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The Screen Time Panic Sets Parents Up to Fail
Episode Notes
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YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/LjK1Swsm1m4
Hello, and welcome to the Four Four Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Four Four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 44media.co, as well as bonus content every week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments, and they get early access to our interview series, gain access to that content at 44media.co. This week, we're joined by Patrick Klepik.
Emanuel:Patrick is the co founder of Remap, a website and one of my favorite podcasts about video games, and he's also the writer behind Crossplay, a newsletter about the intersection of parenting and games. Patrick is also my former colleague at Vice Back when I was a motherboard, he was a Waypoint. I'll take any excuse to catch up with him, but the reason I wanted to have him on today is I've had many, many thoughts and feelings about games and technology since I had a kid back in 2023, but I'm currently the only parent at four four Media, so I don't have a lot of opportunities to to talk about that intersection, and I can't think of anyone better to talk to about this than Patrick. So Patrick, thank you so much for coming on.
Patrick:No. I'm always looking for a fellow parent to complain about why are these billion dollar technology companies unable to make settings that just can it go on and go off at the
Emanuel:times that I want? Why can't they just make that easy? Why can't they just make that easy? Emmanuel, tell me. Yeah.
Emanuel:I mean, so let's get into it. But I think that something that would be very helpful for me for the rest of the conversation is to understand your experience with screen time and video games and technology as a kid. Like, what were the rules about that stuff at your house? Were there rules about TV, movies, video games, and do you remember that changing at all as you got older?
Patrick:No. It's a fair question. I do think it informs a lot of my approach to parenting now, which is to say, not that there weren't rules, but they weren't particularly strict. And the difference to myself and my parents is I think my parents were just winging it, but had the right guttural reaction to what they should do with this stuff. Whereas I've tried to codify it, like, partially out of you know, I run a newsletter where I try and explain my thought process and like ways people can think about philosophies of approaching technology and screen time, etcetera.
Patrick:But in general, my parents, like, let me watch scary movies probably younger than I should have, but it wasn't like a traumatizing experience. They mostly just allowed me to guide myself, and they were there to be guardrails along the way for sort of extreme outliers. And that was in terms of sort of the content I consumed and then also how much time I spent with that. I mean, this is probably apocryphal. I'm just sort of like TLDR ing.
Patrick:It felt like my mom my dad was a salesperson, so he was on the road a lot. So he was kind of got up in his company, was home a little often. So it was more my mom sort of defining the parameters of this. But for her, the way I remember it, the way she has put it, what I've asked her about is like, I just wanted you to be happy and normal by whatever that meant to us and to you. And so if you stayed up till four in the morning playing you know, Final Fantasy or whatever, as long as you like went to school and had friends and seemed like active and happy, why should I stress out over the fact that you are deeply engaging in a hobby that I don't really understand?
Patrick:And like it's just like, you did well in school, you had a good social circle. I didn't see any obvious issues where I started to think I should go down the line and figure out where would a root problem be. Is video games somehow responsible? Because she said that you were playing them excessively, but lots of people do lots of other things excessively, and it's not seen as a negative. Like, if you are obsessed with sports or other things or if you're up reading till four in the morning, is that something you need to clamp down on?
Patrick:And so, you know, this is before we had a better understanding of maybe some of like how it's like mentally and physically healthy to play a video game. She just sort was like, I don't know. You seem fine. Like, so who am I to tell you to stop, you know, trying to get to level 99? And mean, you didn't know I was going for Knights of Roundtable and Final Fantasy VII, but I mean, that's what I was doing until four in the morning during a number of summers.
Patrick:So that is more or less like how the early years of me and technology were defined. Alongside my dad loved to buy technology he didn't understand and then put it in front of me and asked me to figure it out. So like a computer came home and like, What's up? Oh, we have a computer. How's it work?
Patrick:He's like, I don't know. If you flip it on, you tell me. Like, I'll come back later today. And then it was sort of my job to to figure it out. So there were in the house itself, there was sort of a a curiosity about technology from from my dad.
Patrick:And with my mom, she was just generally more permissive absent what she wanted, was looking for was red flags or warning signs that she should think, hey, the way we're doing things, way I'm just sort of trusting my kid to figure it out for themself, maybe we need to take a different approach. And that never happened. Every kid is different, but I've tried to sort of codify that philosophy with my own kids, where now the technology is very different and stickier and more addictive and more exploitative. A lot of those things are true, and yet I have tried to maintain the philosophy of trusting my kids that what I'm there to do is to guide them and help them make their own sort of risk assessments along the way the best that I can, rather than getting overly obsessed with our accounts and things like that where there's I think a tendency these days for parents to find ways to make themselves feel bad about their parenting in an era in which how long you do something like screen time gets codified and sent as a report, which can be useful and also feels like a self shaming tool that you're not being a good enough parent if they spent two and a half hours watching videos that afternoon.
Emanuel:Yeah. That sounds a lot like my background and my childhood. Before we get into, like, current rules in your house and my house, I do have a few more questions. Like, what was your access to devices? Do you remember, like, is a TV in your room?
Emanuel:Is a computer in your room? Was everything in the living room? When did you get a phone?
Patrick:Yeah. The so the evolution for me, obviously, were, you know, similar age, like, in which, like, I think we came about as computer like, got older as computers became mainstream. Cell phones became an actual thing. They were accessible to, like, everyday people. And so it's interesting to to remember those markers along the way relative to kids these days where it's just all that stuff is codified, and it's just new things that are coming coming alongside.
Patrick:But for me, the first computer that came in the house went into the family room. There was a TV next to the fireplace in there. That was the biggest TV in the house until my dad climbed up the corporate ladder enough to put on a small addition to the back of our house where he could get a bigger TV for himself to watch football, which respect. Like, now that I'm, like, closer to the age that, like, my dad would have been making those decisions, like, I get it. I get it.
Patrick:I get it why it happened that way. And so that family computer was there. And the gated access is funny to talk because it was not really about how much time was spent. It was more there's only one terminal, right? It's one computer.
Patrick:And so I got a little bit of a head start because I was two years older than my brother. And so I just understood it more. My parents knew that I was the one sort of tasked with telling the family how it works, what we could do with it. So I had a little bit parental admin access to the computer just because of the virtue of the setup of the family. But I mean, got remember at the time, we had dial up for years, right?
