A no-panic guide to the three games your kid won’t stop talking about — and how to steer them.
If you can’t keep these three straight, you’re not alone. Here’s the plain version — and the good news hiding in each.
An open world where kids build anything block by block. It’s creative, calm, and genuinely educational — there’s even an Education edition schools use. The “creative mode” is closer to art than a video game. This is the one to lean into.
Roblox is millions of little games made by other people (many of them kids). The huge upside: your child can make their own games on it and even learn real coding (a language called Lua) doing it. The watch-out: it’s social and has chat, so it’s worth setting up parental controls and knowing who they’re playing with.
A fast, social, competitive game. It’s the most “just playing” of the three and the least creative — fine in moderation, but it’s the one where the consuming-vs-creating line matters most. Voice chat with strangers is the thing to manage.
Your kid already loves these worlds. The best thing you can do isn’t to ban them — it’s to nudge from playing toward making: a Minecraft build challenge, a simple Roblox game, a mod. The love of games is the on-ramp; building is the destination.