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| OK HERE IT IS (tw: gamer dad story) by Fullofkittens 02/24/2016, 6:06pm PST | ||||
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| This is a story about how terrible Windows 10 is.
My 7-year-old pointed out that some families have "family computers" that the kids are allowed to use, unlike our family where Ms. oK and I use our work laptops and I have a music computer that is absolutely positively off limits to the kids. Those families' kids can play Minecraft, and those kids will not be left behind by the generation of fantasy engineers that is springing up around us. Conceding the point, I bought a reasonably-priced prebuilt HP Envy from Best Buy, which came with Windows 10. Let's talk about the initial user experience of this thing: First of all, it asks me to set up a username and password (reasonably), which I set up. Then I want to set up additional users... at some point in there it asks me if I want to configure OneDrive and I'm like, I don't know? Which means yes, which means it asks me for my OneDrive username and password, which is my Windows Store u/p, which is some fucking hotmail account I had to set up when I took an Azure tutorial. Ok, back to creating additional users. Please enter your password. WRONG PASSWORD. You guessed it: my admin u/p is now my Windows Store password even though I literally set up an admin u/p minutes prior. Without asking me, it changed the username and password of my admin account. Ok, that's stupid, I say. Let's make an account for my wife, Mrs. oK. Is she a kid or an adult? She's an adult. Is she an admin? Yes, she is an admin*. Ok, now one for FoKjr. Is he a kid? Yes. How old? 7. Is he an admin? No, my 7-year old isn't a fucking admin. Ok, what's Minecraft, how do I install this thing? It's Java, right? Let's ask Cortana about this, she really seems eager to go on a mission. Windows-button-"Minecraft" brings me to Minecraft for Windows. Ok! I'm on Windows! What's the difference between this and the Java version? Well, it's the pocket edition which means that not everything is implemented and it's 10 bucks instead of 30. Ok, I doubt that matters, he's only ever played it on iOS up until now. AND because it's a store app and he's a kid, as a parent I will allegedly be able to utilize some kind of reporting on what FoKjr is doing when I'm logged in to my...hotmail account as an admin. I buy the thing through the store (why does everything in the store look so dumb?), it installs, I try it out, it launches, this looks right, cool. I call my son over and teach him how to log in. It's a bit tricky because MS enforced password restrictions on him (Windows Store account, you know), so he has to remember an 11-character password with letters and numbers, but hey, post-it note. He gets in. "Type 'Minecraft' and it should come up." It does. He goes to the page... and it doesn't have the button that I had (to launch or install it). WTF? Now I'm thinking maybe it's attached to my user account? That'd be fucked up!? I log out and back in as me, it's there, log out and back in as him, no launch button. Ok... wtf. I log out as him and in as my wife. She has the launch button. What the fuck is going on? I stare at the screen carefully, and then stumble upon some text I hadn't noticed before: you can't play this title because it's for players aged 13 and older. WHAT. I do some googling about how to override this from the admin account. The documentation on this is clear: if you want to override the age restriction for a Store app as an admin, all you have to do is approve the request that the underage person sent for an override. HOWEVER: it's clear from both the interface on the parent side and the interface on the kid side that there is no button to send that request from the kid side nor is there any mechanism for viewing those requests from the parent side. They implemented the age restriction feature but never got around to implementing the override workflow. So that left me with three options: change his age in the system (theoretically whitelisting a lot of other applications I wouldn't want him playing), give him my credentials (no), or buy the java version which doesn't run in the Store ecosystem and wouldn't observe any age restriction. I try option A and take about 20 minutes confirming that I can change everything about my son, including his name and his gender, the only exception being: his age. Once you create a kid account that kid's birthday is fixed for life. At this point I realize that I could make a new account for him with a fraudulent age *or* I could buy the java version and never buy anything in the Windows Store for the rest of my life. I choose option B. The java version works great, he played in it for at least 20 minutes before going back to watching fkn Dan TDM play Minecraft on YouTube. Minecraft for Windows review: Negative. *Although I made her an admin, she still needs to put in my username and password** to install software because apparently I didn't click the "my wife is an admin" radio button hard enough. **My Windows Store username and password, not the ones I selected as admin credentials when I set up the machine. |
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