Patrick:So it was sort of gated by how long until my mom forgot that if she picked up the phone, it was going to interrupt the internet session, and then somebody's going to yell from across the house like, Mom, you disconnected me from we were an AOL family like many many were with the with the discs at the time, both floppy and seedy. And then I I have distinct memories of waking up in the middle of the night, taking a handful of blankets and then shoving those over the computer to try and quiet the modem at like 11PM at night. It was one of the most traumatic things to discover as an adult that that was something optional by the computer that you were able to turn off that
Emanuel:horrifying iconic sound. The connection sound. Yeah.
Patrick:Right. Because it went. It was so loud. It felt like it could wake it felt like an alarm going off. And as an adult realizing that was some sort of setting I got turned off in, like, the BIOS or something was, like, so awful.
Patrick:I cannot believe I did not know about that from some weird message board. But, you know, the e there was really no rules back then around that. Like, you know, there was no I was in chat rooms. Like, ASL was, you know, the thing that people said in chat rooms, age, sex, like, language, like, that you just jump into a random chat room, and I'm sure I was chatting. Were there predators?
Patrick:Probably. Was I mostly talking to kids hoping like young horny teenagers hoping to like, I'm going to talk to a girl on the Internet. More likely that is probably what was happening, but there was no moderation there. I spent a lot of time in IRC chat rooms. In fact, my career is directly responsible for, like, plopping into a chat room that had editors from EGM and then
Emanuel:EGM I do wanna get into that because I think that's another thing we have in common that colors our perspective. But just one little question. What about content choices? Like, parents, are they looking over your shoulder? No.
Emanuel:And they're like, this is okay. This is not. Or
Patrick:No. In fact, it was like a rainy couple of days in Wisconsin. We were up there with a a friend who they're like, we, you know, we couldn't go to the beach or anything. It's like, we'll go just rent whatever movies you want. Oh, there's sharks on the cover.
Patrick:That's fine. Well, we watched all four Jaws films. And then when the weather did clear out, multiple children were so traumatized about going in the water that it ruined part of the vacation. I was convinced for years that sharks could sneak through the pipes of like a pool in the deep end and and come get you. I was into aliens and sci fi at a young age, and my parents just let me buy, which to this day as a 40 year old person is one of the most traumatizing alien abduction films called fire in the sky.
Patrick:If you just search on YouTube for fire in the sky
Emanuel:the knees bent backwards? Is that the
Patrick:I don't think it's that one. He wakes up in, a gooey cocoon, and it's a very look up fire in the sky alien abduction scene, godspeed, you've now been traumatized. Now imagine you were eight when like you saw that, like, on some Friday night. Honestly, it's not that the value system was not that different than than it is now in which I think my parents gave very little concern for violence and were like very concerned or not concerned, but just like didn't know what to do about sex. And so like that was the line for my parents because I think they just didn't want to get into it, not necessarily because there was anything especially prude.
Patrick:They just didn't know how to talk about it. And so that was the one like, oh, like, oh, says r for sex. Well, I don't know. Like Robocop? R for limbs blowing blown off?
Patrick:Like that? Like, Godspeed. Like, have fun with that kids. And that was generally the the attitude was like, my parents just didn't worry about stuff like that, which I think was pretty typical back then. Feel like everyone had the friend group where there was one house that you didn't want to be at because that mom often would be the one be like, You can't watch the Simpsons.
Patrick:Like, All right. Well, we're going to go to Patrick's house. We're going to play there because my mom would let us watch the Simpsons, and the Simpsons became South Park. Like, they were like, were the dings where some parents were really concerned, about that and others weren't, but, my my parents were not. And in general, I mean, I I right before we started this chat, I sent you, a a video of my nine year old, saying f the packers with full expletive.
Patrick:And so obviously I have continued that tradition forward in some regard, which really is just I just try not to stress about that stuff. Some of that stuff just feels so out of your control. So And many other things about parenting I feel like are better worth my time than than worrying about stuff like that. But that was definitely the the evolution as a for me as a kid and how my parents handled it.
Emanuel:Yeah. So my background, almost identical, kind of watch as much as you want, play as much as you want. I think we got access. My brother and I, we played video games together. We got access to our own little TV to free up, like, the family TV because we
Patrick:playing so a teenager. And then the computer, if I market I know exactly the year, which was the year I I think it was '94, but whenever doom two hell on earth came out. Like, that's because that we got a computer, and then my dad took me to a computer store. He's like, do wanna buy a video game? It was like a big cyber demon, Stan B.
Patrick:He's like, sure. Doom. I mean, it's like, it's game called Doom two hell on earth. That's the first thing he bought alongside, like, a word processor for the computer. I was like, whatever, man.
Patrick:Let's take it home, kiddo. Yeah. I think
Emanuel:yeah. So the only difference, I think, between us is, like, my parents did have some ideas about content. And I perspective was whenever they were looking over our shoulder at some point, right, like pat once we got past like the Super Nintendo phase, it looked to them like everything we were doing was violent. Like everything was like shooting or like hacking and slashing. Mhmm.
Emanuel:And my mom was just like, play as much video games as you want, but it's like, is there anything that isn't about killing people? And we would go to the to the game store and she would ask like the the people who work there, like, what do you have that isn't killing? And that comes from her house. Like, her parents were hippies and, like, they weren't allowed to play cowboys and Indians, and they weren't allowed to have toy guns, and they were very anti war. So I guess that rubbed off on her.
Patrick:I think it's eminently reasonable, though. Like, the the the philosophy I always give, like, at cross play is, like, if you're it's not that you shouldn't say no to things. Like, I'm very permissive. Like, it's I think relative to other parents, perhaps, like, excessively permissive. And I and I and I get that.
Patrick:But, like and I'm sure we'll get this into questions of Roblox and things like that. It's like, it's okay to say no because that that's the role of being a parent is sometimes you have your own value systems. But engage with what your kid
Emanuel:if you're
Patrick:gonna say no, like Roblox, know what it is and explain to your kids why you're saying no. And I I think it's an extension of what your mom was doing here was like, I'm not saying no to the video games. I'm engaging with something that you like and appreciate, and I'm trying to navigate that relative to how I'm trying to how I think it is important to raise you. And I think that's that's a lot of parenting, but I think that's a very thoughtful way to go about it. It's like, I'm not saying no.
