The difference is that Roblox has a thousand "attention stealers" which have enough gameplay and multiplayer fun to keep an eight year old entertained for a long time. Fortnite is just the same recycled concept over and over, with an interface that is difficult for a child on a console. There are a number of Roblox games that are genuinely well-designed and fun, don't let the graphics fool you.
(Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)
" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”"
My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.
The article references a study which claims that university students have difficulty reading Dickens or Jane Austen. Here's an excerpt of the Dickens from the study:
"LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."
I'm a college-educated, reasonably well-read person and this is a rough paragraph to get through. Old idioms, excessively lengthy sentences, anachronisms (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?
Nah, a lot of people want some combination of a) in-person experiences, b) lots of fancy equipment, c) the relationship/camraderie the class has, d) the psychology of going somewhere besides your house to do something
(Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)