![]() ![]() I'm sure if I spent more time around my parents in Montana I'd have numerous stories to tell. Though I live in the PNW so we tend to be a bit more middle of the road here. Hell yes, prioritize helping other parents with exposing their kids to a digital world that isn’t an unmoderated cesspool.Ĭlick to expand.I'm 39 and I'm not sure I've encountered one in real life either. Hell yes, block that Nazi apologia and glorification bullshit. It’s really, really easy not to know what’s happening or to see red flags in real-time. We’ve always been open and involved, and he’s always come to us when he isn’t sure or if he sees something that bothers him…but I was wrong to think that he’d know how to see when he was being influenced online.Īnd I nuked the ability to access Roblox from our home network, enabled the parent locks that I thought my kid wouldn’t need because he’s always been so smart and so mature for his age and so emotionally intelligent, and now they play games on moderated servers and we stay a hell of a lot more involved and engaged than we did before. We talked about what makes satire really hard to pull off without sliding into just doing the thing you think you’re making fun of. We talked about how what you do becomes who you are, and about how you try to live what you believe even if it’s just roleplaying or joking or whatever. We talked about algorithmic engagement and radicalization, we talked about book burning and banning, we talked about punching down and how “just kidding” isn’t actually a get out of jail free card. We watched some actual documentaries, not some History Channel bullshit about Nazi super weapons or whatever. We talked about the horrors of war inflicted on the soldiers and the civilians. We read some accounts of what it was like in the camps. “It’s just a game, I know it doesn’t mean anything!” “We’re only joking, it doesn’t matter!” So what the fuck was happening to my kid in these servers? My son is a good kid, and the first time he encountered real racism he was shaking and crying and furious. I was pretty floored by it because the only fight he’s ever gotten in was with a boy last year who came to our street to play with the neighborhood kids’ Nerf guns and started throwing racial slurs at our neighbor. The kids were picking up language that wasn’t awesome, starting to fall into the kind of internet edgelord bullshit that turns into full-on trolling and dabbling in “just for the lols” racism. It’s not super surprising we market the shit out of other “fantasy” bad guys, right, (Buy a Darth Vader action figure! Here’s a Dark Side Lego set!) and really, how “real” are the Nazis and the fascists from WW2 to kids whose only real experience with them are as fictional characters in movies and video games?īut it was disturbing. I found out there was a…let’s say a very active segment of the Discord and the Roblox community who were very interested in playing the bad guys. I was poking around in his phone one night because his phone notifications kept blowing up at like 130 and because this kinda thing has always been on our radar, so we tried to stay on top of it while striking a balance with giving him the privacy and the space to figure out who he is. As he’s gotten older, he went from obstacle courses to these home brew Risk-style strategy games that he would play with a friend his own age online while they talked on Discord server they’d both joined. We have a 13 yo who liked playing Roblox on his computer. But am I perhaps feeding that narrative for someone else when they see me perform well in those ships? Should that bother me? And they do have faithful recreations of the paint/camo schemes of those ships in game.thankfully without any swastikas they are replaced by an Iron Cross.īut I do occasionally find myself wondering - should I be playing those ships? Should I moralize over it, and feel bad if I do decide to play them? I currently don't I feel pretty confident in my own ability to separate fantasy from reality, and don't take liking the playstyle of a certain tech tree line in a random online battleground game as glorifying or supporting an atrocious government and ideology. I'm talking ships like the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau. They have a pretty unique playstyle in game, and it's one that I happen to really enjoy. Personally, I really like a lot of the German ships. The game features ships (real and concept) from roughly 1905 - 1955. In the common mode of that game (random battle), two teams of 12 people are randomly formed and pitted against each other. One of the games I play a lot of is World of Warships. I think about things like this occasionally in some of the games I play, with a slightly different twist.
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