Patrick:Just like, can we do it slightly differently? I just think it's very reasonable.
Emanuel:And and it had it had a very good effect because I remember as a kid, she would say that and I would roll my eyes and we'd go to the game store and we would buy something that the person recommended that wasn't violent. I was like, oh gosh, like what a waste of time and money and I'll have to wait for like the next birthday or something to get something This I doesn't Resident Evil two. Right. But then we would go home and it would always end up being like a LucasArts adventure game. Oh, And I would like drag my feet and then I was like, oh my god, this is like my favorite thing, you know?
Emanuel:So it turned out to be really, really good. So I wanted to talk about screen time with you because as a reporter and somebody who writes about technology, I've read many articles about screen time. I've read many articles that are reporting about the research about screen time, and it's just like something that's in the discourse that feels like every other week, there's like a big New York Times piece or op ed about screen time. And it's just like in the culture, it's in the news. Like, even if you don't have kids, it's like everybody's talking about screen time.
Emanuel:And despite all of that, once I had a kid, I felt completely surprised and unprepared for how that actually goes down. And I think that's because despite all this reporting, there's very little, like, first person, I'm a parent and I'm talking to you, how about how this works in real life in the news. Mhmm. And you can find it, but usually, you'll have to find it in, like, either in your own life in parenting circles, which you don't really enter until you become a parent. Or if you were curious, I suppose you can go to Reddit, but that stuff also gets weird.
Emanuel:Right? Yeah. Like on like online parenting groups. So I want to have the kind of conversation that I wish I would have heard before I had a kid. And I guess now let's get into it on your end.
Emanuel:A, I guess we heard a little bit about your philosophy about this, but it's like, what are like the literal rules right now and, like, have they evolved as the kids grew up? And I guess maybe if you're comfortable saying, like, how old are your kids?
Patrick:Yeah. My I have two daughters. My oldest is nine. My youngest is is five. And so in between in between them, as they've gotten older, there have been differences in approach with them, which is a challenge when especially once a kid gets old enough to understand they're being treated differently than than than the other one.
Patrick:The thing about reading, it's a little bit of like when you know you're about to have a kid and in, like, the months leading up to that, some people dive headfirst into all sorts of books about, like, parenting and, like, how to prepare. And I think alongside that can be questions of screen time.
Emanuel:Did you do any read did you read like zero? Zero. Okay. Wow.
Patrick:Didn't read didn't read baby books. Didn't read anything about screen time. My, You know, this is an extension of and again, like, people should do, like,
Emanuel:Did your lot any? Did your wife
Patrick:did Not really. Not really. I mean, like, you know, she dragged me to a couple of classes, but, like, both of us are very instinctual parents in which, like, how we viewed it and how we were I think there's an extension like many of extension of how you were raised and like, oh, here are my likes and dislikes from that experience and then what you carry forward, was I don't think we'll know what we want to do about it until it happens. And I don't know how useful it is to get stressed out, create boundaries for ourself, create rules for ourself and our kids before we've met them, before we know what they're like, and what is even the technology going to be when those questions are being brought up? Because it feels like everything is changing so quickly.
Patrick:Where I you know, so early on, no, I didn't sweat. I'm under the age of two. Like, they shouldn't be in the. Presence of I'm just making up BS. But I just didn't part of it is because I do think we grew up with screens.
Patrick:And I think a lot of us grew up with screens without many rules. And we spend a lot of time with screens. And then you see any number of these maybe these articles about how screen time can or can't be, but often is harmful to parents in some x, y, or z way. It's like, oh, well, I have to have rules about that. I have to be stricter about that.
Patrick:I think parents instill a lot of self shame and self pressure early on. And for me, my thought was their screens are going to be everywhere. There is no world where my child or children are going to come in, and I'm going to shield them from screens. So for us, it was more about how they interact with the screens. I cannot create a bubble world where they don't get to experience any of that.
Patrick:So my job as a parent is how do they get used to screens, have a relationship, have a healthy relationship with screens? And that became sort of the defining principle of how we thought about screens going forward, was not avoiding them, was accepting they're a reality. Like every when they go to school, they're all getting Chromebooks and tablets in some fashion. Like, I want them to understand how this works. I want them to understand what it can do and what it can't do and how it fits in as a tool in their life.
Patrick:So that kind of became a defining principle early on. Practically speaking, we're broadly an Apple family, the exception being a non cellular phone that my daughter got a couple of years ago because she found it in a drawer. Because I got it during when Google was pushing Stadia, I just had an Android Pixel phone sitting in a drawer, and then she uses that so she can fit in with some older kids down the street. But we broadly started with no screen time restrictions, and it was more just a negotiation with the kids. Like, hey.
Patrick:Like, it's been x amount of time. Like, we're getting you know, I think we're done after this video was done, yada yada. Part of that was born out of Apple has really awful screen time controls. It's like fifteen minutes, one hour all day, which I'm sorry, that is just does not encompass all the scenarios in which a child might want to use screen time. So we went through a period where originally it was like they were limited to an hour a day absent asking for permission for more.
Patrick:And then I got tired of my oldest saying, well, was a seventeen minute video and fifteen minutes. And so I'm giving you fifteen minutes, then I have to give you another fifteen minutes, or I give you an hour, or I give you all day. That's a really frustrating negotiation to do with the child. It's frustrating for them. It's frustrating for me.
Patrick:So we went through a period where we turned it off and that lasted for, I don't know, a year. But then we noticed we were having problems with getting to school on time, so then we shifted to, you don't get fifteen minutes in the morning, it's on the tablets, you get fifteen minutes on the TV, and the tablets are locked until 4PM till you get out of school. There's no way they can even do anything. And that's where we're at now. It's like it's at one hour during the school week, two hours on the weekends because it allows us to sleep in a little bit longer if they can get up and go get themselves a breakfast snack and be on their tablets.
Patrick:And if mom and dad want to try and sleep till 08:00, that's our best bet to get there. And that kind of the broad strokes of how we have negotiated that, over the years. And the one difference that I've noticed, the one note I'll make about the Android phone that my daughter has is Google's Family Link app is really exceptional. It's really well made, lots of granular controls. The time she has set on that device, she can tell me, she's like, I'm at the end of like this round of 99 Nights in the Forest, which is a popular survival game on Roblox.
