[lyk2005]

How do you partake in the real world without it warping your personality? Being scammed of your virtual items is not that different to being scammed of real money once you are an adult. Growing up with multiplayer games, Roblox can be categorized as an immersive sim with a virtual adult world inside of it that can teach kids a great deal about life. I myself got interested in money from Runescape, where I was scammed and scammed others. Since you brought an example I have my own, I ended a friendship over Runescape because I trusted my friend and he stole all my items. I cried for a week but then I moved on and learned to identify bad actors. You choose to shelter your kid, and that's okay because you are the parent.

[autoexec]

> How do you partake in the real world without it warping your personality?

You can't, but what you can do is try to understand where your cognitive biases are, learn the ways advertisers manipulate you and accept that knowing about those techniques do not make them ineffective, actively search for ways you've already been manipulated by advertising, work to develop your critical thinking skills, and above all understand that your children have zero defenses against advertising and that they are specifically and aggressively targeted by advertisers for that reason.

Children should be protected from as much advertising as humanly possible for as long as humanly possible and you should start teaching them about the fact that they are being lied to and manipulated by advertising as soon as possible and help them to develop some of the skills that might help them, however much of that will be literally impossible for them until their minds are more developed. You child can recognize and form preferences for brands long before they learn to identify ads when they see them.

Even teenagers are terrible at it. https://www.marketingdive.com/news/study-82-of-middle-school...

[milesvp]

I mean, the logical extreme is to let them hang out in an opium den... I'm pretty sure that will likely have some pretty extreme psychological repercussions. I can tell you from personal experience, letting a young child watch some graphic movies can cause enough damage to probably need therapy. Knowing what experiences is age appropriate is a very important job for a parent, and each child is very different. And for the record, I tend to feel we over shelter our children as a society.

But you are very correct with your experience with Runescape, I can only guess at the age you got into it. I certainly would have loved the game in my mid teens, and it would have been a good playground. I'll likely be keeping an eye out for similar playgrounds as my kids get older. I do want them to have some of the villainy experience in settings where the consequences are small to none. Do it too young, that is where the warping tends to happen.