The Screen Time Panic Sets Parents Up to Fail

27:31And she's gotten some animation as well. And her pitch to me was like, I can't take my tablet when I want to go take photos of things outside. And I'm like, that is... That's a... Yeah. And your thought might be, well, get a digital camera. But think about the ecosystem these days. It's like, digital camera requires you to then extract photos, put it on a device. And so her pitch, I don't think she was trying to be sneaky. It was just like, well, I just take this, then it's already got the apps I already use, which means I can edit things on my tablet and edit things on here. I can take photos.

28:03I'm like, shit, that's a... Yeah, okay, fine. Okay, but here's like... I know it's a cell phone, but I'm not turning on the cell phone part. You are not old enough to To me, the defining feature of a cell phone is 24-7 access to data that you can use at all times, which fundamentally changes your relationship with a device. And alongside that track, often when kids are getting phones, which is these days in middle school, it usually means social networks start becoming a conversation. And so my thing was to her, it was like, you're going to hear from your older friends like Snapchat or whatever.

28:39Don't even come to me about it. That's not a conversation. It's a non-starter. But if what you want is to be able to take pictures and access the same apps you have on a smaller device, that is fine. And also, secretly, part of the reason she wanted it was because one of her best friends is 3 years older than her that lives down the street. Her friend got a phone and she felt left out. And so that was my way of bridging the gap between those 2 things. Are they allowed to have the devices at dinner at a restaurant? Only if it would be helpful to us. Yeah. So I would say taking it to a restaurant is exceptionally rare.

29:18There, and this is a big credit to my wife, we have a whole art tub of things that exists in the car permanently that is cycled in with new things. But that's not to say it doesn't happen. If we go to a bar or restaurant to, say, watch a sports game, art activities cannot last you two and a half hours to make it through four quarters of a football game. And this is where I felt no shame over this, but my wife did feel a little bit. And eventually we got to a place where the kids are very young. They cannot be expected to sit in a bar restaurant and entertain themselves for two and a half hours at a table.

29:59At a certain point, we should use this tool to make them happier, to make ourselves happier. We want to watch the end of this football game. Our kids want to go outside. And that is just the nature of, I think, modern parenting, where just let them watch videos for half an hour. We'll let this game wrap up and then we'll get out of here. So that is the distribution of devices. And then the questions ahead for me are, when does that pretend cell phone become a real cell phone? When does a child get something like a watch if you're trying to have more location tracking as they get on a bike and go around?

30:34Sort of stuff that didn't exist for you and I when we got on a bike, but is definitely part of the regular conversation with modern parenting.

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35:13Yeah, one unspoken rule I think that has emerged for us is that we're more likely to give our kid access to a screen after every other activity has been exhausted yeah like you played with your toys you ran around you had a snack you read a book you played with mom and dad and then it's like i don't know man like he knows there's a screen he's done all the other things he's had like he he's had like a well-rounded few hours of activity. And it's like, okay, you know what I mean? It's sort of like he ate his vegetables, so to speak. And here's one distinction I'd make. It's like screen time studies and conversation about screen time.

35:57The word there is really important, which is screen. And the other word there is time. And what's on the screen is so much more important than the fact that they're on the screen. And I think that's one of my guiding principles. So when I say, there are plenty of days, like Lazy Saturdays, Sundays, where my children, if you were looking at the screen time count, it's at four hours. And you're like, oh, you spend a whole afternoon letting your kids on their tablets? Well, they spend three and a half hours role-playing in Roblox or Minecraft. And in any other context of playing with the dollhouse or other versions of play, that would be seen as very healthy.

36:38And so what happens on the screen is frankly more important than the amount of time that is spent on the device. It's not inconsequential. But if you're saying like, oh, all my child's screen time is dedicated to watching YouTube shorts. Okay, yeah, maybe doing that for four hours a day, unless you're sick with the flu and you just have to find some way to get through the next day is not the approach. But three hours of my children actively role-playing, enjoying time with one another actively, is, in my opinion, not something I'm going to get too upset at. This just stirred so many important observations, I think, that I've made recently.

37:18One is, you said, it's really important what's on the screen. And I agree in that in principle. But one of the things that really shocked me, I just wasn't prepared for this. It's like people talk about screen time and how addictive screens can be. And I guess in my mind, that's always related to content. Like the kid is really into Sesame Street. The kid is really into Roblox. The kid is really into social media. You know what I mean? It's the thing that's on the screen that's pulling them. But I guess what I found is that even from infancy, it's clear that we're attracted to screens. And it's like, in my opinion, the biological aspect of it is underrated, right?

38:05There's something about the brightness of the screen, the vibrancy of the colors, the high refresh rate of an iPhone that just draws the eye. And in the same way that a casino kind of pulls you in or even Hades, you know what I mean? the way that numbers and stuff and everything pops on screen it's just like, well look at all these apps the thing about the difference between you and I with screens that we grew up, screens were for a discrete action the things you could do on them were very limited sure there were channels on the TV or the access to whatever games you had but the devices these days, all of them, reward and engage impulsive behavior, which is like, oh I'm tired of doing this switch over to this, I'm tired of doing this And other actions like you're talking about with your kid of like, play with your toys or read a book are discreet, slow the world down, engage with something.

