Dad’s Secret Guide to Mastering Minecraft

Hi this video is for parents who know nothing about Minecraft but they have kids who want to play Minecraft and you as a parent are wondering is it a waste of time are there any positive aspects to playing it is it even safe to play as a parent of two Minecrafters who plays

Minecraft himself I may be a little bit biased here but I have to say Minecraft is a great game not just for kids but for anyone really but and this is a huge butt there are some safety issues online and with other types of play for certain

Types of kids let me explain you’ll probably want your kids to start off with survival peaceful mode that way they can just learn how to play without having to fight what are known as Hostile Mobs which can be really upsetting for kids of a certain age these Hostile Mobs such as skeletons and

Spiders and zombies and creepers and Enderman they can hurt your kids character in the game and since the game is a firstperson Style game where you are immersed in the world some kids have trouble separating themselves from the game when they’re in the game so it’s no bueno when they get hurt much

Less die in the game so start out playing in plain old vanilla survival peaceful mode and they won’t have to worry about these mobs they won’t have to worry about their health going down nothing like that they can just worry about building walking learning how to

Play the game learning what not to do learning that you don’t just walk over a cliff or walk into lava the easier things you’d learn in the game but this video isn’t about how to play the game I’ll provide some links in the description for that so let’s talk

About online play first off for nearly every type of online play you have to know how to play the game anyway so again start out with survival peaceful mode learn how to play the game first after that if your kid really wants to play online just know that online

Minecraft Gameplay is the wild west some games are perfectly suited for people of all ages some games not so much one particular issue with online play is griefing now for adults this may not be that big of a deal but for kids this can be devastating imagine you’re playing in

An online World you’ve been playing for weeks you built up your base you’ve gathered all kinds of wonderful items you’ve built all kinds of wonderful things you have this gorgeous base you’ve really decked it out with all kinds of color coordinated things and it’s really beautiful and then someone

Comes in slices you down with their sword you’re then tumped over on the side looking around you can’t move because you’re dead but you can see what’s happening they’re stealing all your valuable stuff and then here’s the worst part they destroy your base they either vandalize it Beyond repair they

Set it on fire they just destroy it and your kid is left their dead watching it unfold all of their weeks or months of hard work gone in a matter of seconds and usually with chat messages from that person who’s doing the killing just making fun of them and calling them all

Kinds of bad names there are videos online of kids having complete meltdowns that this happened to um the kind of things where it’s traumatic they require therapy after this griefing can be really really traumatic for some kids especially the younger ones so uh I would avoid that I would avoid having

Them play in any kind of Realm or any world that allows them to do that so circling back on this if you do decide it’s okay for them to play Minecraft and we’ll get to the positive and negative aspects of Minecraft later for the safety reasons start out in survival

Peaceful mode learn how to play the game then from there try easy mode out see if they can handle the easier mobs see if they can handle loss see if they can handle having their stuff blown up by a creeper nearby see if they can handle

Dying in the game if they can’t don’t play online um but if they can fine great if they find it fun to be shooting at skeletons and things like that and slicing them up with their swords and things like that great however if they don’t like this go back to peaceful mode

And they can just stay in there that’s fine too but if they do like it great move up to normal mode hard mode even even though I personally don’t like hard mode or hardcore mode but that’s just a personal preference two more quick notes when it comes to safety Minecraft can be

Extremely addictive for some kids so you’ll probably want to to set time limits UPF front make it a reward not a right second some online games let you pay with real money to get certain perks so if you have a credit card hooked up to Minecraft be careful so let’s move on

To is Minecraft actually worthwhile to play are there any positive benefits to playing Minecraft one benefit that comes to mind when you’re playing in a multiplayer world or realm is if you have a cooperative play where it’s just your kids and their friends and they’re building things together and things like

That in the world uh that can be a nice substitute for a play date when you can’t do a play date really quickly like if you just want to play for a half hour at night they can do that when normally it would take you 15 minutes to get to

Their friend’s house and 15 minutes back and this school night and they can’t really do that but they can jump online for a half hour and play with their friends there that is nice as long as the friends aren’t jerks in the game and actually play cooperatively they can

Communicate in chat or over their phones or various different you know voice over IP sort of things and they can talk and play and it’s all good learning to play Minecraft cooperatively in general has all kinds of benefit benefits for instance this is me anecdotally speaking

But when my kids were younger and they would play I found that a lot of their cooperative play would carry over into the real world for example my wife and I would say hey kids you got to go do the dishes they would then immediately look

At each other and say how about this I’ll load the dishwasher if you go gather all the dishes from around the house the deal deal and they would just go do it that comes right out of Minecraft where they would just separate two t separated task say this task has

To get done how about I go gather the wood you go gather the Cobblestone and they come back and they have all the stuff they need playing cooperatively in Minecraft helps tremendously in the real world at least that’s been my experience but then there are a lot of games that

