It so happened that my attitude to raising children (and who else to raise, not adults) has always been based on humanism, bordering on connivance. Even in my youth, teaching English to teenagers in a private school and to my peers in a medical college, I perceived each student as a whole universe with its own unique laws, life circumstances, opportunities and talents. The students quickly caught wind of this feature of the young teacher’s worldview and, of course, sometimes used it shamelessly - telling amazing stories about unfulfilled homework and making me crawl under the teacher's table with laughter.
Of course, over time, my humanistic fervor, not fully comprehended in my youth, faded slightly - I began to understand that people, in addition to free will and choice, need rules, boundaries, rituals, stability and a foundation. Children - even more.
Nevertheless, I believed and still consider myself not to have the right to create greenhouse conditions around a child, trying not to adapt the lives of those close to me to a growing person, but to help the growing person get comfortable in the world around him. This is not a matter of discipline and not an attempt to raise a child “comfortable” for society - quiet and always obedient (which, of course, is nothing wrong with, but I only saw such people on Soviet postcards). Boundaries and rules are needed not so that the child is not noticeable, but to make it easier for him to get used to the world of people.
Let's say, the rule “listen to the end of what they tell you, and then speak out yourself, it will be more convenient for everyone”, I consider justified, and “I’m an adult, I know better, and you keep quiet” - obscurantist. Borders should be drawn for the purposes of protection and prevention, and not for the purpose of prohibition.
Still from the film “The Wall”, 1982.
The same rules have always applied to available information. The question “Where do children come from?” - an honest answer in an accessible form, where, how and why. The question “Mom, will I die too?” - an honest affirmative answer and a conversation about the fact that the memory remains alive in our family, friends and descendants.
In general, my position in raising new people came down to two main factors: the desire to organically fit the child into daily life family and the desire not to limit his access to what does not pose a danger to his life and the comfort of others.
These two factors influenced my attitude towards a growing person's access to digital entertainment. Me, my family and my friends - modern people, who have been actively using and interested in digital technologies, gadgets and the Internet since their youth. Soon the Internet became my place of work; naturally, the son constantly saw his mother behind the screen of a laptop, smartphone and tablet; I’m used to the fact that I search for answers to some of his questions on Google; to the fact that cartoons can be watched on YouTube; Besides, you can play Cut The Rope on your smartphone. I am pleased with the way my son’s gradual immersion into the digital information environment took place and I am sure that for his age he has developed an adequate understanding of the network - as a place where one gains knowledge and where one can find, if desired, everything that interests one.
Something went wrong
My son got his own smartphone when he was 5 years old - he got his dad’s old phone. He played all parts of Angry Birds on it ( good game for children who are not destined to walk with a slingshot in the yard) and Bad Piggies (a cool engineering puzzle - I couldn’t cope with the levels, but a five-year-old could easily). The summer before starting school, he acquired Minecraft in his arsenal. Pocket Edition. I was even glad - how many times have I written about this toy right here on Newtonew, and I was always going to offer it to my son, but then somehow it happened.
Minecraft is, without exaggeration, a cool game, almost instantly after its release it acquired a fan subculture. I am still not able to understand what is so attractive about it to children of senior kindergarten and junior school age. While adult players may well be nostalgic for eight-bit graphics and enjoy the square Minecraft world, children do not experience such nostalgia. Nevertheless, elementary and middle school students are crazy about her - just look at how many let’s play films have been filmed and posted on YouTube by young, unspoiled souls. I came to the conclusion that Minecraft combines everything that, in principle, distinguishes computer games from all other types of entertainment:
- the opportunity to build your own world;
- non-linear way of interacting with the game world (not like with a book);
- interactivity (not the same as when watching programs and films);
- instant feedback;
- extensive opportunities for communication and self-expression (thanks to the gaming community).
These are excellent properties that develop systemic and strategic thinking, digital literacy, planning skills and even communication skills. Under several conditions: you yourself know how it all works, you are ready to spend a lot of time exploring the game world with your child, and... you do not use the mobile version of the game.
It was Minecraft Pocket Edition, the official Minecraft mobile app, that led to alarming consequences.
The Dark Side of Minecraft
We had Minecraft installed on a spare laptop at home, which didn’t really belong to anyone, and therefore came into the possession of our son - on an old MacBook (in this case, Mac OS is important) Anton launched his favorite toy, looked for tutorials himself, watched let’s plays on YouTube. I carefully controlled everything he watched, since he surfed through my active Google account. The version of Minecraft that Anton played on his MacBook and his playing style evoked only approval from me - he learned simple commands in the terminal, found new blocks, independently learned to handle them, and explored the possibilities of the world.
