and 17+ “experiences” but they completely neglect that the vast majority of their user base is barely even old enough to speak. To make matters worse, as far as I’m aware there’s no actual age verification other than just inputting your date of birth so most of those kids barely old enough to speak frequently access features like public voice chat
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lemmy.ml
Kids make maps. Stuff in the maps is sold for Roblox bucks. Roblox bucks cost money to buy. The kid who makes the map gets the Roblox bucks, and can sell them. The problem is you only get 30% back when you sell a Roblox buck. So kids spend time making big maps and servers, buying ads, getting shoutouts on YouTube/whatever, and Roblox takes a 70% cut from all of it
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thebrainbin.org
Oh boy, Roblox in the Philippines is on their knees… In case of video inaccesibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ICCrsFC6o&t=1157
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sh.itjust.works
“Product lead at Roblox” So… monetizing modules children made for free? Isn’t that like the whole thing with Roblox?