Have that quality so what sets Minecraft apart well there’s two other things I can think of one is creativity and the other is logical thinking when it comes to creativity you can do pretty much anything you want in Minecraft in terms of building static objects you can build

Any Castle you want you can build any statue you can have some crazy things there’s also water effects and other things you can do to make it really neat you can make things glisten and what not but you can build some really gorgeous things in Minecraft for instance there

Are people that build things like this oo and this ah in other words you’re only limited by your imagination you can build all kinds of things and it’s a great outlet for that as for logical thinking there are two ways I see that Minecraft helps build logical thinking skills the first

Way is in learning from your mistakes you build things very easily and quickly in Minecraft and and in doing that you’re going to make a mistake in building that happens to all beginners a pretty standard beginner mistake is building a house that’s too small or building a farm that doesn’t have room

To expand with Minecraft you can learn from those mistakes and fix them other kinds of mistakes like accidentally walking over a cliff you learn not to do that again lots and lots of mistakes are made in Minecraft so mistakes are made you learn from mistakes and you carry on

And this is a wonderful life skill learning from your mistakes another bigger and more important in my view aspect of logical thinking gained from Minecraft is the whole concept of I can get this if I have that for example I can get an enchantment table if I have

Four blocks of obsidian two diamonds and a book I know that’s a crazy example but it follows the to get this I need that mentality and that mentality is huge humor me for a minute here let’s think back to high school geometry where you had to prove something like this given

ABC is an isoceles triangle am and BN are angle bis sectors prove that am is congruent to BN non-minecraft kids like we were in high school probably would pick away at this and they’d eventually figure out something and there you go but Minecraft kids would the to get this

I need that sort of mentality would say hey to prove that a m and BN are congruent I can do that if I can prove that triangles a n b and a MB are congruent well since triangle ABC is Isles angle cab is the same as CBA and

Since a m and BN are angle bis sectors then angle MB is the same as angle ABN now we have these two triangles and since a is the same as itself we know they’re congruent triangles by angle side angle thus a is congruent to BN notice I blew past the proofy part of

That the reason is the most important part is the realization to get this I need that to get these two things are congruent I can get that if I can prove these two triangles congruent once you make that realization it’s downhill from there that’s just one example of this

Type of reasoning in my former profession of software development this type of reasoning is huge in writing any real software application you tear things out you stub things out you stub out classes and methods you would make what’s known as a walking skeleton where everything can be run through easily and

Then you kind of fill things in later to get this whole application I’m going to need this and I’m going to need this and this and this and this and this so you stub all those things out then you start filling them in later and this type of

Thinking isn’t just limited to geometry proofs and software development anything that requires logical thinking would use this type of thinking in some way to get this I need this well to get this I’m going to need this other thing to get that other thing I’m going to need this

And I know how to get that that sort of thing is huge so yes I believe Minecraft can be very beneficial for kids as long as they don’t get addicted they start out playing Survival peaceful mode are mature enough to handle loss and even death in the game and don’t start

Charging your credit card left and right now I’m going to say this really quickly for any uh person out there that thinks peaceful modes for wusses why would you ever do that I play in peaceful mode you think oh I’m a wuss I’ve killed every

Mob in the game other than the word I haven’t killed the warden yet just cuz I don’t really want to two hours later I just like peaceful mode that’s just me it’s more fun and and that’s the cool thing about Minecraft there’s no wrong way to play it you don’t have to fight

In Minecraft whatever you like to do that’s what you should do it’s a great game that way before I go there’s one other quick thing about Minecraft I’ve been saying survival peaceful mode all this time I say survival peaceful because there’s an alternative to survival known as creative in creative

Mode you have everything in the game from the start you want to build a castle out of diamond blocks go for it you can do that um there are people that play Nothing But creative mode because they love building wonderful structures the there are some really really uh beautiful things people have built

Online out of uh with creative mode creative mode is got a lot of fans not as many as survival but it has a lot of fans in fact there’s one online game I used to play with my kids uh that’s nothing but creative mode and you’re

Told you have five minutes build an owl or build a moose build a chicken and people would have 5 minutes to go in creative mode and build a chicken and they get a bunch of yellow blocks and orange blocks and brown blocks for feet and things like that and they go build a

Chicken and get the best chicken they can build in 5 minutes but even in online games like that you think oh that’s nice people can build chickens what’s the big deal cuz you’re not limited what you can build and sometimes people just build out letters that say

Things that are anti-semitic or worse or they’ll build two stick figures in did I mention the online world is the wild west yeah that’s about all the advice I can give to parents of potential Minecrafters if you have any advice you’d like to give please drop a comment

Below I’ll also provide some links in the description to useful blogs and websites and other things that uh where other people have other perspectives on this for parents and also a few links on how to get started with Minecraft hopefully you can come to a family decision that you’re all happy with and

If you do let your kids play Minecraft don’t cheat yourself play as well it’s a fun game anyway that’s all I have I hope this helps thanks for watching Cheers a