39:05Maybe not for long. Maybe you don't want to do it. But it is... The way that you change gears from one action to another, one preference to another, is fundamentally different in the real world with physical objects than it is on a rainbow-colored device with dozens of apps that within moments, you can decide, well, I'm bored with this. I'll do something else. Go to the App Store, request, can I download? You know what I mean? That is a loop that I think, especially at younger ages, despite the fact that these devices don't stress me out that much, I'm also not going to sit here and tell you they don't have profoundly addicting and exploitative qualities to them.

39:44Even in the case where I don't know that it's necessarily nefarious. I don't think the construction of iOS or the Android operating systems is nefarious in that regard. But I think the devices, their construction, especially for younger minds, can lead to, well, why wouldn't I just want to do this? Why would I want to do the other stuff? Which is very adorable. I don't blame a three-year-old for saying like, yeah, I'd like to just do the iPad. Thank you. Like, yeah, of course. So would I. Yeah. And everything... I think people understand that on the extreme end of it is something like TikTok or other vertical video platforms where very short form, you like it, you watch something for seven seconds, you don't like it, you just flip up, right?

40:28And that's a very impulsive extreme end of it. But everything arcs that way, and it catches you in ways that it didn't expect. And it's exactly the difference you said. If I wanted to play a game, you pop something into the Super Nintendo, that's what you're playing. You want to watch a video, you put in a VHS, you're watching Star Wars and that's the thing that you're watching and there is the accessibility of the movies on the shelf and I can watch it a million times and that's what we did and that's what kids do but I'm noticing that it does even like my kid is a little older than two but even at this point the logic of that system is already apparent to him and he is starting to manipulate it in the sense that he's very into cars like the Pixar franchise hell yeah and uh that used to be we're sitting down we're watching the movie we're watching the movie again we're watching he's seen all the cars movies but now he does now he's like oh he he realized that we can like skip to any point in the cars movie so he's like let's get the dialogue dude like let's get to the race you know what i mean so and that's already that's already apparent to him and like sometimes i indulge it but now i'm like well wait i don't want him to it's like the movie right like the experience of consuming a movie is like the ups and downs of this is a slow scene this is a fast scene this is a sad scene this is a happy scene he's like no i just want to see lightning mcqueen race that's my my younger has done uh younger one has done stuff like that but especially she went through like many kids a deep deep k-pop demon hunter phase that we are still uh working our we'll see we'll see if it survives to her birthday in march which she claims it'll be k-pop demon hunter is like that's gonna be 10 months of k-pop okay um but um it's hard to untangle is am i is this me being a millennial boomer is it just okay that like you fast forward to like the cool scene that you like i know you need to be sit with the sad part like you need to sit with the sad part before you get the get that And I'm broadly with you.

42:35I understand the impulse. And one way to counteract that is one of my favorite things. And this doesn't work for every kid. But my wife and I deeply love going to the movies. And so despite how expensive it is, we still regularly take our kids to the movie theater. Even though I know those movies will be on Disney Plus. I'm already playing for Disney Plus. It'll be there in four months. We take our kids to go to the theater because it is one of those instances with both children where they, like, it's dark, it's loud, the screen is bright, and they sit and we'll watch. I mean, they sat through both Wicked films, like, you know, movies that are, you know, two plus hours long.

43:13And my fibro got, you know, got squirrely by the end of the first Wicked. She was four when that came out. But like, and for them, like, there's no way for them to, the context of the TV at home that they have full control over because of a remote, their devices that give them full control over the content. But when they go to the movie theater, that's all stripped away. And so for my wife and I, it's like, well, I'll stop stressing about that as much at home because we found a world where all the control is taken away from them and they just have to watch the movie in a theater, in a social context.

43:46We're like, you have to be quiet because there's other people around. And we found that to be very useful to help them... Because they do engage with the story way more when they've seen it in a theater than when they watch it at home because there's a thousand distractions of getting up or I'm going to get a snack or I'm going to do that. It's not even necessarily always just a screen or control issue as much as just at home, you're less likely to sit and emotionally engage with the art that's on screen. Whereas the movie theater, we found a lot of success with that. One last thing broadly about screen time before we move on to Roblox, because I do want to discuss Roblox.

44:24you said like we're we're talking about aiming for a healthy relationship with screens but what that means is a very complicated conversation and it requires you to examine your own relationship with screens and if you think that's healthy and i think for us specifically that is even a more complicated question because I, like you, was left to my own devices, pun intended. And I was in some chat rooms that I wasn't supposed to be on. And that's just not a big deal. But it's like I learned how to pirate video games. And I just did all this stuff that I wouldn't want my kid to do. I had access to pornography before that was probably advisable.