But I couldn’t call his style of playing on a smartphone constructive. One thing needs to be said here: there is a huge shadow industry serving Minecraft - modifications, or simply “mods”. A mod is a file with code that changes the original content of the game. They can add new features, for example, allowing you to play your own music in the background or add electricity, elevators or new dimensions to the game; can change appearance, for example, change textures; or they can seriously influence the entire course of the game, providing a loophole for cheats - for example, giving unlimited amount resources. Mods are not officially supported by the manufacturer, but there are a huge number of launchers that allow you to install and run mods. This is very easy to do in Minecraft for Windows and in mobile version Minecraft.
An entire industry is built on these mods, with millions of views.
Mods, when handled skillfully, can greatly enrich the gaming experience, complicate and diversify the game; but, unfortunately, the opportunity for easy money turns out to be much more attractive. Anton couldn’t figure out how to install mods on Mac OS, but he also had a mobile version!
In general, all that Anton’s game on a smartphone has become is searching, viewing and testing dozens of different mods. The main goal of the game - the development of your own world - was forgotten. The imagination, spatial thinking, and patience necessary to collect resources were left out of work.
All this has been replaced by a mindless race for new mods, their updates, short-term joy from visual goodies and a huge amount of resources, and quick disappointment from each acquisition - what you haven’t earned yourself soon gets boring.
And it will be difficult for an adult to stop himself if he finds himself in a giant hypermarket, where there is a lot of everything and everything is free - just reach out and take it. Candy? As much as you want. The most delicate pate? Yes, take it straight from here. Lemonade? Croissants? Caesar salad? Imagine yourself in such a place. The temptation is great to overeat, then suffer from indigestion, then reproach yourself for weakness of spirit and promise yourself that never again, but... But again there is a neon sign of this hypermarket, and again you cannot restrain yourself, and again then you get angry with yourself.
It is even more difficult for children to control their desires. And irritation from what they have received undeservedly also grows in them, but they are not aware of the reason for their negative emotions.
After a couple of months of playing Minecraft like this, I ended up with a capricious, apathetic, nervous child. A little more and it would look like this canonical example:
I had to do something drastic. During the winter holidays, after a week of skiing and reading books from his mother’s childhood in his grandmother’s house, Anton did not find his smartphone in its usual place.
Mom, where's the phone?
- He is temporarily not with us until you and I both understand what you are interested in, except for mods for Minecraft.
And guess what? This explanation, short and honest, was enough. Sometimes we check the official website together to see if the game (not mods!) has been updated. I did not restrict access to the laptop; he plays the desktop version of Minecraft, which I like, on the weekends. Read the entire home library of children's books. Anton no longer depends on charger, and the morning doesn’t start with the words “I’ll just install this mod and get dressed.”
Still, I have not lost my faith in video games and believe that they belong in school. After all, games at school are, by default, licensed versions without an easy bypass option and adult supervision. Moreover, there is successful examples and experiments - a Norwegian teacher, or even in Russian schools.
If the Minecraft hobby has passed you by, then we have made an adaptation of a large and thorough NY Times article about this game. Below you will find out why you drag these stupid cubes at all, what is the point of the game, and why children who play Minecraft will grow up smarter than you and become great programmers.
Jordan wants to set a hidden trap.
An 11-year-old boy with black horn-rimmed glasses was inspired by the sci-fi thriller “The Maze Runner” and now wants to build the same maze for his Minecraft friends. Jordan has created an Indiana Jones-style obstacle course with a waterfall and collapsing walls, but his goal is an unpredictable trap that will catch his friends by surprise. Really, how to do it? This problem haunts him.
And then a light bulb goes on in Jordan’s head – animals! Minecraft has its own zoo of animals, which the player is free to eat, tame, or simply avoid. One of the animals is the mooshroom, a red and white cow-like creature that wanders aimlessly around the map. Jordan uses these cows' erratic movements to hide the trap. He sets up pressure plates that activate traps, and then brings in some cows who start circling the area and accidentally trigger the traps. Jordan took advantage strange behavior cows to create, essentially, a generator random numbers inside Minecraft. In computer engineering parlance, Jordan hacked the system, forcing it to do something new and clever.
“It’s like planet Earth, a whole world that you build yourself,” explains the guy, leading us from the beginning of the maze to the exit. – My art teacher always said that games develop creative thinking only from the creators of these games. The only exception is Minecraft." Jordan leads us to the exit, and above it is imprinted the slogan “The Journey Itself” more important than that what awaits you at the end."
