If you haven’t yet heard about it from your own kid, or from parents who have kids, or from the marketing campaigns from Pick n Pay, Game, and Standard Bank, then you’re probably living under a blok. With around 1.5 million monthly log-ins from South Africa alone, it’s massive, but what exactly is it, and why is it so popular?
Don’t think of Roblox as a game like Fortnite or Minecraft. In reality, it’s more of a platform like Facebook. Some describe it as a toy box, others an imagination station, but Roblox themselves like to call it the “ultimate virtual universe”. It combines a free-to-play game, a social media platform and a social commerce platform.
To make things a little bit more complicated, there are also two halves of the platform—the half where you play the games created by other people, and the half where you make the games.
Let’s start with Roblox Studio, the creator half.
Roblox Studio provides you with a 3D platform, almost similar to Unity. Here, you are able to create a game for others to play on. The possibilities are practically endless. While I was not able to create anything of any real substance, from what I have played, it really seems like there is no end to the content that you can put in your game or experience, as they’re called. These experiences are also where creators add the option to purchase items or donate directly to the creators using the in-game currency Robux.
Roblox Studio is a free and pretty cool way to give younger kids, or even those who are new to the scene, an idea of what game development could be like. The tool has a lot of power, from scripting to terrain editing to triggers and a whole lot more. It’s also a fantastic, imaginative outlet and allows folks to turn their incredible ideas into something tangible.
Even though this is part of the Roblox experience, you can completely ignore it and just play other people’s experiences, which is what most people do.
This brings us to the other half of Roblox, the playing.
When you open Roblox, it presents you with an almost app store-like layout. Thousands of games are at your fingertips, and if you don’t have a specific one you’re looking for, I guess you just pick the one that sounds or looks the best. Whether that’s “Sword Emoji BOOM BATTLE Sword Emoji [V2]” or “Adopt Me!”
Most experiences are broken up into the following categories:
- Roleplay: You roleplay as some sort of character, usually in a high-school or city life environment.
- Adventure: A hard category to describe, usually a mixture of all the other categories thrown in to one, sometimes with a bit of a story or theme to follow.
- Fighting: Fighting games, obviously.
- Obby: The Roblox term for Obstacle Course. A game that features some sort of course for players to work their way through.
- Tycoon: Where you attempt to become the best of the best in one form of business, like a car dealership. or a theme park.
- Simulator: It seems like a category created for simulation-type games, like flight simulators, but has since been flooded with any game that resembles something from the real world.
Since I had just finished binge-watching the new One Piece live-action, I picked the first One Piece-looking game on the list: “Blox Fruit”.
The game felt very reminiscent of the first time I played World of Warcraft, and I was quite surprised by the amount of content that was in the game. I was given quests to complete, there was a “good” and “bad” side to choose from, I could purchase items to make myself stronger, and there were loads of other people running around. Some of these people looked like they were level 50 million. Others looked like they had no idea what they were doing, just like me. Like I said, World of Warcraft.
About 30 to 40 minutes of joyously smashing mobs into the earth with my fists was enough for me before I decided to see what else I could find to play.
After a few more games, I realised Roblox is just a host of mobile-like games with a very strong social emphasis. In fact, it’s not really about the game itself, but about playing with others who enjoy similar things to you, kind of like a playground at school. This is why I think it’s so popular. It’s like-minded folk, not taking a game too seriously, hanging out together in a virtual world. It’s the metaverse. Of course, showing off the cool outfits you may have purchased with all your mom’s money plays a huge role, but kids already do that with their real-life Nikes anyway.
The internet can be a crazy and dangerous place at the best of times and with over half of the Roblox player base under the age of thirteen, it’s very very easy for them to fall victim to scams or other nefarious activities in an environment they feel (and should feel) safe in.
As I mentioned earlier, each experience offers the opportunity to purchase items or donate to the creators using the in-game currency Robux. Robux is purchased in bundles online or through top-up cards from your local store. You also get a monthly subscription that you could sign up for to receive a few Robux every month. Unless you’ve set up an awesome experience that’s just churning in the donations, you or your kid are probably getting their Robux using real money.
It’s way too easy to just spend these Robux in Roblox, and if you have a card connected to your Roblox account, you could have quite a serious leak in your bank account, especially if your child is unaware of the cost of things and is just spending and donating.
However, online, there are also those who are interested in things other than money. A little bit of conversation can turn adult very quickly, and for a young child, things could get extremely creepy.
There are countless experiences created, which are essentially chat rooms that are designed for adult conversation. These are called ‘sus’ rooms. If you just had to type ‘sus’ into the search bar, you would see how many there are. Sure, a lot of them don’t have any active members in them, but the point is that the kinds of people making these experiences are on the Roblox platform, hanging out with kids.
I tried out one experience called Public Bathroom Simulator, where you just chat with people… in the bathroom… Already, it sounds a bit weird, but there was a conversation that I “overheard” where someone was talking about their uncle liking young girls, and the other person in the conversation was too old because they were 15. The conversation kind of ended there, and I logged off shortly after reporting the account, but I was already quite creeped out.
The experience is not just my own, though. Others in the NAG office have said they won’t allow their younger family members to play on Roblox because of incidents very similar to mine.
Roblox has implemented a few moderation and parental control settings to help fight this all off, but I found that it was quite easy to get myself into a conversation that should not be held in front of children.
There is a chat moderation tool that works quite well in recognising bad words and when you try to manipulate bad words into a sentence. It’s overly sensitive, which is for the best. However, you can get around it by saying things in a nicer, less adult way or by being a little creative with things that could represent other things.
The parental controls include a few options to help keep your kids safer online.
You can limit which experiences are playable in terms of age category. There are three options here: games suitable for all ages, games suitable for over 9s, and games suitable for over 13s. Any game that has not submitted an age category gets an automatic “suitable for over 17s” tag. While this cut out around 90% of the inappropriate games, there were still a few listed for all ages that definitely weren’t. In one game listed in this age category, you can pay Robux to tie up a girl who was lying on the bed.
You are also able to set a spend limit for the account, which can be set to zero, should you choose. This one I haven’t been able to find a workaround for, so at least your bank account should remain safe from your child’s unhealthy branded clothing habits.
You can also limit what private servers the account can join. Private servers are servers that users create that aren’t listed on the platform. That means the experience isn’t necessarily moderated. If the experience had to be reported, then action would be taken against that account, but if not, then the rules don’t really apply here. With parental controls, you can set the option to allow no private servers to be joined at all.
The parental controls most certainly help, but there are gaps that need to be filled, and it’s a little concerning that they haven’t been filled more quickly, with over 30 million kids on the platform every day.
I can see why companies like Nedbank, Game, and Pick n Pay have offerings for Roblox. There’s a huge player base here, and it makes business sense to try and tap into that, especially from Pick n Pay’s point of view, considering they are offering easier ways to buy Robux, whereas Nedbank has created their very own experience. Nedbank’s experience allows players to start their own restaurant, serving up “South African Flavour”, and in doing so, helps teach kids about earning and spending money. A very clever way to try and inspire the youth to start thinking about banking.
Roblox has great potential and feels like the first stepping stone into what the Metaverse could turn out to be, but because it is all done online and anonymously, there is some danger here, especially for younger people. The internet will always be a dangerous place, whether that’s through Roblox or another platform, and it goes without saying that parental supervision should always be exercised.
If you do allow your children to play games on Roblox, just be extra vigilant. Ensure you’ve enabled the parental controls to a level that you’re comfortable with, and check on what kinds of experiences your kids are involved in. A simple race around town with some friends from school is a lot of harmless fun, but when strangers get involved, anything could happen.
