The Firebug, who turned 7 a few months ago, loves Minecraft. We’ve kept him in single-player mode (and off the Web generally so far, though that’s gonna start changing soon, I think), but it looks at least as fun and interesting and safe as anything else he might do on a tablet.
My daughter will be 9 this month, and for the past few months she’s been allowed to play on other servers with other people. I keep on eye on what she does, though, as I do whatever she does.
How does Minecraft multiplayer work? I’ve only played on the Xbox single player mode. Is it like you all wander around the same giant map or something and have to worry about other players blowing up your work?
My 6 year old son loves the single player creative mode through the “pocket edition” available for the iPad. Biggest issue so far is having him wander away from his built up area, which means I have to get the compass out, and start searching for his stuff.
I do enjoy that he’s made a castle and a zombie monster army to go with it.
I have a child approaching this age and was on the fence about picking up the iPad version.
You’ve sold me.
Someone hosts a server, which may be publicly available over the internet, or just on your LAN. You can have blacklists and whitelists, so the person creating the server has total control over who is let on. You can also make certain areas “undestroyable” (eg, have a starting area where everybody pops up at first, with items to help people get started)
After that…yeah, it’s just a world where people can run around in and do things and make things either together or separately. As in the real world, people can choose to use that freedom to destroy and steal other people’s stuff. The response to that really depends on the players and the world owner. You can boot people who grief too often - and if you like you can define “too often” as “ever”
We run a server for our kids and their friends. Friends have to get put on the whitelist to be allowed on. We have suspended people occasionally for destructive behaviour - there are logs, you can tell who’s done what. But generally it works pretty well. When the players are all people who know each other IRL, the same sort of social pressures apply as would always do - you can’t fuck with your friends too much or they’ll yell at you and not want to play.