Patrick:Like, I just need ten minutes. And like, so then I can go in there, I can give it ten minutes. And if she needs one minute after that, I can go in and I can give it the one minute. I can be very granular with the relationship where her and I are talking about, what are you trying to accomplish? My youngest needs a more forceful hand because she's just delaying giving the device back, and she's inventing reasons to extend stream time.
Patrick:Whereas with my oldest, it is often much more goal based or goal oriented. Like, I'm finishing this, I'm doing that, can I have the time to finish it? And I'm much more amenable to extending time if there's a specific task that's trying to be accomplished.
Emanuel:I think I need to give people who are listening who might not be parents, like, a lay of the land here because before you got into the specific, you said that you're pretty permissive. You're more permissive than the other parents you know. But now that you're getting into the details, it sounds like, broadly speaking, an hour a day during the week, two hours.
Patrick:It's it's I guess what I'd say is it's it's an hour or two hours before we talk about what we're doing with the time.
Emanuel:Right. But that that's not that's not that doesn't to me, you know, as a parent, and I'm sure to other people who are listening, that doesn't sound like wild. It it definitely doesn't sound like what was the situation with us. When we were growing up, like my mom came to visit recently and we were trying to put the baby down. Mhmm.
Emanuel:She was like, just put him in front of the TV. That's what I did with you guys. But you saying that you're very permissive, I think, is in contrast to, like, broadly speaking what the general advice is, which is pretty restrictive. Right? Like, at least the the mainstream common sense, common wisdom on screen time is very, very limited.
Emanuel:I believe that the American Psychological Association says things like a child should not even look at a screen until they're two or three, which is not the situation in our house. Like, that wasn't the situation in our house.
Patrick:It's it's just the science the science is the science, but it doesn't live in the real world. And I think that that is I think that's often I think a lot of especially, like, liberal coded parents, like, reading the New York Times guilt shame themselves over screen time because the news articles make it seem like you're it's very easy to read that stuff and be like, I'm a bad parent. And you tell yourself that while absolutely not following those guidelines in the real world. And I think a lot of my like at CrossFit and other places, like, it's so like, you're not a because you gave your kid an hour on their tablet to mindlessly watch videos while you cooked a nice dinner as opposed to, like, putting something in the air fryer is not something to be ashamed of. That's that's a tool.
Patrick:Like, that's using the context of current society and technology to allow you to do something nice for yourself and your family. There's nothing wrong with that.
Emanuel:Yeah. The the the literature, broadly speaking, whether it's journalism or science, is much, much more restrictive than than what I think people think and what, as you say, like the reality of parenting is. A few more, like, this is kind of like where we're going to veer off into Emmanuel is seeking parental advice from Patrick part of the podcast, but like a few specific questions. There's an Android phone you mentioned that one of your daughters has. Does anybody else have?
Emanuel:Do they
Patrick:have their own devices? Both. Yes. Both. Yeah.
Patrick:Both children have a a tablet. I I don't, you know, I don't even have distinctive memories of when my five year old got we essentially did a refresh of family devices and then everyone got was on the same, alright, we bought them here. Whenever these busted, we'll replace them in five years or whatever. But so each kid has their own dedicated tablet that they're responsible for charging and putting back in its designated spots. And then, yes, my nine year old has a Google Pixel two, I don't know, a Google Pixel.
Patrick:It's one of the bigger phones. Like I said, she found it in a drawer. And that was given to her explicitly because one, she found it and said, what are you doing with this? I'm like, nothing. And she really likes taking pictures and doing photo and video editing, and she's gotten some animation as well.
Patrick:And her pitch to me was like, I can't take my tablet when I wanna go take photos of things outside. I'm like, that is that's a yeah. And my you know, your thought might be, well, get a digital camera. But like, think about the ecosystem these days. It's like digital camera requires you to then extract photos, put it on a device.
Patrick:And so her pitch I don't think she was trying to be sneaky. It 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 photo I'm like, shit. That's a yeah. Okay.
Patrick:Fine. Okay. But here's like I know it's a cell phone, but I the was like, I'm not turning on the cell phone part. Like, you are not old enough to like, to me, the defining feature of a cell phone is twenty four seven access to data that you can use at all times, which fundamentally changes your relationship with a device. And then 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.
Patrick:And so my thought thing was to her was like, you're going to hear from your older friends, like Snapchat or whatever. Like, don't even come to me about it. We're not 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.
Patrick:And also secretly part of the reason she wanted it was because one of her best friends is three 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 between those two things.
Emanuel:Are they allowed to have the devices at dinner at a restaurant?
Patrick:Only if it would be helpful to us. Yeah. So it's I would say taking it to a restaurant is ex exceptionally rare. There and this is a big credit to my wife. She is you know, we have like a whole art, like, tub of things.
Patrick:It exists in the car permanently that is cycled in with new things. But that's not to say like it doesn't happen. Like, if we go to a bar restaurant to like, say, watch a sports game, like, art activities cannot last you two and a half hours to make it through four quarters of a football game. And this is where the like, this is where, you know, I felt no shame over this, but my wife did feel a little bit, and eventually we got to a place where like the kids are very young. They cannot be expected to sit in a bar like a bar restaurant and like entertain themselves for two and a half hours in like at a table.
Patrick:At a certain point, we should use this tool to make them happier, to make ourselves happier. We wanna watch the end of this football game. Our kids wanna 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.
Patrick: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 you know, have more location tracking as they get on a bike and go around sort 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.
Emanuel:Yeah. 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.
Emanuel:He's done all the other things. He's had like a he he he's had had like a well rounded, you know, few hours of activity. And it's like, okay. I get you know what I mean? It's sort of like he ate his vegetables, so
Patrick:to speak. Well, and he and here's one here's one distinction I would make. It's like screen time studies and conversation about screen time, the 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.
Patrick:And I think that's one of my guiding principles. 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 they're like, Oh, I used to spend 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 a dollhouse or other versions of play, that would be seen as very healthy.
Patrick:And 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.
Patrick: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.
