Roblox wants an older audience, but it’s leaving younger players behind

Roughly a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Carolyn, a mother of six, finally capitulated to her kids’ begging. Roblox is a website that lets users create and host multiplayer online games. Roblox proved to be a great way to make friends online with children during the pandemic. Carolyn was concerned about her children’s interactions with strangers online and decided that they could play on Roblox. Roblox’s content moderator changes have made it difficult for Carolyn to manage what her children see over the years. It was hard for her to decide to no longer allow her children to play.

“Alright, I’m done. DONE. I deleted my kids’ Roblox accounts, and recommend you guys do too. It was horrible. I spent 6 hours playing games designed for 5 year-olds. Something is very wrong with Roblox Corp,” she said in a tweet thread.

Carolyn shared additional disturbing content that she found while using the platform in the form of tweets. This included a game called “The Game.” Simulator in Public BathroomsIt was almost like a public bathroom environment. Carolyn stated to Polygon that she had expected to find some funny potty humor. The game ended when her character fell into a puddle, and got stuck on concrete. The other participants in the game then appeared to play role-play. simulated an assaultAn incident which has occurred to Roblox players was based on her character.

Roblox allows anyone to create a game. The platform almost works like YouTube — except instead of uploading videos, any user can design and publish a game, or as Roblox calls it, an “experience” for others to play. It gives users the opportunity to play and create any type of game or virtual world they want. Roblox spokeswoman said that the platform was used by 58.8 millions users per day in the third quarter 2022. 46% of these people identify themselves as younger than 13.

This creates a problem with content moderation. Users can choose between roughly 9 million experiences, according to Roblox’s website. This immense volume of experiences makes it more challenging to moderate, despite the company’s active role in monitoring the platform.

Roblox removes inappropriate skins, chats, and personal data from user-made skins. The company says that it employs a team of “thousands” to monitor the platform for inappropriate content and that its trust and safety team typically takes “minutes” to address any behavior that violates their terms of use and community standards. There have been games that mimic slavery, fascism and mass shootings on the platform.

For most of 2022, individual Roblox games did not have an “age appropriateness” designation or rating, as the platform’s intended audience was simply younger children. Parents could restrict their kids’ account so that kids could only play on a set list of games curated by Roblox, along with other safety features, like disabling chat.

However, in September, Roblox launched “Experience Guidelines,” which include age ratings for games, seemingly in order to cater to its growing number of users over the age of 13 on the platform. Games now have three possible age group labels — all ages, 9 and over, and 13 and over — and age recommendations are “grounded in child development research” and “industry standards,” according to a Roblox Developers Conference blog. The age-recommended options allow parents to restrict access to games.

It’s up to the everyday people making games on Roblox to make sure their content has an age-appropriateness rating. To do so, developers fill out an Experience Questionnaire — specifying whether violence is depicted in-game and its frequency, level of intensity, and presence of blood — that will generate the recommended age group for their game. As of January, games whose developers have not filled out an Experience Questionnaire won’t be recommended to young users. (The dev forum doesn’t specify whether young users can still find these games independently.)

Image: TallyWally/Roblox

Polygon talked to Roblox developers who specialize in making family-friendly games. They asked Polygon to keep their anonymity because of the relationship they have with Roblox. They believe that Roblox is taking strong steps to inform parents, but that it’s ultimately on parents to monitor their kids’ activity.

“Roblox is making great changes and efforts to inform parents about the content found in particular games with age guidelines, but it’s still up to parents to monitor their younger children and teach them online safety guidelines and rules to follow,” they said.

Carolyn and her husband took an active role in their children’s digital lives and regularly played Roblox games with their kids. Both she and her husband were avid gamers growing up. RuneScapeAnd Ragnarok OnlineThey were also aware of possible dangers associated with playing online.

“We had a pretty good idea of the things that can go on, and the things that can be published with just text and voice chat. And then, more recently, the user-manipulative games — like games where you can place things and change things about your character — I think that kind of opened up a new thing for parents to be worried about.”

The Experience Guidelines are only an addition to the existing moderation issues on the platform. Although some games are not appropriate for young children by the developers, they can be used to connect with their peers on the platform via role-playing. The most popular games on the platform are role-playing with imaginary characters and interactions. These allow for inappropriate interactions via chat and with role-play elements. Although a game may not include blood, or other age-restricted material as indicated by the survey it could allow users to play the game and experience an attack.

Roblox community standards and terms of usage are more restrictive than those on other social media sites and platforms like YouTube. Roblox, for example, prohibits the depiction of romantic scenes and political parties. It also explicitly bans content that is about extremist groups. To enforce these rules, the company also moderates through a reporting system, which allows users or a parent to report a specific user or a game that violates Roblox’s terms.

Roblox

Roblox was contacted by Polygon and the following comment was received:

“To determine the suitability of content for each age category, we examined global industry standards and consulted child development experts to guide our policies. These are some of the highlights from our experiences. [Carolyn’s] Twitter thread are marked as ‘All Ages’ because the content is generally suitable for all ages and may contain infrequent mild violence and/or light unrealistic blood,” a Roblox spokesperson told Polygon via email.

According to the spokesperson, while there is more experience in the system, parental controls have been improved so that children can access experiences according to their preferences.

While the portion of Roblox’s older players is growing, a large number of users below age 13 remain. It’s true that Roblox takes a stronger stance in content moderation compared to other content platforms, but even then, changes like these may expose its younger users to more age-inappropriate content on the platform. Tweeting is now possible. other parentsAnd family membersThey claimed they had deleted the game and other players. shared their own horror stories.

For now Carolyn is caught in the middle of major changes at her company and the wishes of her children. She has decided to remove their accounts. It turned out that everything went well for her.

“I was expecting a huge, like, meltdown. It was actually quite cool. They’re like, All right, you know, if it becomes safe, we’ll play again.It was as if I had been like: Yeah. Wow. That’s it. Cool.”