45:15but not like today though I mean like it's like everything got speed run in terms of access which is just for sure but you pirate like you pirating a movie off of IRC like an IRC like bot that you're DMing with like an upload download ratio is like slightly different than the way it works now but it's like for people who don't know like you said it's like you were on some IRC channel you kind of leverage that into a career in writing about video games that you started very early you know and kind of like a a wonder kid for for for reporting on video games and i similarly like all this stuff the pirating chat rooms even the pornography it's like i leverage that into like my my career like that's that's my life you know what i mean and i guess the question is like how do you work backwards to what is a good relationship with screens for your kid based on your own relationship.

46:12What is healthy? I find this to be extremely challenging, which is both my nine-year-old is old enough to when she's been told to get off the screen, she's like, why are you on your phone? Great question. Yeah. It's a good one. It's like, well, you're just playing a video game. These are good points. These are good points. And eventually, it's dad's job. It stops being like my nine-year-old can cut through the BS on that one. Sometimes I just tell her the rules are different. You're a kid. Sorry. That is just sometimes the nature of things. You didn't make breakfast this morning while you watched the screen.

46:45And so now I'm time shifting my screen time to after having made breakfast. But I do struggle with the fact that I figured it out. And my parents, to some degree, didn't know what was going on, but also just did fundamentally trust me. And I try to, to a certain degree, maintain that feeling, which is like, I want my kid to make their own mistakes. I they're going to find themselves in danger in real life and in line and my role as a parent is to I think more it's much more likely that they're going to be in a situation in which there's nothing I could have done to prevent them being in some dangerous situation other than to prepare them to react to it appropriately and hopefully protect themselves I think that's fundamentally sort of what you're doing like your number one goal as a parent is less about keeping I mean And yes, you're trying to stop them from killing themselves when they're too young to know better.

47:41But then as they're getting older, you're going to be in situations where I just have to hope that a relationship has put you in a position where you can make those judgments for yourself. Or if something goes wrong, you find ways to deal with that. And so I try to keep that in mind. The challenge these days is you have access to so much data about what your children are doing that I think it can put yourself in a position where you feel like you have to be exerting more control than you are because you have access to all the things that are happening. You can monitor all of their chats in Messenger Kids or whatever other platform.

48:24You can monitor their watch history. Now they make that extremely hard. YouTube does a really good job. YouTube does not want you to monitor their watch history. You have to log into a Google... Into a website, to an account, to export some data. They don't send you a report that's like, your kid watched this channel for X amount of time. Because they actually don't want you to be paying attention to that. It's one of the more insidious parts about YouTube specifically. But I do... In the same way that the first time my oldest crossed the street to go to a friend's house. And she was old enough that she was able to do it by herself.

48:58And I forced myself to not watch. I could have watched him outside the window and make sure she did it. And maybe I'm irresponsible to not watch him again. But if the car was going to hit her, I couldn't have saved it. She went out the door. And I tried to internalize. I have to let go. I have to trust that she knows to look both ways. And if I'm not going to walk her there, I have to trust that there's nothing I could have done. she walked out and didn't do it. I guess maybe an awful way to think about it. But it is something I try and think about. I need to allow my kids to make mistakes within whatever I feel is still my role as a parent to establish guard rails and understand things that you don't understand yet and do my best to negotiate that.

49:40But it's not easy. I think fundamentally the questions in front of parents these days in regards to screen time technology, social networks, platforms like Roblox, they're really hard because they don't have really good yes or no answers. And I think more parents want yes or no answers. And if I've learned anything over the nine years of parenting is that most answers are a maybe in a really frustrating sort of way. So let's get into Roblox. I have written about Roblox. I've read a lot about Roblox. I've read your writing on it. I've read a lot of Cecilia D 'Anastasio. at Bloomberg. She's a really good reporter on Roblox.

50:19I hope to have her on at some point also to discuss it. Even with all my reading on Roblox, I find it really hard to wrap my mind around what it is. And I don't think most people understand what it is. I think even parents whose kids play Roblox don't really understand what it is. Professional video game writer, Patrick Huffick, how would you describe it? What is it? What do you do? I launched Roblox and... What happens? It's a social platform. Roblox is a social platform for interactive experiences, which you could call video games, but frequently what you're asked to do as a quote player is not very much.

51:01Roblox, for the vast majority of younger audiences, and I mean that from as young as five to high school age, is a space to hang out with friends and do things. It is less about accomplishing a goal as much as it is spending time with other people in a space. And Roblox has an unlimited number of spaces in which to do those things. So whichever impulse you might have that day, whether it's an obby, which is short for... It's Roblox slang for obstacle course, which for people listening to this podcast, means a platformer. That's what obbies are. Now, they're obbies with the worst physics you have ever experienced in a platformer.