Since its release 7 years ago, Minecraft has become a sensation, spawning a new generation of players. With 100 million registered players and its status as the third best-selling game in history (after Tetris and Wii Sports), Microsoft shelled out a whopping $2.5 billion for Minecraft in 2014. There have been blockbuster games before, but as Jordan rightly points out, this is a different story. Mineraft is part meeting place, part tech tool, part theater stage where kids build machines, design worlds, and make YouTube videos. And it is not perceived as a game in the usual sense - while Google, Apple and other giants are trying to simplify computer interfaces, Minecraft, on the contrary, encourages the player to explore the world, break it and put it back together. It forces you to use your brains and work with your hands.
Minecraft takes us back to the 70s, to the era of early PCs like the Commodore 64 and kids who learned to code in Basic to write software for themselves and their friends. And today, when the President of the United States encourages children to learn to code, Minecraft has become a way for them to approach coding from the back door. Not because it is necessary, but because it is interesting. And if the children of the 70s became the ones who paint the canvas of the current digital world, then what will the children of the Minecraft generation bring to the world?
“Children,” writes social critic Walter Benjamin, “love to play where there is work that they understand. They are irresistibly attracted by waste from construction, gardening, household, weaving and carpentry." According to Colin Fanning of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, European philosophers have long considered a game with blocks, which Friedrich Froebel perfected about three hundred years ago (he is called the creator of the concept kindergarten), a useful game. Starting to build with blocks, children learn to synthesize complex objects from simple parts, which later allowed them to better see patterns in the world around them.
Pedagogical pioneers like Maria Montessori used wooden blocks for teaching children mathematics. During the last century's cataclysms like World War II, some architects like Carl Theodor Sorensen proposed turning ruins into playgrounds where children could play and build at the same time. And Swedish teachers, afraid that children would lose touch with the physical world, introduced sloyd (in the original: sloyd) at school - carpentry lessons that are still taught in Swedish schools.
In Minecraft, children start the game free to do whatever they want: there is a pristine environment around which the player is free to build whatever they want. And it all starts with wooden blocks, which the player makes from trees that come to hand. In this respect, Minecraft is less like video games and more like Lego bricks, which replaced traditional wooden construction sets in the post-war era. Although today Lego is less about fantasy and more about brands - store shelves are littered with themed sets like Hogwarts Castle from Harry Potter or the rebel base from Star Wars.
“You buy a kit, read the instructions, assemble the model and put it on the shelf,” explains iconic game designer Peter Molyneux in the Minecraft movie. “Lego used to be a box of pieces that you took, threw on the floor and made magic out of them.” Now Minecraft does it."
As a Swede, Mojang founder and Minecraft creator Markus Persson brought Swedish sloyd into the digital realm. Persson, 36, was a child of the computer age who taught himself to write code on his father's Commodore 128 at age seven and by age 20 was developing games and tinkering with code for an online photo storage service in his CD-lined bedroom.
He released the first version of Minecraft in 2009. The game principle was simple, like the corner of a house - every time the player starts the game, it generates a new landscape for him with mountains, forests and lakes. Next, the player is free to dig the ground, mine stone ore, or process wood to make the coveted block. From these blocks he can erect buildings, or combine them to get new item. Combine a couple of stone blocks with wood and get a pickaxe. With it you will get to the bottom of gold, silver and diamonds (just don't dig too deep, to the earth's core). Or use it to kill that spider over there, and use its web to make a string for a bow or crossbow.
At first, the game was just fun for overgrown nerds, but in 2011, all the children in the world got hooked on Minecraft, and sales soared. And even after 5 years, at a price of $27 per copy, Minecraft remains one of the best-selling games - about 10 thousand copies fly off store shelves every day! According to official Microsoft statistics, the main age of Minecraft players today is 28 years old. 40% of them are women.
Over time, Persson improved his game. First came the survival mode, in which the player had to build defensive structures to repel regular attacks from monsters. Residents of Minecraft Country were then able to share their maps with friends. Following this, Persson opened the game code (players began making mods) and added multiplayer. Today, for $5 a month, children play in the same world with hundreds of thousands of other players, and the concept between solo play and multiplayer has completely disappeared.
The game became a hit, but Persson felt like a squeezed lemon - he was fed up with the overwhelming popularity and the fans who constantly demanded to add/remove/change something, and then criticized the same changes. In 2014, Marcus finally got fed up with the game and handed Mojang over to Microsoft for a modest fee of $2.5 billion. And as compensation, he bought himself a mansion for $70 million, in which he refuses to remember his brainchild.
Persson left, but the blocks remained. There was also complete freedom of action. As I watched my children play, I saw replicas of the Taj Mahal, the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, and the castle with the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones built. But then it turned out that real freedom was hidden not in the blocks, but in “redstone” - an element that is mined from red ore and is the game analogue of electrical wiring. My 8-year-old son Zev showed me the automatic doors he made using Redstone, and 10-year-old Gabriel came up with a game within a game. He constructed a giant catapult, which, using redstones, threw anvils at other players, and they dodged the projectiles flying at them, running merrily within the playing area.