Emanuel:This just stirred so many, like, important observations I think that I've made recently. One is you said, it's really important what's on the screen. And I agree that in principle, but one of the things that really, like, shocked me, I I just wasn't prepared for this. Like, people talk about screen time and how addictive screens can be. And I guess in my mind, that's always related to content.
Emanuel:Like, the kid is really into Sesame Street, the kid is really into Roblox, the kid is really into social media, like, you know what I mean? They're like, it's the thing that is 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, like the biological aspect of it is underrated, right? Like there's something about the brightness of the screen, the vibrancy of the colors, the the high refresh rate of an iPhone that just like draws the eye, and in in the same way that like, you know, a casino kind of pulls you in or even Hades, you know what I mean? Like the way that numbers and stuff and everything pops on screen, it's just like
Patrick:Well, at all these apps. Mean, that's the thing about the difference between you and I with screens that we grew up, screens were for a discrete action, or the things you could do on them were very limited. Sure, 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 which is is like, oh, I'm tired of doing this. Switch over to this. I'm tired of doing this.
Patrick:And, you know, other actions like you're talking about with your kid of like, you know, play with your toys or read a book are discrete, slow the world down, engage with something, maybe 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?
Patrick: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 that they don't have profoundly addicting and exploitative qualities to them. Even 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.
Patrick: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 abnormal. I don't blame a three year old for saying, Yeah, I'd like to just do the iPad. Thank you.
Patrick:Yeah, of course, so would I. Yeah.
Emanuel:And it it it everything I think people understand that, like, 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? And that's like a very impulsive extreme end of it, but everything arcs that way, and like it catches you in ways that it didn't expect. And it's exactly the difference you said, like, 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, like, that's the thing that you're watching. And there is the accessibility of, like, 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, like, 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.
Patrick:Hell, yeah.
Emanuel:And that used to be, we're sitting down, we're watching the movie. We're watching the movie again. We're watching the movie. 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 skip the dialogue, dude.
Emanuel: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.
Emanuel:This is a sad scene. This is the happy scene. And he's like, no. I just wanna see Lightning McQueen race.
Patrick:That's the love. My my younger has done, younger one has done stuff like that, especially she went through, like many kids, a deep, deep K pop D 100 phase that we are still working our we'll see if it survives to her birthday in March, which she claims it's gonna be K pop D 100. It's like, that's gonna be ten months of K pop. Okay. But it's hard to untangle is this me being a millennial boomer?
Patrick:Is it just okay that you fast forward to the cool scene that you like? No. You need to be sit with the sad part. You need to sit with the sad part before you get that. And I'm broadly with you.
Patrick:I understand the impulse. And one way to counteract that is one of my favorite things. And this work for every kid, but, like, 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, like, I know those movies will be on Disney plus.
Patrick:I'm already playing for Disney plus. You know? 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 movies that are two plus hours long.
Patrick:And my five year old got squirrelly by the end of the first week, and she was four when that came out. And for them, 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, like in a theater, in a social context where like, you have to be quiet because there's other people around. And we found that to be like 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 to get a snack, or I'm going to do that.
Patrick:It's not even necessarily always just a screen or control issue as much as, like, just at home, you're, like, less likely to, like, sit and, like, emotionally engage with the artist on screen, whereas whereas in movie theater, we found a a lot of success with that.
Emanuel:One last thing broadly about screen time before we move on to Roblox, because I do wanna discuss Roblox. You said, like, we're we're we're talking about aiming for a healthy relationship with screens, but what that means is a very complicated conversation and it 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. Mhmm. And, you know, I I I was on some chat rooms that I wasn't supposed to be on, and I I that's just not a big deal, but it's like I learned how to pirate video games.
Emanuel:And I I just did all this stuff that I wouldn't want my kid to do. I had access to pornography before, you know, that was probably advisable, but not like today, though.
Patrick: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 Yeah. Than the than the way it works now.
Emanuel: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?
Emanuel:And I guess the question is, like, how do you work backwards to what is a good relationship with with screens for your kid based on your own relationship? You know? Like, what is healthy?
Patrick:You know? No. I think this I find this to be extremely challenging, which is both my nine year old's old enough to, like, when she's been told to get off the screen, she's like, well, well, why are you on your phone? Like, great question. Yeah.
Patrick:Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Patrick:Yep. Yep. It's a good one. It's like, well, you're just playing a video game. Mm-mm.
Patrick:Mm-mm. These are good points. These are good points. Eventually, it's dad's job. It stops being like my nine year old can cut through the BS on that one.
Patrick: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 your screen.
Patrick: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. They're going to find themselves in danger in real life and in line. And my role as a parent is to think 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.
Patrick:I think that's fundamentally sort of what you're doing. Your number one goal as a parent is less about keeping I mean, yes, you're trying to stop them from killing themselves when they're too young to know better, but then as they're getting older, it's you're going to be in situations where I just have to hope that our 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.
Patrick:Can monitor all of their chats in Messenger Kids or whatever other platform. You 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.
Patrick: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 you know, in the same way that, you know, the first time my oldest crossed the street to go to a friend's house and she was old enough that she should be she was able to do it by herself. And I forced myself to not watch.
Patrick:Like, I could have watched from outside the window and make sure she did it. And maybe I'm irresponsible to, like, not watch him again. But, like, if the car was gonna hit her, I couldn't have saved it. She went out the door. Like and I tried to internalize.
Patrick:Like, I have to let go. I have to trust that she knows to look both ways. And if I'm not gonna walk her there, I have to trust that I there's nothing I could have done if like like she walked out and didn't do it. That's, I guess, maybe an awful way to think about it, but it is something I try and think about. It's like, need to allow my kids to make mistakes within whatever I feel is like still my role as a parent to establish guardrails and understand things that you don't understand yet and do my best to negotiate that.
Patrick:But it's not easy. 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 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.
Emanuel: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 DiAnastasio at Bloomberg.
Emanuel:She's a really good reporter on Roblox. I 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 Epek, how would you describe it?
Emanuel:Like, what is it? What do you do? I launched Roblox, and
Patrick:what happened? A social platform. Roblox is a social platform for interactive experiences, like, which you could call video games, but frequently are what you're asked to do as a co player is is not very much. Like, Roblox for the vast majority of younger audiences, and I mean that from as young as five to, like, you know, high school age, is a space to hang out with friends and do things. It is it is not it is less about accomplishing a goal as much as it is spending time with other people in a space.