51:46And yet, that's how my daughter learned how to jump in a video game. And she mentioned one time when she played Astro Bot, she made this very funny remark. She was like, wow, it's so much easier to control it here. And I'm like, yeah, because Roblox physics are trash and they're floaty and they're bad. But it's a social platform for young people to hang out and do different things outside of a school or in-person social context. Let's get even a bit more granular because when you say social platform, I think people are imagining a Facebook or a Twitter. You open a website and there's a user interface.

52:25There's some kind of feed. You can click on people's profiles. You open Roblox. I don't think you've mentioned this, but it's a platform where other people... It's not Roblox, the company itself, that is making all the experiences. It's other people. Sometimes they're other players. Sometimes they're companies whose entire business is making content for Roblox. And it's like, you could come... You can kind of get in there and download any one of those. There's no downloading. This is definitely an important part of it. Everything is seamless. When you jump into the interface, the top of your friends list, it will say what your friends are doing at the moment.

53:05You tap on their name. It's the first... You can either send them a chat or you can just seamlessly... They make it absolutely frictionless to jump in, not just go to the experience. They call it experiences because Apple said you couldn't call them games. Now they're called experiences. It was like a technical tiff they had with Apple over the App Store guidelines. Because then they would have to pay... Something along the lines of like, You can't have games inside of a game. It's like the App Store for a while wouldn't allow GeForce Now or Xbox Cloud Streaming because Apple's perspective was Halo should be its own app.

53:39It can be a cloud thing, but Halo should be its own app. And Roblox is a platform that has games inside of it. And Apple is saying, well, you can't have a video game inside of your video game. And so Roblox just renamed them experiences. And Apple was happy to take their money off the in-app transactions and allow Roblox to skirt the rules in a way that would definitely not be allowed for a smaller company. But yes, it makes it frictionless. You jump in with your friends and not just join their experience, but to then join the party that they're in. You'll just be in there doing... I'm sure even if you're not familiar with Roblox, especially you've heard of Grow a Garden or Brain Rot or Adopt Me.

54:15These are extremely popular. Popular enough to have toys at McDonald's level of... Which I think Adopt Me was the first Roblox game to have discrete toys in a Happy Meal a year ago. And then below that is a feed on what's trending amongst Roblox users. What's recommended for you based on what you've played. And then below that, you get into... Actually, the interface is very similar to Netflix, in which it's like, here's what we're pushing on you. And then if you want to get into the categories of more specifics, you can. And then there's obviously a search engine that you can use to find things based on what you're looking for.

54:52And Roblox is full of copyright violations. they just actively a lot roblox operates like many platforms we don't take it down unless the the rights holders ask to take it down and it's interesting because when i've talked to different rights holders like there's definitely a wink and a nod which is like netflix is happy to have k-pop demon hunters unofficial experiences everywhere as long as they're not weird and sexualized and going to generate an awful headline from cecilia of bloomberg like a lot of this stuff operates in a gray area where Roblox is happy to have the stuff that skirts copyright.

55:27The copyright holders are happy to have the free advertising as long as it doesn't end up most likely as a headline from Cecilia Bloomberg about how there were a bunch of predators in it. So I would say there are three major risks that are unique to Roblox. One, because the options of experiences is functionally infinite. you're going to get some that are designed to be i would say either bad or not for kids uh that's like a content problem then it's online and you can interact with other people as you alluded to hang out in bathroom simulator uh right sort of things yeah there's a bunch of people who are predators basically on there that's been like the accusation and then there's like the more mundane but i would say and i've heard you talk about this like a serious challenge for parents is, kids are invited to spend money on items within these experiences.

56:26And you can very easily end up spending a ton of money on Roblox. Is that generally how you view it as what the challenges are? It is. And I think the added lay on there is the social challenge from a parental perspective of this is just where everybody is. Everybody's on Roblox. And so there's lots of things in your life you can say no to. When you're saying no to Roblox, you are saying no to one of the primary social vectors for children, which doesn't mean you shouldn't say no. But as I said earlier, know what you're saying no to, both from what you are cutting your kid off from in terms of just what is the social conversation amongst young people.

57:06And then also, why are you saying no? So that if you're going to put your foot down on this, at least at first, you can articulate why it makes you uncomfortable, especially if your child was old enough to maybe not be happy with, but understand, articulate why we're saying no to something. But yes, those are all the different things that I have taken into consideration. And both my kids do use Roblox. I have a very specific story that I can get into if you want about how that originally happened. But monetarily, we do not spend money in Roblox. That is a building block of my children's relationship with Roblox.

57:42is it's not even that you can go spend your own money on a Roblox gift card. We don't spend money in Roblox. That is just rule number one. Now, are there exceptions to that? How do you explain that? How did you explain that to them? So it started with my youngest. She played Roblox even earlier than my oldest started playing Roblox because their sisters, she would see what her sister was doing. She didn't want to play Roblox. She wanted to do what her sister was doing. So that was part of that relationship. With my oldest, we sat down. And again, I encourage people to... Almost nobody that listens to this is going to enjoy playing Roblox.