Persson developed Redstone with an eye to conventional electronic circuits. By adding on and off switches to this block, you can make "logic gates," as computer designers call them. Place two switches next to each other, connect them with a redstone, and now you have an AND gate: if switch 1 and 2 are on, current will flow through the wire. You can also build an “OR” logical element, in which it is enough to use only one of the switches. If we look inside a regular microchip, we see a similar architecture.
This winter I was visiting a 14-year-old boy named Sebastian. He showed off his machinery to me, the largest of which was trading platform- a giant wall near which players could sell things by placing them in a special chute. This wall was full of AND gates, and it took Sebastian several days to design the wall and find a bunch of AND gates for it. “Move here,” Sebastian tells me, diving into the shaft under the device. Inside, like an architect at a construction site, he shows me the insides of his apparatus. “Leverages are connected to these wires different sides walls - one with this one, the other opposite. When both are turned on, they activate a piston that attaches the redstone to this block at the top of the distribution tower.”
To work with the “red stone” you need logical thinking, perseverance and the ability to find holes in the system. For example, five-year-old Natalie installed an automatic door in her castle, but it did not open. Natalie frowned briefly, and then began to look for a bug in the system - it turned out that she had connected one of the red stones incorrectly, and it was sending current to the other side of the circuit.
This is what programmers call computational thinking. And this is one of the most important educational effects of Minecraft. Unbeknownst to themselves, children learn the daily struggle with bugs, familiar to every programmer. After all, it is not the gods who burn the pots, but the gods who find and correct errors in the code. From this point of view, Minecraft is an ideal educational game for modern children - it touches on elements of science, mathematics and engineering, but teaches it through play. This is in contrast to the government's "teach kids to code" initiative, which the US government spent millions of dollars on. The funny thing is that Persson himself and his followers never considered Minecraft as a pedagogical tool. “We were just making a game that we wanted to play,” says current Mojang chief developer Jens Bergsten.
The next useful skill that Minecraft players acquire is the ability to work on the command line. In a world where lines of code have replaced glossy interfaces, ordinary person breaks into a sweat at the sight of ten simple lines of code. But without learning to work with the command line, you will never tame your computer. In Minecraft, children learn this, again, not because it is necessary, but because it is fun. Call the command line “/”, type “time set 0” into it and see the sun’s tail going beyond the horizon. Learn the command chains and you can perform magic like Harry Potter.
The next hero of the article is seventh-grader Gus from Brooklyn, whom we met this spring. While watching Gus play with his friends, I notice how he types the command “/give AdventureNerd bow 1 0 (Unbreakable:1,ench:[(id:51,lvl:1)],display:(Name:“Destiny”) )". She gives his character an indestructible magical bow called Destiny. Gus's desktop is full of virtual stickers with the commands he uses most often. Several commands are combined into a block, which leads to a chain of actions. Just like clicking on the icon of the desired program launches blocks of code in its depths.
“Minecraft is one of those places where young people can interact with more experienced people much older than them,” says Mimi Ito, creator of Connected Camps at the University of California, which studies the relationship between learning and computer games. “These connections become key: the kids get the opportunity to look at the professional side of things, and that’s something they don’t show at school.” And don’t let the form of such interaction between adults and children unfamiliar with each other scare you - according to Ito, when the group is given an interesting task, age fades into the background.
Ito has found that the Minecraft hobby encourages children to develop other talents. For example, 15-year-old Eli just wanted to change a few game textures, but in the end he got to the point where he mastered Photoshop combined with drawing and now posts entire mods on the gaming forum, where both adults and children help him. “Criticism there is always constructive,” says Eli. “The gaming community is very helpful.”
You may laugh, but playing Minecraft also develops stress resistance. Mojang makes changes to the game weekly, and one morning you might wake up and find that after a fresh update your gigantic Railway does not work any more. Ito sees this as a valuable experience - practical and philosophical sense children are getting stronger.
“Minecraft creaks and you try to fix it,” she says. – This is a different type of thinking. If your iPhone application does not work, then you just sigh. If something doesn't work in Minecraft, you sigh and then start fixing the problem. Not because you have to, but because you want it. It’s similar to the aesthetic of home brewing – you can buy a pint of lager at the store, but it’s more fun to brew it yourself.” With Minecraft now in its 7th year, Georgia Tech's Ian Bogost is looking forward to welcoming the first students who grew up playing the game into his classrooms.
