For parents
Fair question, and you should not take our word for it. Here is what the research says, what it does not say, and what we do about the parts that matter. It takes about four minutes.
This is the part that surprises parents who did not grow up with it. Pew Research Center surveyed American teenagers who play video games.
Nearly half said games had helped their friendships, and 41% said games had helped how they work with other people. Australia's eSafety Commissioner — a government regulator, not an industry group — has reported similar: most young gamers say online play is good for their skills, their social connection, or how they feel.
Minecraft in particular is a building game before it is anything else. Two children on the same world are negotiating, dividing work, and fixing each other's mistakes. That is not a claim about screens; it is just what the game is.
Those Pew figures are about teenagers, because that is who was surveyed. We have not found equivalent numbers for younger children and we are not going to pretend the teenage figures transfer exactly.
There is a lot of confident nonsense in both directions. We would rather be straight with you about the weak claims, including the ones that would help our case.
The largest study of its kind, from the Oxford Internet Institute, followed nearly 40,000 players and found little to no causal connection between how much people played and their wellbeing — in either direction. Anyone selling you games as good for a child's mental health is going beyond the evidence.
Also weaker than you have been told. A study of more than 350,000 young people put the size of it like this:
<0.1%of the difference between children is explained by screen use — about the same as how many potatoes they eatOrben & Przybylski, 350,000+ young people
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health says the evidence for a direct toxic effect is overstated, and that there is no evidence-based number of hours to hold children to.
That is not "screens are fine". It means the hours are the wrong thing to measure, and what the time replaces — sleep, moving about, seeing people — is the thing worth watching.
The research showing academic gains comes from classrooms with a teacher and a lesson plan. Our world is somewhere your child plays. We are not going to borrow a school's results for it.
This is the part that matters, and the guidance is unusually consistent about it. It is not the game, the hours, or the graphics. It is who is on the other end.
The UK's CEOP — the child-protection education service run with national policing — names the risk plainly:
“chatting with people they don’t know. This can include adults that are seeking to make contact with children with the intention of sexual grooming.”
CEOP Education
The NSPCC's advice follows from the same place: keep a child's gaming chat to people they actually know, or off. Which is why Common Sense Media, reviewing Minecraft for families, points at private servers specifically:
“This is a safer option than public servers because you know exactly who else is playing.”
Common Sense Media — they rate Minecraft for ages 8 and up
The other consistent finding is duller and more useful: children do better when an adult is actually around.
“Play games along with them and set a good example.”
American Academy of Pediatrics
eSafety's research found that a large minority of young gamers actively wish their parents would play with them.
A Minecraft world on a computer in our house, run by a dad and his son, for the friends that boy actually knows. Here is how it lines up with the conditions above — including where it does not yet.
Family, and friends invited by name. The world is not reachable from the internet yet, and the invite list that will keep it to invited people is being switched on before anyone outside our family joins from home.
It is our house and our family's evening. Not a service with moderators somewhere else — a dad whose own child is on the same world.
Nothing. No sign-in, no cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts, nothing that loads from anywhere but here. We do not know you visited.
The invite list, and the filter on what players type to each other, are being built now — they are not switched on yet, and we would rather say so than let you assume. Nothing outside our house can reach the world in the meantime. When those are on, this page changes to say so.
Talk to us first — you should want to know who is running a thing your child logs into.
The quickest way is the family who gave you the card.
We would rather you check us than trust us. Every figure above is from one of these.