Wow, I guess I still hadn't grasped how big fortnight was, not having much to do with children and all... I guess minecraft either attracted a younger audience or the lack of competition removed aspects of bullying?
All of Fortnite is crafted and tuned around in-game purchases. It's also a very centralized game. Minecraft online gaming is a very different experience and there are thousands of independent servers.
The in-game purchase (and indirect gambling) problem is very well known, but no one's done anything about it. It's just too tantalizing a prospect for publishers/game companies I guess.
I think TF2[0] might have been the first on the scene with hats in 2009, and other games followed suit once they saw the success... But many of the games I can think of (Counter Strike for one) were aimed at a somewhat older demographic.
Yeah, as of early 2019[0]. I didn't even mean to imply that there was in-game gambling in Fortnite, but you noting it prompted me to look it up (I don't play/follow Fortnite at all, I dismissed the genre basically as a whole when I saw PUBG start to rise).
Gaming's funding model is SUPER broken. I don't know where or when it went so far off the rails, but at some point people shifted from making massive bets on passion projects to doing a little more marketing/advertising/manipulation to make projects more likely to succeed to full on profit-maximization with little regard for the effects. Ethics hasn't kept up, parenting handbooks haven't, and regulation never stood a chance of keeping up.
Whether it's some of us or all of us to blame, the problem is the same. I'm not hopeful enough to count on some sort of moralistic shift in how things are done across the whole human race or even at the country level but something should probably be done about this. For the same reason people generally agree we shouldn't allow children to do some things before a certain age (where they are likely to have developed enough both physically and mentally to process the ramifications and make a choice), we should probably be preventing manipulation of kids at this level. Look at how Juul swept through high schools (and their marketing campaigns, etc). Things are kind of fucked.
Pretty much anything you could ever want in Minecraft you can get for free (perhaps with the assistance of mods). From what little time I've spent playing Fortnite, it seems much more narrowly-scoped and frankly, pretty boring. I'm not even sure why they're being compared here; they're very different games.
That was my understanding. I think it tries to capture some of Minecraft's mechanics like freeform building but it's so distilled it's not really fair to compare them.
The building in Fortnite is not remotely comparable to that in Minecraft. You can build stuff, but it's mostly small fortifications quickly thrown together to hide behind.
For Minecraft, it largely depends on the server and how it's moderated or lack thereof. Some servers have a higher degree of toxic behavior than others. It is called 'griefing' rather than 'bullying' though.
Griefing is purposefully doing things to ruin someone else's fun, such as blowing up their Minecraft house with explosives or killing them every time they enter a PvP area in WoW. Or quickly killing the enemy that someone needs to complete a quest, over and over before they can. It's not really personal. The "griefer" doesn't have a specific target in mind when they start their run. They just pick someone and do it.
Bullying is more personal. This is someone that has decided they're going to pick on a particular person for some reason. This might be someone they know, or it might be someone doing something they want to stop, like joining a team without knowing what they're doing. Bullying "defaults" is because they don't think the person will know what they're doing and they would rather a teammate that knows the game better. In other games, that might be by player rank/level, attack power, or other means instead of physical appearance.
These 2 things are kind of a hot button for me, obviously.
Hmm, that makes sense. Given that though I would say griefing is a sub-category of bullying then, or a tool used by the bullying party (inheritance vs. composition I guess).
I was in a store the other day and was kind of shocked at the amount of Fortnite merchandise they had. Makes me glad I don't have kids that would beg me for it. And it makes me wish that there was that much merch for the games I liked when I was younger!