58:22But I encourage you to download it and play it, especially if you have children, experience it yourself so you understand the world that they're navigating. And so I would jump into it with her. And I would say, what's the game that you're into now? And so she would jump into that. And in every Roblox experience, and this is something that Roblox encourages, This is something they could regulate if they wanted to change their moderation policies, their terms of service with creators. They choose not to. You are overloaded from the jump with buy this, buy that, buy this, buy that. And they're all FOMO, like weapons, items, things for your avatar, cheats, upgrades.

59:00It is all dangling, just little candy. And none of that stuff carries over from one experience to the next. It's like, you spend$3. And obviously, it's obfuscated by... They call it Robux. And because they don't want you to think about what the actual money is. They just want you to think of it in point values. And great. So you spent$3. So you could have unlimited continues for this level. When you leave, that's gone. That's used. Doesn't carry over to another experience. And so what I told my oldest was, that is not a good use of money. These games are trying to trick you. and if you get old enough where you can look at something and you can explain to me the value judgment of that, like that this is actually useful because of X, Y, and Z, I am willing to have that conversation.

59:49If you can't and you know that this is just like a cheat because you just don't want to do something in the game or you want an early weapon, we're just not going to do that. The exception is... Now with a 5-year-old, it's just no. We told you we don't buy things in Roblox. The one exception is buying things for their avatars. There are two layers of purchases in Roblox. There are inexperienced purchases, which are superfluous, exploitative, and just trying to grind Robux out of you that you got from a gift card over the holidays. And then there are avatar-level purchases like a Stitch shirt or something like that.

1:00:27That carries into every experience into Roblox. That is just the basic avatar that gets dumped into everything that you play. And so when my kids were into the boo-boos, you could spend a dollar and they could look like a little boo-boo. I was like, that's... Go get a dollar from your wallet or piggy bank. And that is fine. You have to spend your own money, but I will let you spend a dollar for something that carries over to everything you do into Roblox. I consider that a fundamentally different transaction. So that's the relationship we have. And I think that also illustrates the difference between kids' age gaps.

1:00:59The younger kid, it just has to be no. No conversation, no negotiation. Because I can't get into explaining exploitative game mechanics. With my 9-year-old, I can't. She can identify, at least for now, AI slop. We have conversations about that. She understands this game. It feels scammy is the word that we use with her. This feels scammy. It does feel scammy. And so I can have an actual conversation with her. And that's the dynamic we have about buying or not buying things in Roblox. I'm much more permissive on basically anything else. But Roblox, because it's such a slippery slope, that saying yes to anything, I feel like...

1:01:37And even saying yes to the gift cards, I feel like puts them in the mindset of spending more in a way that I need my kids to be older before I allow them more permission on that front. do you think your older kid has internalized that rule or is it still an ongoing battle where you said she asks and you say no where she like okay well that's how it is or like i i understand where daddy's coming from yeah no it's never it never comes up it only she now she only comes to me on the avatar stuff but what i'll say is what was useful and i think the roblox discussion is really hard because like i'll be on um and this is all due respect to cecilia and lots of other folks to do Roblox reporting.

1:02:20But the standard line in, I would call it, enthusiast and mainstream tech press is understandably, I would characterize as anti-Roblox. Roblox is bad, evil, exploitative children. We should be deeply skeptical of what the company says, what they're claiming. I agree with all of that. But I'm here on the ground with the parents and the parents are letting their kids play Roblox. And so when I'm on calls with Roblox executives and some reporters are asking about statistics, about predators on the surface. I'm glad that's being covered. But then I'm raising my hand. I was like, alright, can you explain why this change happened to the parental control system?

1:03:00It used to work on the website this way and now it's differently on the app. Because fundamentally... And that's just my approach. Again, I have deep respect to all these folks doing really excellent reporting. I'm reliant on it and for my own reporting. But my tact is like, yeah, but most parents are going to say yes. So I need to scrutinize the company from a different angle, which is How are you protecting parents who have said yes instead of protecting parents who have said no? And so that's where my angle comes from this. But my daughter, she now knows how to... And I think if you watch any young person that is playing Roblox games, they just see through the BS.

1:03:34They just see right through all... Click away, click away. It looks like pop-up malware when you jump into a lot of these experiences before you get into the thick of it. And kids just know how to ignore it, negotiate it, move right past it. It is just white noise to them as they jump into it. And they move right past it. And that doesn't mean it shouldn't be regulated by Roblox. It doesn't mean that it's acceptable. But if you're raised in the filth, you get used to navigating the filth. And that's what my daughter has done. I think a lot of other kids have done. It's just... That doesn't... They don't even see it at all.

