Tech is passing me by
Feb. 1st, 2021 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI have been trying to play Minecraft with the kids. I love the idea of playing, exploring and building and fighting in a shared world, it's basically the dream. But in practice I absolutely cannot get it to work reliably. I am starting to wonder whether I'm turning into the 21st century equivalent of middle-aged people who need to get small children to program the video recorder for them!
It's not just me, two other adults who work professionally with computers have tried and got nowhere. And the children sort of know how to achieve what they want to, but not how to debug it when it doesn't work. I, and my more technically adept partners, have tried searching for suggestions, but there's such a morass of extremely out-of-date stuff, guides that either assume you're on Windows or are unclear about which versions their information applies to, and people trying to extract money from you in more or less shady ways. I just don't have the right search terms to distinguish all the different versions (which are sometimes called 'editions') or between the different types of multiplayer, the realms and servers and I don't know what else.
I'm guessing some of you must play, either in your own right or in order to be companionable with children. Do you have any suggestions for where I should be looking? We've had games where it randomly takes four or five tries to connect and then it works fine, and games where we've spent an hour trying every combination we can think of and either it claims that the host player isn't online (when we're in the same room and can perfectly well see that they are), or the game is visible but when I try to join it times out with a very uninformative error message (
Thankfully the children have reached the developmental stage where this kind of frustration and disappointment isn't massively upsetting, but I still feel kind of bad when we make an appointment to play together and all the time is taken up fruitlessly trying to connect to the game. I am starting to feel really stupid, though; this is a game played by millions of under-10s, surely it can't be this difficult?
I'm willing to throw money at the problem if needed, but I can't even work out what sort of premium service, if any, would make this easier.
Halp?!
It's not just me, two other adults who work professionally with computers have tried and got nowhere. And the children sort of know how to achieve what they want to, but not how to debug it when it doesn't work. I, and my more technically adept partners, have tried searching for suggestions, but there's such a morass of extremely out-of-date stuff, guides that either assume you're on Windows or are unclear about which versions their information applies to, and people trying to extract money from you in more or less shady ways. I just don't have the right search terms to distinguish all the different versions (which are sometimes called 'editions') or between the different types of multiplayer, the realms and servers and I don't know what else.
I'm guessing some of you must play, either in your own right or in order to be companionable with children. Do you have any suggestions for where I should be looking? We've had games where it randomly takes four or five tries to connect and then it works fine, and games where we've spent an hour trying every combination we can think of and either it claims that the host player isn't online (when we're in the same room and can perfectly well see that they are), or the game is visible but when I try to join it times out with a very uninformative error message (
Unable to join gameor something equally bland and hard to search for.)
Thankfully the children have reached the developmental stage where this kind of frustration and disappointment isn't massively upsetting, but I still feel kind of bad when we make an appointment to play together and all the time is taken up fruitlessly trying to connect to the game. I am starting to feel really stupid, though; this is a game played by millions of under-10s, surely it can't be this difficult?
I'm willing to throw money at the problem if needed, but I can't even work out what sort of premium service, if any, would make this easier.
Halp?!
