What They Say
A writer on a fatherhood blog has made a case for allowing children to enjoy screen time partly on the basis that with the rapid rate of development in the world economy, many of the jobs of the future don’t yet exist and that playing creative games in the Metaverse may be a way of developing the mental skills that employers will want to fill those jobs. He points out that elements of the Metaverse are already here in Minecraft and Roblox. There are over 600 developers who earn over $85,000 a year from their Roblox creations, and the company paid out $129.7 million to developers in the second quarter of 2021 alone.
(I also enjoyed his quote of a Marcus Brigstocke joke:
“If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.”
What We Think
I’m so used to having seen, over the decades, many, many articles highlighting the downside of the use of the products of the display industry, that it’s very refreshing to see an argument in favour. It brought to mind two things for me. First, I became aware of Minecraft after seeing a young family member getting into the game some years ago. I did wonder about the amount of time he spent on the game, but these days he’s very happily at University studying to become a software engineer.
I’m also reminded of the view that one of the reasons that the UK was believed to have developed so much good 3D graphics technology partly because so many youngsters spent their teenage years hacking away at Sinclair Spectrums (Spectra?) and BBC micro PCs that really had very limited graphics power. They had to find ways to overcome weak hardware with clever software. In the end that 3D technology and programming power turned into software and hardware businesses. (BR)
There are over 600 developers who earn over $85,000 a year from their Roblox creations