Ava, a 5th grader I met on Long Island, started playing Minecraft 2 years ago. She launched into “survival mode,” not really knowing what to do next. “I thought this skeleton was kind, so I asked how he was doing,” Ava says. “Then I died.” The fact is that Minecraft is a complex and incomprehensible game. Unlike blockbuster games, there are no pop-ups or hints, no one leading you by the hand to show you how to turn your head, run or squat. Minecraft doesn't explain anything: not that skeletons can kill you, not that you can reach lava (which will also kill you) if you dig too deep, not even that you can craft a pickaxe.
During the development of the game, Persson did not have the money to write instructions. It’s unlikely that he would have guessed how ingenious the decision to abandon hints turned out to be: today, players on forums hourly share secrets and strategies of the game (there are about 5 thousand articles about Minecraft on Gamepedia), book publishers publish entire volumes with the secrets of the game, and they sell well. For example, one of the books about the red stone overtook such literary hits as “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. In his review, writer and critic Robert Sloan calls Minecraft "a game of secret knowledge."
The most important assistant in learning Minecraft is YouTube. Having found death at the hands of a skeleton, Ava went there to look for answers, because the easiest way to learn new things is by watching how a master does it. YouTube has become a second home for Minecraft players - let's play, instructions, tutorials and just fun videos are posted here. Today, the word “Minecraft” is the second most popular search term on YouTube (after “music”), and the total number of themed videos has exceeded 70 million. For young players, these videos have become an opportunity to abandon the television diet in favor of what you personally like. “I don’t understand this,” Ava’s mother complains on my second visit. – Why are you watching someone else play? Why don’t you play yourself?”
Ava recently launched a gaming channel on YouTube with her friends. Her father bought her a microphone, and her sister drew a sign that said “Recording in progress” (on the other side “Recording not in progress, but please be quieter”). While I'm sitting in her room, Ava calls her friend Patrick on Skype and they start recording. This clean water improvisation - they joke about Ava drowning in lava traps, like real radio hosts or sports commentators. If something goes wrong, they start again. Seeing this in person, I better understand the words of the head of the gaming division of YouTube, Ryan Waite, about the blurred boundaries between the player and the viewer.
Some Minecraft broadcasters have become really famous and make good money from it. These stars are mainly not children, but young people. For example, 25-year-old Stumpy Cat from Brighton has 7 million subscribers on his channel. His colleague Mumbo Jumbo from Brighton only has a million. But this million reached very quickly when the guy uploaded a video with 20 homemade mechanisms to open doors. “Of course, it’s not the new Gangam Style, but it still turned out well,” says Mumbo Jumbo, whose real name is Oliver Brotherhood. Now Oliver spends 50 hours a week on the game itself and recording thematic videos. It's actually work.
“I told my mom I was quitting my job as a postman,” Mumbo Jumbo recalls. – When asked why, I showed her my channel and my first 40 thousand subscribers. That's more traffic than the corporate newspaper she consults for." IN next year Oliver will study programming in college. In his opinion, programming is very similar to Minecraft - you experiment, learn, make mistakes and ask for advice on the forum. By the way, the guy was accepted into college even before the final exam results - his YouTube channel became his admission ticket to the university.
Last year, 12-year-old London launched a separate server for his friends and acquaintances. A couple of days later he saw that some merry fellow broke into their holiday and blew up all their buildings to hell. Then London did a little magic with the settings and opened individual access to the server for friends. Now try to imagine this in some World Of Warcraft, where the server settings are controlled exclusively by the developers. Microsoft allows you to play on a shared server, rent your own, or create an individual game and play over Wi-Fi with a friend. And here the most interesting part begins - how will children take advantage of this freedom? Will their world be equal for both creators and destroyers? And what to do with rule violators?
Sociologist Seth Frey from Darmouth College studied the behavior of hundreds of children on Minecraft servers for three years and came to the conclusion that the game improves their social intelligence. “Kids are running around with their blocks and you think it's just a game,” explains Seth. “But in fact they are solving one of the most complex issues in the history of mankind - how to establish interaction between different social groups so that everyone is comfortable." In the experiment that Seth conducted, most of the participants were teenage boys with all their complexes and problems of puberty. "This the worst people on Earth,” Seth either jokes or says seriously. “And in my opinion, this experiment in socialization should have failed. It’s all the more surprising that everything worked out.”
