I am still glad that children are playing Minecraft. One of the first things that I am really proud of what I did was somehow breaking a nat of an intel tiber (free) vps just so that I can create a minecraft server.
My first thing that I built myself in mc that I still remember is having a piston push a redstone block which pushes another piston and a redstone block (quite complicated overengineering) to basically create a clock to spawn many mobs. I am still proud of it and my brother showed me minecraft and I remember the first time he showed me and I was in awe!
one of the first blogs (or second I think) that I made was about how to self host minecraft using a different technique (there is a plugin)
There are lots of coding/server related things to Minecraft. I think many people got into coding just as much because of minecraft and got into servers because of minecraft server hosting. (It's really popular)
I sometimes get recommended Minecraft Nostalgia videos and man the nostalgia hits so hard.
I understand what you are saying but Minecraft at its core is a simple blocky game that I played with friends.
Yes, It might be hard to care about pixels but also not so much. I still play chess and I can play it on a pixelated screen just as much as on chess.com or lichess.org
One of the first games that I played was pokemon yellow (the OG one), I pirated it and that introduced to the piracy and oh boy, I genuinely believe that it was the reason why I got tech savvy and am learning CS within uni as I did that within 2nd grade.
I have played pokemon yellow, pokemon crystal and all the pixelated games. I love them all and cherish them with nostalgia.
I am more worried about the shorts and reels.
Some comments and stuff that I wrote about similar things:
[An advice for a 15 year old on HN to play minecraft instead of hyperoptimizing for business]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341430
[My pokemon yellow piracy complete story]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663383
Self Hosting Vanilla Minecraft server has never been this easy before (GUI Right in minecraft , while being open source !): https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...
[–] chr15m 3 days ago
[–] Imustaskforhelp 3 days ago
Glad you liked my comment. I learnt about Kolmogorov complexity through it! I think that Minecraft basically provides some beauty to the complexity yet structure that it has and that too comes in a program that I can download!
> [Like you I also worry about short form video, but I note that in the past humans have got bored of these types of addictions so you might find we see it waning at some point.]
I hope that I am wrong about it. I can be wrong and I usually am and in this case I want myself to be wrong, but within the context of discussion and as it currently stands, I am more worried about that but I do hope that the future will be a brighter future.
Another game that I like with Minecraft is pokemon.
I genuinely think that you will love this video really a lot: Competitive Pokemon may be Impossible to Explain[0][1]
This is a video of an economist Phd person trying to explain competitive pokemon and the most accurate representation that he could come up with for the title is that it may be impossible to explain, but I think that within this 45 minutes video, he does a pretty damn good job at explaining it.
There is some joy in all the complexity behind the scenes that children can be exposed to in "simple" games. There is fun in exploring all these forms of complexity especially if its a phenomenon that other people connect to. I have so much fun playing competitive pokemon with my friends and if someone plays pokemon or minecraft, then it can help strengthen the bond and be part of community of like-minded people in many ways. In my opinion, this is the largest benefit of such things (especially when the downside seems to be comparatively little but nonetheless, I still believe that there are be downsides but still as said by jacquesm himself, there are far worse things out there than minecraft/pokemon)
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrR6MquGU6A&t=16s
[1]: https://attraylor.medium.com/competitive-pok%C3%A9mon-may-be...
Minecraft worlds also have low Kolmogorov complexity and high logical depth, producing these incredible complex worlds from a seed and a relatively small program. Just that observation is drilled into every player's experience in a visceral way and I think it's a useful thing for more people to know and appreciate. A kind of intuition for complexity and compressibility.
You raise a great point. The kids are alright!
Will check out your threads.
[Like you I also worry about short form video, but I note that in the past humans have got bored of these types of addictions so you might find we see it waning at some point.]