1:04:09It's just there. They move past it. And they get to the part they want, which is either doing some weird thing with their friends or doing another loop of 99 Nights in the Forest. And they just click past all this pop-up garbage in a way that I'm not excusing it. But I think kids have gotten pretty smart about negotiating what has become a very gambling-centric, gambling-adjacent world for lots of child's experiences. And I think for a lot of them, they've just learned to navigate that in surprising ways because they don't have a choice. It's just the way a lot of the stuff is going. One rule that...

1:04:47And I'm very much... Again, we're just two years into parenting. But one rule we've been able to follow so far that I want to follow as long as I can. And I'm clear-eyed about the fact that I won't be able to for long. But my kid doesn't consume anything media-wise that I don't know what it is. And that allows me to do some quality control. So no YouTube is basically what you're saying. uh we'll watch youtube if i can sit down and watch with him right right um and that has allowed me to do things like and and this is somewhat analogous but it's like in his age group for infants and toddlers coco melon is like a huge thing yeah it's prevalent to the point where we had unfortunately had to take it to the hospitals a bunch of times and it's on in the waiting rooms and it's like if you're admitted and the nurse comes in and as part of trying to be a good nurse and to be nice to you, she'll be like, she'll just put it on without asking.

1:05:51And I have seen some Cocomelon and I'm very anti-Cocomelon because I think it sucks. You know what I mean? I just think it's like... It's empty calories for sure. It's just shitty. It's like, I don't even care. I don't know about the... It's just like as someone who loves art and media and movies, I'm just like, this sucks. Whereas you know, I don't want to watch cars another 50 times and I'm sure I will but it's like there's something there it's good, there's a story, there's writing there's craft. It's a bad Pixar movie but like it's still a Pixar movie there's craft to it, there's something there it's like I'm okay with him consuming it and that's just sort of the quality control that I'm able to maintain at this point as a parent and it sounds to me like as a video game critic you're not a big fan of the various Roblox experiences and I'm kind of...

1:06:44I don't know if I'd characterize it that way. I think people give Roblox experiences short shrift because they are bad video games. But... And I think they often are bad video games. The majority of them are bad video games. But that's not their goal. The term I've settled on with Roblox game design is social first. Which is that the design of the experience from what we would call traditional game mechanics on, the structure of it, is built around social dynamics. And so it's less about are you having the best video game arc possible as much as what is this doing to encourage and facilitate social interactions?

1:07:29Which if you want to be, and there'd be reason to be cynical about it, is also like you set up... That's how you set up FOMO. That's how you set up microtransactions. There are very deeply exploited ways that that is worked into the system. But ultimately, it is about social experiences first. And I notice this all the time with the games that my kids end up playing. It's like, I go into it. The actual experience of going around the world is just... It's all role-playing adjacent. And it's all about social interactions between people in the world, but more likely my two daughters building a home together and role-playing being like parents and kids and yada, yada, yada.

1:08:11And I think if you go into the average Roblox experience and think of it from social first rather than gameplay first, I think a lot of it makes a lot more sense and speaks to a generational divide in game design that... Okay, throw away Roblox. Nobody likes Roblox. Fine. Minecraft is actually one that does both at the same time. It is a great facilitator of social interactions in a very well-designed video game. And I think alongside social first would be something I'd describe as frictionless. There is just less of a desire amongst younger people for games that are centered around... Not that they can't enjoy difficulty and challenge and skill arcs, but my kids don't play survival Minecraft.

1:08:56They play Minecraft creative mode where they can build to their heart's content and treat it like a Lego system. Many of the frustrations they have when we play traditional video games is, can we just turn off dying so that we can just have fun and run around? And I think that is going to be one of those fundamental shit. Roblox is a signifier of a broader shift in game design that will happen over the next 20 years, which is emphasizing social interactions and de-emphasizing, I think, challenge, difficulty, traditional markers of what is a good video. This stuff doesn't go away, but I think it just shifts as the focus as a different generation embraces a different style of game so I'm very happy to hear that I got it wrong because I thought you were kind of like anti-Roblox in terms of quality and I'm happy to hear that you are able to see I don't like playing them but I understand I just think they're going for something fundamentally different and that there's there's a value there there is art to it.

1:09:58They're able to get something out of it. You're not upset that they're consuming something bad, it sounds like. So I'm very happy to hear that and I will take it a step further. I don't know if I heard you make this connection yet, but on Remap Radio, the gaming podcast that you do, you guys have been discussing this emerging, I would say, not dominant but a defining trend in games this year or the past couple of years is what has come to be known as friend slop. Right? And these are social first games. These are games where mechanics are somewhat de-emphasized and the thing that is highlighted is how are people interacting together in an online game?

1:10:45And that sounds very Roblox. That sounds like Roblox logic trickling down to... I don't know what you want to call this audience. like the hardcore audience or the Steam audience or the... I think it's young people getting older and more sophisticated. I think the rise of Friendslop, which those games do have a ton of challenge and are often rooted in repeatable loops of games in which the loss, when you die, when the loop is over, you start from scratch. And the punishments can often be very mean in some of these Friendslop games. But I think Friendslop exists this as a result of iterative and trickle-down Roblox design and stuff in that space.