Three years ago, the Darien, Connecticut, municipal library launched a public Minecraft server that could only be played by library card holders. In the first month, they added 900 new readers under the age of 20, according to John Blueberg, the library's director of development. “And this is a real community,” John shares. “As a rule, I receive up to a dozen calls a day like ‘Hello, this is Dasher 80, some idiot blew up my house while I wasn’t here, figure it out,’ or ‘Hello, someone robbed me.’ We used to deal with conflict resolution ourselves, but then we noticed that if the children were given a little freedom, then towards the end of the day you would have other messages on your answering machine like ‘This is Dasher 80, we have sorted out the problem, ignore my previous message.’”
Many parents and experts believe that Minecraft is an additional dimension, a digital sandbox in which children learn to socialize and respect other people's space (even virtual) without the supervision of elders. Previously, the street played the role of this sandbox, but in Minecraft, although children are at home, they communicate with friends using new technologies. In a sense, Minecraft is not so much a game as it is a social network.
Life on a Minecraft server constantly requires more advanced technical skills from children. 11-year-old Leia was furious about griefers (as vandals are called in the game) and one day asked the server administrators for moderation rights. For several months Leia worked as a police officer. A program called "command spy" allowed her to watch recordings of players' actions: she moved all the bad guys into a virtual "time out" zone and soon she was promoted. “I'm supposed to give punishments to anyone who breaks the rules,” she told me at the time. In fact, Leia played the role of system administrator on the server.
But not everyone adapts so easily to the world of Minecraft. Shy 17-year-old Tori has been playing Minecraft for 2 years, but mostly in single player mode. When she decided to try playing online, other players, having learned that she was a girl, posted “BITCH” blocks. Her fellow players consoled her and said that this happens everywhere. For example, a study of Halo players found that girls were bullied twice as often as boys. And in a typical survey of 874 people who identified themselves as online gamers, 63% of girls said they had been bullied. Some parents get angry because of this and forbid their daughters to play online games, some daughters do not pay attention to this and simply hide their gender or put animals on their avatars. Like Leia.
How long will Minecraft's popularity last? This directly depends on Microsoft management. The company's executive directors have little control over the game. All major issues regarding the development of the game are resolved by Mojang in Sweden. They can improve the game, or they can, on the contrary, negate all the magic by making a new interface or changing the combat system. Once Mojang tried to change the battle system, but this caused a storm of criticism - children did not want their sandbox to be turned into a regular field for fights.
But so far there is no reason to worry, and Minecraft is reaching the masses. Teachers are starting to try to bring elements of Minecraft into both math and history lessons. Many libraries already install Minecraft on their computers. For example, the Bronx Library Center recently installed Minecraft servers. A local librarian gave the kids, who didn’t have their own PCs and came to play in the library, the task of building a Parisian Arc de Triomphe in 45 minutes. Three guys started working together, while the fourth, younger one, developed his own design. The trio teased each other all the time, and after 45 minutes, when the arch was ready, they stuffed it with dynamite, admired the fireworks from the cubes and went off to play another game.
In the corner, the fourth boy continued to work on his Arch. He told me that he often stays late playing Minecraft with friends. They built the Statue of Liberty, World shopping mall and even a copy of the library we were in. He clicked the blocks with his cursor, creating an inverted staircase to mimic the rounded arch of the Arch. He sat back in his chair to enjoy the work he had done. “I haven’t blinked in I don’t know how many minutes,” he said. The model was finished and looked quite realistic.
“I’m actually proud of it,” he said with a smile.
I don't know about everyone else, but when I was growing up (in the 80s) there were people who talked about video games loudly and often:
Video games are bad for you
They're causing your brains to rot!
Children today will never learn how to be normal (adults - editor's note), if they sit in front of the monitor and play all day!
At the time I thought it was just the ravings of a madman. It's just a game after all. As a child who grew up hearing these words, I changed my perspective. Not much and not for the worse.
Games don't rot your brain!
The main argument in the statement “ Games are causing your brain to rot!" is that " when you play you don't do real things". This is a separate topic for discussion, but there are studies that prove that games not only do not rot the brains, but, on the contrary, make them work more actively. The same goes for adults. Since Minecraft is a well-known game, I will use it as an example.
Almost everything you can do in Minecraft requires some ability. For example, building even the most ordinary house you will use creative thinking. What if we build a big fortress on a mountain? Here you will already be to plan construction from the very beginning, so as not to get into trouble. The player will have to research territory in order to understand whether it will be possible to build a castle in the chosen location. Next you will need calculate how many resources will be required for construction. If the player is going to build a fortress in survival mode, then he will have to think about safety, because at night he will be attacked by hostile mobs,
And after building the castle you will need to do design interior spaces And ennoblement territories.
Games don't make people antisocial!