Patrick:And Roblox has an unlimited number of spaces in which to do those things. So which whichever impulse you might have that day, whether it's an obi, which is short for is 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, and yet that's how my daughter learned how to jump in a video game. And she mentioned one time when she played Astrobot, she made this very funny remark.
Patrick:She was like, wow, it's so much easier to control it here. I'm like, yeah, because Roblox physics are trash, and they're floaty and they're bad. But it's a it's a social platform for young people to hang out and do different things outside of a school or in person social context.
Emanuel: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 the website, and there's a user interface. There's some kind of feed. You can click on people's profiles. You open Roblox.
Emanuel:I don't think you've mentioned this, but it's a platform where other people it's not it's not Roblox, the company itself that is making all the experiences. It's other people. Sometimes they're, like, other players. Sometimes they're companies whose entire business is making content for Roblox, and it's like, you could come you can kinda get in there and download any one of those.
Patrick:There's no downloading. This is definitely an important part of it is everything is seamless. When you jump into the interface, the top or your friends list, it will say what your friends are doing at the moment. You 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.
Patrick: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.
Emanuel:Because then they would have to pay
Patrick:a It was 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. It 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, you can't have a video game inside of your video game. And so Roblox just renamed them experiences, 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.
Patrick: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. Like these are extremely popular. Popular enough to have toys at McDonald's like level of of which I think Adopt Me was the first Roblox game to have discrete toys in a in a Happy Meal, I think, a year ago.
Patrick:And and then below that is a feed on like, what's trending amongst, Roblox users? What's recommended for you based on what you've played? And then below that, you get into sort of and actually the the the interface is like very similar to Netflix in which it's like, here's what we're pushing on you. And then then if you wanna get into the categories of, you know, the 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.
Patrick:And Roblox is full of copyright violations. They just actively Roblox operates like many platforms. We don't take it down unless the rights holder asks to take it down. And it's interesting because when I've talked to different rights holders, there's definitely a wink and a nod, which is like Netflix is happy to have K pop demon hunters unofficial
Emanuel:experiences everywhere as long as they're not
Patrick:pop weird and sexualized and gonna generate an awful headline from Cecilia Bloomberg. Like, a lot of this stuff operates in a gray area where Roblox is happy to have the copy stuff that skirts copyright. The 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.
Emanuel:So I would say there are, like, 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. That's like a content problem. Then it's online, and
Patrick:you can interact with other people as you alluded to. Hangout in bathroom simulator Right. Sort of things.
Emanuel:Yeah. There 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, and you can very easily end up spending a ton of money on Roblox. Is that generally, like, how you view it as, like, what what the challenges are? It is.
Emanuel:And I
Patrick:think the at Atlanta, 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. It's always like 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.
Patrick:And then also like, 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 is 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 roadblocks. I have a very specific story that I can get into if you want about how that originally happened.
Patrick:But monetarily, we do not spend money in Roblox. That is a building block of my children's relationship with Roblox is 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 how are there exception exceptions to that?
Emanuel:How do you explain that? Have how did you explain that to them?
Patrick:So it started with my my youngest. She well, you know, when played Roblox even earlier than my oldest started playing Roblox because their sisters she would see what her sister was doing. She didn't wanna play Roblox. She wanted to do what her sister was doing. So that was part of that relationship.
Patrick:With my oldest, we sat down. And again, I encourage people to Almost nobody that listens to this is going to enjoy playing Roblox, but I encourage you to download it and play it, especially if you have children, experience it yourself, so you kind of understand the world that they're navigating. And so I would jump into it with her. And I would say like, let's just what's the game that you're into now? And so she would jump into that.
Patrick:And the in every Roblox experience, and this is a something that Roblox encourages, it's 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 are all FOMO like weapons, items, things for your avatar, cheats, upgrades. It is all dangling just little candy.
Patrick:And none of that stuff carries over from one experience to the next. Like you spend $3, and obviously it's obfuscated by they call it Robux 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 spend $3 so you could, like, have unlimited continues for this level.
Patrick: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. Like, these games are trying to trick you.
Patrick: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. If 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 now with a five year old, it's just no. We just we told you we don't do we don't buy things in Roblox. The one exception is is buying things for their avatars.
Patrick:There are two layers of purchases in Roblox. There are inexperienced purchases, which are superfluous, exploitative, and just trying to grind purchases Roblox 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. That carries into every experience into Roblox. That is just the basic avatar that gets dumped into everything that you play.
Patrick:And so when my kids were into Lububus, you could spend a dollar and they could look like a Lububu. I was like, that's go get a dollar from, you know, your wallet or piggy bank. And like, 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 sort of different transaction.
Patrick:So that that's the relationship we have. It's like and I think that also illustrates the difference between kids' age gaps. Like, the younger kid, it just has to be no, no conversation, no negotiation. Because I can't get into explaining exploitative game mechanics. With my nine year old, I can.
Patrick:She understand like, she can identify, at least for now, you know, AI slop. We have conversations about that. She can she understands like this game feels like it feels scammy is the word that we use with her. Like, this feels scammy. It was like it does feel scammy.
Patrick:And so I can have an actual conversation with her, and that's the dynamic we have about buying or not buying things in in Roblox. I'm much more permissive of basically anything else. But like Roblox, because it's such a slippery slope, to saying yes to anything, I feel like And 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 kind of allow them more permission on on that front.
Emanuel:Do you think your older kid has internalized that rule, or is it still an ongoing battle where you say she asks and you say no? Or is she like, okay. Well, that's how it is, or, I I understand where daddy's coming from?
Patrick: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, and this is all due respect to Cecilia and lots of other folks who do Roblox reporting.
Patrick:But the standard line in, I would call, like, enthusiast and mainstream tech press is understandably, I would characterize as anti Roblox. Like, 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, like, I'm here on the ground, like, with the parents, and, like, the parents are letting their kids play Roblox.