1:11:30And this is where I'm generally just an optimistic person in general. I think a lot of people look at Roblox-adjacent design as something to not be appreciated. There's nothing there. There's no value. I think it's easy because of the interface of Roblox, because of the awful art style of Roblox, that it's difficult to see what they can offer. and that are they coming up with their own new rule sets. And I think what you see in games like Peak or Repo are reactions to Roblox-style game design, but then handled with... Made exceptionally well. What do you do when you take those core ideas and then hand them to...

1:12:13Because a lot of the designers on Roblox are also teenagers. These are exceptionally young people building... Some of that is changing. You mentioned there are companies that are... that are... I saw a prediction in a newsletter recently that's like, we are due probably this year for the first... Someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase a Roblox studio that becomes part of an Electronic Arts or something like that. But I do think things like Frenzlop is a direct... That would give you encouragement. It's like, oh, this stuff can produce really interesting game design, even if it's hard to see that because Roblox itself is just so hard to parse.

1:12:55Yeah. And that's something less about being a parent and more just being an old man. It's like, I don't want to get into Roblox and be like, hello, fellow kids. But I also don't want to dismiss things that are not for me. So it's good to see the value in something that is for kids and is often, I think, dismissed. Well, it'll be helpful when it's... I get this largely less out of observations by myself as much as ongoing conversations with my oldest who can best articulate what are you getting out of it. I mean, the TLDR and why she got into Roblox at all was she started playing Roblox when she was five, which is...

1:13:41I wouldn't recommend that. I'd recommend waiting longer, especially once they get into grade school and there's social pressure. But the social pressure is exactly why my kids started playing Roblox. It's because I was the first winter of COVID. There were no vaccines available for adults, let alone for children. And my oldest, it was five at the time, started... Or four at the time, started playing outside. Met this older girl who's now one of her best friends, three years older than her, lives down the street. And she was playing Roblox. And they could play outside. But then, especially in winter, gets dark quickly, they can't come inside to play, and they can't have a traditional budding friendship in the way that you normally would because they're restricted by the weather conditions outside, our concerns about COVID, etc., etc.

1:14:28And she came to me and said, my friend plays this thing called Roblox. And I immediately tense up because like, oh, I thought this was something I'm dealing with in a couple of years. I'm like, let dad download it and look at it and I'll get back to you tomorrow. And I did and I had real concerns about it and I was prepared to tell her no. And then I asked, why do you want Roblox? And I'm like, can you explain to me why you want it? Because dad has some concerns about it. And she goes, because of this disease or whatever, she's just my friend. I can't spend actual time with her. And if we're in Roblox, then we could be friends and she could be more of my friend.

1:15:10She got me in the heart. It was a really reasonable ask. And I said, okay, there are going to be really specific rules about this. When you play with her, you're going to play with dad at the same time. I want to see how this works, see what she's doing that you're doing. But that is not unreasonable, especially given this current context. You just want to spend time with a friend that you can't spend time with. So that's how we ended up saying yes to Roblox and then went from there. And so again, I wouldn't recommend... I feel like her doing it at the age she did it at was a very specific set of circumstances, chances, which is like a kid that's multiple years older, plus COVID got me to saying yes to something that I probably would have otherwise said no until she was a couple years older.

1:15:52But I didn't feel bad about the decision. I think she also had a pretty reasonable argument for why it was worth at least giving a chance. I love that story. I think that's great because at 4.4 Media, we're highly critical of technology. it's what we do that's the nature of the job sometimes we get a reputation as being haters and we need more haters though it's true but it's like we do this because like we love it and it's like i love technology i love video games that to me is one of the best things video games can do where i am able to keep in touch with friends who i'm not near and have like really deep meaningful fun, memorable, making memories playing a video game.

1:16:42And that's awesome that a kid can recognize that. It's a reminder for why we care and talk about any of this in the first place. I could talk to you about all of this for many more hours and maybe we should again. But I want to do just a lightning round of some things I wanted to know. Again, parent to parent. Do you kids watch Bluey? Yes. Obsessed. Not so much anymore. When they did the 30 minute episode that feels like that cracked a fever for us. Do you think Bluey is good by adult standards? Yes, I do. Okay. I disagree. I think the animation is good, but it's like, it goes right over my head.

1:17:22I don't get it. I thought you're going to be one of those parents who's like, I hate Bluey because it portrays the parents as always heroic, smart, and doing the right thing, never frustrated, never letting their children down, which is not how actual parenting goes. I enjoy cars more than I enjoy Bluey, personally. I don't know. You've watched Cars too many times. I know. I'm completely brainwashed. Are they allowed to watch Paw Patrol? Yes, I had. I wrote an article for Car Display about and they called it the Paw Patrol question, which was about like, you know, there was a lot of protests happening around the time that my youngest was into Paw Patrol and it's like, Paw Patrol could reasonably be argued as being propaganda at the end of the day, I was like, if I can't have a conversation with my daughter about Copaganda, I don't know that I'm going to stop her from watching Paw Patrol as a result.

