Crossplay

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash There are many stories that I, sadly, do not have time to pursue, or there isn’t enough there there to demand a full article. These ideas start piling up in my inbox, shuffled away to be ignored. Why not, it occurred to me recently, simply share them here? So, here are three stories that caught my eye this week. And by caught my eye, that usually means it caused me to nearly toss my phone across the screen in annoyance or disgust.

A month ago, Roblox quietly launched a new feature called “Quick Words.” It’s a way for Roblox users to “chat” with other players using pre-written phrases, a smart middle ground between parents (like me) who don’t allow their children to text or voice chat, while recognizing legitimate reasons a child might want to start yapping. Here’s how Roblox describes the feature: “You may see a [lightning] icon next to the chat input bar with Quick Words.

A summer of pools, pools, and more pools is headed towards the end. I know that “summer” is often categorized as June, July, and August, but as my kids have gotten older, it becomes clearer and clearer that summer is really just “July." You spend June waiting for the weather to warm up, July doing as much as you can, and August begins the anxious walk towards the start of school, even if the weather remains very hot. As a summer person, I’m already sad it feels nearly over.

Conveyance is the ability of a game to express to players what the goals and mechanics are. There is an incorrect assumption that complexity or difficulty are limiting factors to conveyance when targeting children. While genres such Kazio Mario or Soulslike may be incredibly difficult, they are made deliberately “readable” to allow players to focus on their execution without confusion of design intent.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash Deep conversations with kids can be hard. When I pick up my oldest from school, I secretly wish that in that 20 minutes of one-on-one time, I’ll find a way to pass on some nugget of information that positively changes his life forever! The reality, however, is that’s highly unlikely. He’s tired, and we often have to walk single file. There’s usually just silence. (I also wish that he would walk faster—sometimes not secretly at all.

The short version: Milestone moment. She had a blast. Now, the long version… I don’t know when the concept of “the backrooms,” or liminal spaces, entered our lives. Like many things, I suspect Roblox. (But it also could have been YouTube.) In either case, for several years now, my oldest daughter (who turns 10 at the end of the summer) has been fascinated by the conceptual horror for young people, transfixed by the notion of entering a forbidden space that feels strangely familiar and, yet, off.

Based on the reaction to last week’s post, a lot of parents are also annoyed at the amount of YouTube content making its way onto platforms like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and others. Even for families that allow their kids to watch YouTube, there is a time and place, and its appearance on non-YouTube platforms is an issue. Fortunately, for some of the platforms, there are solutions. You can block the content.

My children are allowed to watch YouTube, be it age-filtered normal YouTube (my nine-year-old) or YouTube Kids (my six-year-old). They are not, however, allowed to watch YouTube on the family television. It’s restricted to their iPads because, truth be told, I don’t want to watch most of that garbage.

It is, at present, extremely hot in the midwest, and all my kids want to do is swim. Swim in our pool, swim in the community pool, swim in a friend’s pool. Swim, swim. My parents were never ones who’d have us escaping to a movie theater to cool off. We would, instead, drive up to Wisconsin and do exactly what my kids are doing: swim.

Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen is a good game, a game more worthy of the Bluey name than the franchise’s last outing. But one of my knocks against Quest for the Gold Pen was that my five-year-old couldn’t play it on her own because she couldn’t read yet. As I wrote at the time: “I mean, sure, you can figure out the basic logic of every level by looking at the interface, but I mean, who doesn’t want to know what Bluey and Bingo are saying?