Patrick:And so, like, when I'm on, like, calls with, like, Roblox executives and some reporters are asking about, like, statistics about, like, predators on the surface, like, that's all true. I'm glad that's being covered. But then, like, I'm raising my hand. I was like, alright. Can you explain, like, why this change happened to the parental control system that, like, it used to work on the website this way and now it's differently on the app?
Patrick:Because fundamentally, like, that that's and that's just my approach. Again, I'm I have deep respect to all these folks doing really excellent reporting. I'm reliant on it in informing my own reporting. But my tact is like, yeah, but most parents are gonna 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.
Patrick: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 the BS. Like, just see right through all like, 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.
Patrick:And that doesn't mean it shouldn't be regulated by roadblocks. 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 is just that doesn't they don't even see it at all.
Patrick:It'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 ninety nine 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 surprising ways because they kind of don't have a choice. It's just sort of the way a lot of the stuff is going.
Emanuel:One rule that and I'm very much, you know, again, we're just two years into parenting. Yeah. But one rule we've been able to follow so far that I wanna follow as long as I can, and I'm I'm clear eyed about the fact that I won't be able to for long. But, like, my kid doesn't consume anything media wise that I don't know what it is. Mhmm.
Emanuel:And that allows me to do some quality control.
Patrick:So no YouTube is basically what you're saying?
Emanuel:We'll watch YouTube if I can sit down and watch it Right. With Right. 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 and toddlers, coco melon is like a huge thing. Yeah. It's prevalent to the point where we had unfortunately had to take him to the hospitals a bunch of times, and it's on in the waiting rooms, and it's like if you're admitted and, like, the nurse comes in and, like, as part of, like, trying to be, like, a good nurse and to be nice to you, she'll be like, she'll just put it on without asking.
Emanuel:And I have seen some coco melon and I'm very anti coco melon be because I think it sucks. You know what I mean? I just think it's like It's empty calories
Patrick:for sure.
Emanuel:It's just shitty. It's like, don't even care if I I don't know about the it's just like, it's a as someone who loves arts 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 I will, but it's like I write there's something there. It's like, it's good. There's a story.
Emanuel:There's writing. There's there's craft. It's a bad
Patrick:Pixar movie, but like It's still a Pixar movie.
Emanuel:Yeah. There's a craft to it. There's something there. It's like, I'm okay with him consuming it. And that that is just sort of the quality control that I'm able to maintain at this point as a parent.
Emanuel:And it sounds to me like as a video game critic, you're not a big fan of the various Roblox experiences,
Patrick:and I'm kind of I don't know I don't know if I'd characterize it that way. I think the I I think people give Roblox experiences short shrift because they are bad video games. But Mhmm. And I I think they I think they're often are bad video games. The majority of them are bad video games, But that's not their goal.
Patrick:The term I've settled on with, Roblox game design is 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 like the best video game arc possible as much as what is this doing to to encourage and facilitate social interactions, which 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 micro transactions. Like, there are are very deeply exploited ways that that is that is worked into the system. But ultimately, it is about social experiences first.
Patrick:And that is like 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 parents and kids and yada yada yada. And I think if you're going through 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.
Patrick:It 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 it is a great facilitator of social interactions in a very well designed video game.
Patrick:And I think alongside social first would be something I describe as frictionless. There is just less of a desire amongst younger people for games that are centered around like not that they don't can't enjoy difficulty and challenge and skill arcs, but my kids don't play survival Minecraft. They 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 like turn off dying so that we could like just have fun and run around? And I think that is going to be one of those fundamental shift.
Patrick:Roblox is a signifier of a broader shift in game design that will happen over the next twenty years, which is emphasizing social interactions and deemphasizing, I think, challenge difficulty, traditional markers of what is a good video. This doesn't go away, but I I think it just shifts as the focus to as a different generation embraces a different style of game.
Emanuel: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, like, quality, and I'm happy to hear that you are able to see I don't like playing them,
Patrick:but I I understand. I I just think they're going for something fundamentally different.
Emanuel:And that there's there's a value there. There is there's arch to it. There's, you know, that they're able to get something something out of it. You're not upset that they're consuming something bad, it sounds like. No.
Emanuel:So I'm very happy to hear that, and I will take it a step further. And I don't know if I heard you make this connection yet, but on Remap Radio, the gaming podcast that that you do, you guys have been discussing this emerging, I would say, not dominant, but like a defining trend in games this year or the past couple of years is what has come to be known as FriendSlop.
Patrick:Mhmm.
Emanuel:Right? And and these are social first games. These are games where, like, mechanics are somewhat deemphasized, and the thing that is highlighted is how are people interacting together in in in an online game. And that sounds very Roblox. That sounds like Roblox logic kind of trickling down to I don't know what you wanna call this audience, like the hardcore audience or the the steam audience or the the the
Patrick:I think it's I think it's young people getting older and more sophisticated. I I think I think I think the rise of friend slot, which those games do have a, like, a ton of challenge and are often like rooted in, like, repeatable loops of games in which the the the the loss, when you die, like when the the loop is over, you start from scratch. And the punishments can often be very mean in some of these friend slop games. But I think friend slop exists as a result of iterative and trickle down Roblox design and stuff in that space. And this is where, you know, I'm generally just an optimistic person in general.
Patrick:Like 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.
Patrick:Like what do you do when you take those core ideas and then hand them to because a lot of the designers on Roblox are also teenagers. These are exceptionally young people building. Some of that is changing. Mentioned there are companies that are studios 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 FriendSlop is a direct That would give you encouragement.
Patrick:Was like, Oh, like this stuff can produce really interesting game design even if it's hard to see that because Roblox itself is just so hard to to parse.
Emanuel:Yeah. And and that's something, you know, less about being a parent and more just being an old man. It's like, I don't want to like 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 it's good to see the the the value in in in something that is for kids and is often, I think, dismissed.
Patrick:Well, it's it's it's it's it's it'll be helpful when it's you know, I 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, TLDR and why she got into Roblox at all was she started playing Roblox when she was five, which is I wouldn't recommend that. I'd recommend waiting longer, especially once they get into grade school and their social pressure. But the social pressure is exactly why my kids started playing Roblox. Like it's because it was the first winter of COVID, there were no vaccines available for adults, let alone for children.