The image of a lonely, self-contained person sitting in a dark room and a gamer who never says a word. Anyone who has ever played Minecraft online knows that this is a complete lie. Here I can say for sure that the example may not only be Minecraft. Now the developers are trying to make the game as social. For example, in Counter Strike: Global Offensive It is not possible to play without voice communication at all. You can only play Ingress and Pokemon Go alone at the initial levels.
By its very nature, playing online forces people into contact with each other. Let's go back to the fortress example. Let's say we have already planned everything and now we must begin construction. We have a lot of work and we want to invite friends to help us. Now 2 points become obvious:
- Communication vital in the game;
- Joint efforts rally people into a friendly team.
Now the team must decide who collects resources, who designs the fortress (if the fortress has not been fully thought out) and who builds it (and what parts of it), who will forage for food, and who will defend the others from hostile creatures. In addition to this, you need to distribute the players so that they work efficiently. Trying to assemble such a team, the leader acquires invaluable experience in communicating with people, which will be useful to him in the future.
Antisocial research has been carried out for many years and as a result, it was found that games with a multiplayer mode helped players overcome self-doubt and fear of other people. About 70% of users were happy to communicate with other players. In Minecraft, gaming communities range from just a few people playing together local network, to entire servers where more than a hundred people are online at the same time. For example, on the site the daily reach is more than 5000 players.
Games are not bad!
I've been playing games for two decades. During this time they have grown and developed and, it seems to me, games improve everyday life rather than destroy it. Some people make a career out of gaming. We can see this by watching the channels of famous let-players on YouTube or Twitch. In addition, Minecraft is one of the top mmo-RPG games (according to: http://vsemmorpg.ru/top-mmorpg)
People have always played games. Over time, their shape changed. It all started with dolls made from grass. and sticks sharpened with a sharp stone, and now our games have been transferred to computers and phones. Games have always been played to have fun, but in addition to that, games teach us some things.
I don't know how video games are worse than the ones that came before them. And in some cases they are even better!
What do you think about video games? Are they harmful or beneficial?
Write your thoughts about this in the comments!
According to a study conducted by Octoloy and Newzoo, the above game collected about 4 billion views during the month of March alone.
This figure is unlikely to surprise many parents who are hopelessly trying to get their children away from screens. Neither football, nor cycling, nor a picnic in the forest can distract young gamers from watching videos of people building with little green bricks.
Parents call this passion differently: some call it obsession, others call it addiction. However, both of them are very concerned about her.
Opinions vary.
In numerous articles and online messages, parents complain that Minecraft has taken over their children's lives, they neglect household chores and school assignments, and are annoyed when they are not allowed to play. As a result, many parents have to prohibit this game altogether or strictly limit their time on the computer. One father explained his decision to limit time this way: “Minecraft, like other games, addictive, is limitless, but children’s childhood is not. I would like them to explore not the virtual, but the real world.”
Other parents don’t see a big problem in this game. As the father of two boys notes, his children spend hours watching videos with different Minecraft versions. “Nowadays they watch YouTube a lot more than regular TV. Am I against it? Probably a little - yes, however, I am fully aware of the place this game occupies in the lives of my children and their peers. Banning it means separating your children from their friends,” he says.
Interest in the game also has beneficial consequences, since children have mastered the program well, learned to create their own game modes, and manage their own game server, create and edit videos and run your own YouTube channel.
Minecraft on YouTube is a vast ocean of materials - there are almost 42 million videos. There are hundreds of channels dedicated to Minecraft, the most popular of which are SkyDoesMinecraft and Yogscast. Some Minecraft channels have become real sensations. The cat-moderated YouTube channel Stampy has 5.6 million subscribers and about 3.4 billion views. Last year, this channel was the fourth most popular on YouTube.
There are also channels for parents, such as MineMum, created by educator Bec Oakley, which aims to help parents navigate the minefield of Minecraft. “YouTube is a new generation of television. It allows children to learn and share knowledge. He entertains the children. When they watch others play, they gain new experience of the game and can also share it with others,” she notes. - Unlimited content. It is extremely interesting, educational and useful.”
According to Oakley, this hobby is not a serious problem. She emphasizes that attention needs to be paid to the time children spend playing and the impact on their mood and health. “It is very important that parents teach their children to enjoy the game without causing harm healthy image life. Parents need to teach their children “healthy” gaming, which involves, first of all, the ability to stop in time. Parents need to establish rules for safe play, as well as rewards for following these rules,” she notes.
It is worth noting that Minecraft is the creation of Swedish game designer and programmer Markus Persson, who is also known as Notch. Initially, the game was not designed for young players. Persson was inspired by games such as Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper.
Some time later, the programmer founded the Mojang company, which produced the game for some time, and last year it was sold to Microsoft.
How games affect the human brain.
