Eli Stark-Elster

Definitely.

I think one contrast that is maybe useful is between two games, both of which kids love.

One is Minecraft, and the other is Fortnite.

Minecraft, I think, is the best-selling game in history, something like 350 million purchases.

Fortnite's also immensely popular, and kids spend a huge amount of time on both of these games.

And understandably, parents, I think, sometimes have concerns about this because it strikes them as strange that kids would be spending so much time in these virtual worlds.

But when you look at the way that these games are built, I think there are very different reasons that kids are drawn to them.

One of those reasons is good, and the other one is probably bad.

In the case of Fortnite, the company that designs the game has essentially built it like a casino.

It is designed to draw kids in, hook their attention, and keep them in these places.

repetitive loops that encourage them to eventually spend lots of money on the game minecraft is not built that way it's a one-time purchase so there's no incentive for the parent company to get kids to stay on there for as long as possible but kids still love it i think they love it for a different reason than fortnite which is that it's a very open-ended exploratory game where you can collaborate with your friends and they have pretty much total control over what they choose to do so

When you zoom out, it can look like these are two instances of a similar thing of kids addicted to video games.

When you zoom in on what they're actually doing and how those games are built, you get a very different picture, I think, of what's actually happening in those worlds.

I don't know.

I don't know that the research on it is well-developed.

My sense, though, and this is something that people like Peter Gray have written about quite eloquently, I think, the key thing to look for here when kids are playing in a physical or a virtual space is, do they have the freedom to make their own decisions in this space?

Are they exploring?

Are they spending time with other kids?

If the answer to all those questions is yes, my sense is that the play is probably just as good regardless of the domain.

But I'd also emphasize, though, is often this is sort of framed as a trade-off, that if kids would simply get off of these virtual spaces, they would go out and play.