1:18:12Plus, they send cops to the school to meet. Copaganda is everywhere. I was like, I'm just going to hope Paw Patrol is a fever that will break. And if it's not, then we'll have that conversation. And the fever broke and I never had to have that conversation. But also, Paw Patrol sucks. So, if you're going to watch The movies are not bad. The TV show is trash. But the movies have decent animation, fun music, and I remember coming out of both going like, well, the TV show was at least half of this. I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed by it. Are they allowed to watch YouTube without supervision? Yes. My youngest is in the YouTube Cibs ecosystem.

1:18:58I was pretty obsessive about watching it alongside them in the early on and i i've never caught anything you know there was that period that i know that like you know you guys did a bunch of reporting on this at motherboard about like how much like weird shit was slipping through the cracks on the youtube kids app specifically um there's just a lot it's it's garbage it's not good like it's it's like it but it's bad in the sense that like you're getting absolutely nothing out of this but yes My youngest has YouTube Kids that is age appropriate. We haven't had any issues there other than it just being slop.

1:19:37And I have like AI slop, although there is that stuff as well. My oldest, I went in and manually changed her age. Not age, but I changed... You can change the age category. Like the parent can say, do you want to move your child up a category that is not tied to their age? and I moved her into a different bucket because she got really into... It was the first YouTuber she got into. I did my research. I was like, this seems fine. I don't see any pro-fascism Nazi propaganda in here. It just seems like this is a really good Minecraft girl that you like to watch. And so I had to move her up because most of that YouTubers...

1:20:20It's Anthemath, I think was the YouTuber. Now people are going to send me messages isn't about why it's bad. But like, most of her videos were getting filtered out by... So it was doing its job. So I moved it up so that she could watch more of that specific person's video. Interesting. Interesting. Will you allow them to have fully connected online phones by the time they're 13? Sixth grade seems to be the marker for most kids these days. I feel better. So the answer is probably. some of that will be social pressure. But the thing that is encouraging is I've been a huge proponent of banning cell phones in schools.

1:21:06But just catching on now is a thing. It passed in our district. I'm very cognizant of, especially the Taylor Lorenz argument, of I'm not saying that you should ban communities for kids to... I think the whole ideification of the internet, I have very deep problems, even like the potentially good faith or like good consequences of some of those actions that is occurring on the internet. But I think fundamentally, you can bring the phone to school, but it's got to be put away while you're at school. I think school shootings are bad as well, but I do not think the off chance that your child will be part of a mass shooting outweighs the profoundly obvious negative consequences for access to phones while in school.

1:21:50That is an unfortunate American-specific reality. But I fall on the side of that phone should be put away because it is just so profoundly obvious. The idea that my child could be, which obviously breaks my heart to even conceive of, part of an unimaginable tragedy, that's something I have to wonder could happen. What I know can happen is that their brain will be fucking rotted by taking the phone to school every day. So I feel better about the choice that I probably make for them to switch on that cellular thing when they're in sixth grade, knowing that their schools now make them put that away in a locker from the start of school to the end of school.

1:22:29Obviously, such an insane consideration to even have to make. But that's the argument I end up seeing with parents who end up saying that's why they should have it. What if I could call my kid? I'm like, I get it. Again, my heart bleeds for that, but I fall on the side of taking it away in school. okay finally will roblox still be hot still be this embedded among young people in like five years five years yes uh 10 years 10 years i i think that is when you get into is there you know kind of replacement platform like sort of chase chase chase the energy that's sort of impossible i think roblox will never go away that's i guess that's what i would say like roblox is a is a is a pillar, is an institutional part of the media landscape.

1:23:17Whether it can be... The youth can be captured to somewhere else. Like, sure, look at TikTok. You can imagine that. So something like that comes out. There can always be something that captures that energy. But what Roblox has going for it is... I think Roblox will start to lose the older generation. I think the existential crisis for Roblox is its desire to capture audiences as they hit high school and beyond. And it's just hard for me to imagine that they're going to be able to do that. But they have a very steady treadmill of younger audiences. And I... It's hard for me to imagine them losing that.

1:23:51I think they just lose market grasp, but they never actually fundamentally go away. Okay. Patrick, thank you so much. I want to send people to Remap Radio. Genuinely enjoy it. I don't miss an episode. Great conversations. Also, Crossplay, the newsletter. It's crossplay.news. news yes uh great newsletter recommended to current parents thinking of becoming a parent uh very much the kind of conversations that i wish i heard more of before before i became a parent myself uh as a reminder 4-4 media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers if you wish to subscribe to 4-4 media and directly support our work please go to 4-4 media.co you'll get unlimited access to our articles and ad-free versions of the podcast.

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