There are many studies regarding the effect on the human brain. Some of them are quite contradictory. Researchers in China used MRI to monitor the brains of eighteen students who spent about ten hours online, mostly playing games such as World of Warcraft. Compared to a control group of students who spent no more than two hours a day on the computer, gamers had less gray matter in their brains, which is responsible for reasoning.
In the early nineties, scientists warned that because only the parts of the human brain responsible for movement and vision were stimulated, other parts responsible for emotions, learning and behavior might be underdeveloped.
Regarding research on the game Minecraft, an article by Robert Paisonau and psychologist Yun Lee, published by Quartz, notes that it does not seem to be as creative as some parents believe. “In fact, the creativity of the game is inherent in the program itself - this is a huge number of combinations, materials and tools. And the players have only one task left - to create more complex designs. Despite the fact that at first glance the game seems creative, in reality it is a rather monotonous activity. Most of the children we studied experienced irritability after a long period of play."
Minecraft is an incredibly popular computer game which many children like. However, some parents cannot share the joy of their sons and daughters regarding this game. There are a huge number of reasons why children love Minecraft, and the same reasons make parents fall into a stupor and scratch their heads thoughtfully. These are 5 things kids really love about Minecraft. But you don’t even suspect that most modern parents simply don’t understand them.
Minecraft language
How can you even explain the language of Minecraft? Friends come to visit your child, they gather in the room and start talking about noobs and endermans, laughing and giggling while the parents listen and think that it would be better if they talked about sports. Many parents aren't even into sports, but they can at least participate in this conversation. 
Parents want to be involved in their children's lives, but as soon as they start talking about Minecraft, they immediately begin to think it's Latin. And when parents ask their children to explain one concept, it immediately becomes necessary to explain another concept, and then another. And by the time you understand why your child needed to kill the Ender Dragon, half of your day has already passed. As a result, it all ends with the child telling the story, and the parents simply nodding and hoping that they didn’t just agree to buy some add-on.
YouTubers
It’s not enough that Minecraft itself is strange for parents, but there are also a million YouTube stars who talk about this game, show off their achievements, and share jokes that only those who play Minecraft can understand. And we're not talking about any specific YouTuber here. Parents who have had to rip a tablet out of the hands of a child who has been listening to someone talk about a game for hours on end will understand the problem. Yes, many of these YouTubers earn more in a month than their parents earn in a month. whole year, and maybe this irritates parents just a little, but we're talking about not about money. It's about about sanity, and hour-long videos of teenagers recording loud, annoying Minecraft movies in their rooms lead adults to say such banal things as "What is this world coming to?" and so on. And this is terrible, because it makes parents feel the way their parents felt before - old and outdated. And the circle is closed.
Addiction
Many parents don’t understand one thing: is there really nicotine or some other drug added to Minecraft? Every parent whose child plays Minecraft understands how difficult it is to get him to turn off the game. It comes to tears, screams and even fists. Children even begin to swear at their parents. Moreover, both small children and teenagers do this. Sometimes you get the feeling that if zombies break into your children's real house, they won't care, but if this happens to their Minecraft house, the world will end. For many parents, this game looks like some kind of pixelated disgrace, but children cannot agree with this.
Disorientation
If you're trying to bond with your child by playing Minecraft, you'll want to remember the barf bowl. No, the game is not disgusting or disgusting, but it is disorienting. You start to feel dizzy from everything that is happening around you, you don’t understand what to do, and you find yourself in some room with a pickaxe in your hands. And then your child begins to laugh at you as if you are a complete idiot, and not an adult with a higher education and a prestigious job. And then the child himself sits down at the computer, his Blue eyes begin to rush around the screen while he corrects the situation you created, and he begins to say: “See? Do you see? But you still don't see the difference between what you did and what he does.
Trying to understand makes everything worse
Like any good parent, when your child starts playing Minecraft, you try to better understand the game by reading about it online. Here's an excerpt from one such article, called "A Parent's Guide to Minecraft": Minecraft is a sandbox game created by Swedish programmer and gamer Markus "Notch" Persson. The game world is generated procedurally, and its essence lies in collecting resources, creating objects, building and (if the player wishes) battles.” Many parents have encountered strange texts in their lives, but this is just crazy.
conclusions
The conclusion can be drawn as follows: most children like this game, while some parents simply cannot understand it. And the saddest thing is that many parents initially believed that they would not have problems with understanding. Not just Minecraft, but everything that concerns their children. When people become parents, they don't think they'll ever have to say "that's the way it is these days" or "why can't you play normal games?" as these are some of the most unpleasant things they've ever been told. their own parents when they were young. However, this is what parenting is all about. It's a reality where you get older and try to understand your children, wishing they would just do what you understand.