Patrick:And my oldest was five at the time, started Or four at the time, like started playing outside. Met this older girl who's now one of her best friends, three years older older than her, lives down the street. And she was playing Roblox. And they could play outside, but then, you know, especially in winter, like gets dark quickly, they can't come inside to play, and they can't have a traditional sort of like budding friendship in the way that you normally would because they're restricted by the weather conditions outside, our concerns about COVID, etcetera, etcetera. And she came to me and said, you know, my friend plays this thing called Roblox, and I immediately tense up.
Patrick:Because like, Oh, I thought this was something I'm dealing with in like a couple of years. 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 like, Why do you want Roblox? And I'm like, Can you explain to me why you want it?
Patrick: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 like if we're in roadblocks, then like we could be like friends and like she could be more of my friend. And like she got me in the heart.
Patrick:Like, it was like a really reasonable ask. And I said, okay. There are gonna 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, that you just want to spend time with a friend that you can't spend time with.
Patrick:So that's how we ended up saying yes to to Roblox and then kind of kind of went from there. And so, again, I don't I wouldn't recommend I feel like her doing it at the age she did it at was a very specific set of circumstances, 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. But, like, I don't 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.
Emanuel:I love that story. I think that's great because, you know, at four four 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
Patrick:We need more haters though.
Emanuel: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 I'm able to keep in touch with friends who I'm not near and have, like, really deep, meaningful, fun, memorable, like, making memories Mhmm. Playing playing a video game.
Emanuel:That and that's that's awesome that, like, a kid can recognize that, and it's a reminder for, like, why we care and talk about any of this in
Patrick:the first place.
Emanuel:I could talk to you about all of this for many more hours, and maybe we should again. But I wanna do just like a lightning round Okay. Of some things I wanted to know, again, parent to parent. Do you kids watch Bluey? Yes.
Emanuel:Obsessed.
Patrick:Not so much anymore. The the when they did the thirty minute episode, that feels like that cracked the fever for us. Okay. Do you think do
Emanuel:you think Bluey is good by adult standards? Yes. I do. Okay. I disagree.
Emanuel:I I think the animation is good, but it's like it's it goes right over my head. I don't I don't get it.
Patrick:Oh. I thought you're gonna be one of those parents who's like, I 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.
Emanuel:I enjoy Cars more than I enjoy Bluey, personally. I don't know.
Patrick:Are are you You've watched Cars too many times.
Emanuel:I know. I'm completely brainwashed. Are they allowed to watch Paw Patrol?
Patrick:I yeah. Yes. I had. I wrote an article for Car Display about and they called it the Paw Patrol question, which is about, like, you know, there were 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 argued as being propaganda. At the end of the day, I was like, if I can't have a conversation with my daughter about propaganda, I don't know that I'm going to stop her from watching Paw Patrol as a result.
Patrick:Plus, they send cops to the school to meet. Copaganda is everywhere. Right. Right. I was like, I'm just gonna hope PAW Patrol is a fever that will break.
Patrick:And if it's not, then we'll have that conversation. And the fever broke, and I never had to have that conversation. So Okay. But, also, PAW Patrol sucks. If you're gonna watch PAW Patrol, the movies are not bad.
Patrick:The TV show is trash, but the movies have decent animation, fun music, and I I remember coming out of both going like, well, the TV show was at least, like, half of this. I I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed by it.
Emanuel:Are they allowed to watch YouTube without supervision?
Patrick:Yes. My youngest is in the YouTube kids ecosystem. I 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. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Patrick:About, like, how much, like, weird shit was slipping through the cracks on the YouTube Kids app specifically. There's just a lot it's garbage. It's not good. But it's bad in the sense that you're getting absolutely nothing out of this. But yes, my youngest has YouTube Kids that is age appropriate.
Patrick:We haven't had any issues there other than it just being slop. And not even like AI slop, although there is that stuff as well. My oldest, 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?
Patrick:And I moved her into a different bucket because she got really into for the was the first, like, YouTuber she got into. I did my research. Like, I was like, this seems fine. I don't see any pro fascism, like, Nazi propaganda, like, in here. Just seems like this is a really good Minecraft girl that you like to watch.
Patrick:And so I had to move her up because most that that that YouTubers it's anthemath, I think, was the the the YouTuber. Now people are gonna send me messages about why is bad, but, like, most of her videos were getting filtered out by and so it was doing its job. So I moved it up so that she could she could watch more of that specific person's video.
Emanuel:Interesting. Interesting. Will you allow them to have fully connected online phones by the time they're 13?
Patrick: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.
Emanuel:Mhmm. But just catching catching on now as
Patrick:a And it passed it passed in our district. I you know, I'm I'm very cognizant of, especially like the Taylor Lorenz argument of like, I'm not saying that you should ban communities for kids to I think the whole ideaification of the internet, I have very deep problems, even like the potentially good faith or good consequences in some of those actions as 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. That 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.
Patrick:Like, the idea that my child could be, like, which obviously breaks my heart to even conceive of, part of like 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.
Emanuel:Obviously, such an insane consideration to even have to make.
Patrick:But that's typically the argument I end up seeing with parents who are like, end up saying that's why they should have it. Like, what if I could call my kid? I'm like, I get I get it. I get my heart bleeds for that, but I that I fall on the side of taking it away in school.
Emanuel:Okay. Finally, will Roblox still be hot, still be this embedded among young people in, like, five years?
Patrick:Five years? Yes. Ten years? Ten 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.
Patrick:I think Roblox will never go away. I guess that's what I would say is like Roblox is a pillar, is a institutional part of the media landscape, whether it can be, the youth can be captured to somewhere else, like sure, look at TikTok. Like you can imagine that to something like that comes. Like 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.
Patrick: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 it's hard for me to imagine them losing that. I think they just lose I think they just lose market grasp, but they never actually fundamentally go away.
Emanuel:Okay. Patrick, thank you so much. I wanna send people to Remap Radio. Genuinely enjoy it. I don't miss an episode.
Emanuel:Great conversations. Also, Crossplay, the newsletter. It's crossplay.news. News. Yes.
Emanuel:Great newsletter recommended to current parents thinking of of becoming a parent. Very much the kind of conversations that I wish I heard more of before before I became a parent myself. As reminder, four four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to four four Media and directly support our work, please go to 44media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and ad free versions of the podcast.
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Emanuel:We'll see you again next time.