Roblox wants an older audience but is leaving younger players behind

About a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Carolyn, a mother of six, finally gave in to her children’s begging. Her kids wanted to join Roblox, a platform that allows users to create and host online multiplayer games. Roblox became a major opportunity for kids connect virtually during the pandemic, and despite her concerns about her children aged 12 and under interacting with others online, Carolyn and her husband have decided to let her play. Two years later, a series of changes to Roblox’s content moderation has made it harder for them to control what their young children watch. She made the difficult decision not to let her children play anymore.

“Okay, I’m done. FINISHED. I have deleted my children’s Roblox accounts and I encourage you to do the same. I just spent six hours playing the games meant for 5 year olds and it was bloody awful. Something is wrong with Roblox Corp.” she said in a tweet thread.

In subsequent tweets, Carolyn described additional disturbing content she encountered while playing on the platform, including a game called Public Bathroom Simulator that mimicked a public toilet environment. Carolyn told Polygon she was expecting some potty humor, but what she found was far worse. In the game, her character slipped on a puddle and got stuck on the ground. After that, other players in the game seemed to take turns role-playing simulated a robbery of her character, an incident this has happened to others on roblox.

Anyone can make a game on Roblox. The platform works much like YouTube – except instead of uploading videos, each user can design and publish a game, or as Roblox calls it, an “experience” for others to play. This gives tremendous opportunities to young users to develop and play in any virtual worlds and games they can imagine. According to a Roblox spokesman, as of Q3 2022, the platform had 58.8 million daily active users, 46% of whom identify as under the age of 13.

This poses a content moderation issue. According to Roblox’s website, users can choose from around 9 million experiences. This immense amount of experience makes moderation difficult, despite the company’s active role in overseeing the platform.

Roblox filters potentially inappropriate user-created skins and chats, as well as personal information. The company says it employs a team of “thousands” to monitor the platform for inappropriate content, and it typically takes “minutes” for its trust and security team to address any behavior that violates its terms of service and community standards . Still, games simulate slavery and fascism

For most of 2022, individual Roblox games didn’t have an “age-appropriate” designation or rating because the platform’s target audience was simply younger children. Parents could limit their kids account so kids can only play on one fixed list of curated games from Roblox, along with other security features like disabling chat.

However, in September, Roblox introduced “experience guidelines” which include the following age ratings for games, apparently to do justice to his growing number of users over 13 years on the platform. Games now have three possible age group designations – all ages, 9+, and 13+ – and age recommendations are “based on child development research‘ and “Industry Standards,” according to a Roblox Developers Conference blog. Parents now have the opportunity to do so restrict access to certain games based on age recommendations.

It’s up to the ordinary people who create games on Roblox to ensure their content has an age appropriateness rating. Developers fill out one experience questionnaire – Indication of whether violence is depicted in the game, as well as its frequency, intensity and presence of blood – which generate the recommended age range for their game. From January, games whose developers have not filled out an experience questionnaire not recommended for young users. (The developer forum does not indicate whether young users can still find these games independently.)

Image: TallyWally/Roblox

Polygon spoke to a Roblox developer who specializes in creating family-friendly games and wishes to remain anonymous due to his relationship with Roblox. They believe that Roblox takes strong steps to inform parents, but that ultimately it is up to parents to monitor their children’s activities.

“Roblox is making major changes and efforts to educate parents about the content of certain age-guided games, but it’s still up to parents to monitor their younger children and teach them the online safety guidelines and rules to follow,” they said .

Carolyn and her husband took an active part in their children’s digital lives and regularly played Roblox games with their children. She and her husband grew up playing games such as RuneScape and Ragnarok Onlineso the two were well aware of the potential dangers of playing with others online.

“We had a pretty good idea of ​​the things that can go ahead and the things that can be released using just text and voice chat. And then, more recently, the user manipulative games — like games where you can place things and change things on your character — I think that’s opened up something new for parents to worry about.”

These experience guidelines are only in addition to existing moderation challenges on the platform. Although the content of certain games may be deemed age-appropriate by the developers, children can still interact with others on the platform through role play. Role-playing games with imaginary elements and character interactions are among the most popular on the platform. This opens up opportunities for inappropriate interactions, either via chat or with role-playing elements. So while a game might not contain blood or age-restricted content that was flagged as appropriate in the survey, a user could still go into the game and simulate an attack.

Roblox Terms of Use and community norms are relatively strict content rules compared to other platforms and social media sites like YouTube. For example, Roblox prohibits depictions of romance novels and depictions of political parties, in addition to explicitly prohibiting content about extremist groups. To enforce these rules, the Company also moderates a reporting system that allows users or a parent to report a specific user or game as violating the Roblox Terms.

Image: Roblox

Polygon reached out to Roblox and received the following comment:

“To determine the appropriateness of content for each age category, we examined global industry standards and consulted child development experts to guide our policies. The experiences highlighted in [Carolyn’s] Twitter threads are labeled “All Ages” because the content is generally appropriate for all ages and may occasionally contain mild violence and/or slight, unrealistic gore,” a Roblox spokesperson told Polygon via email.

The spokesperson also said that while the new system has expanded the pool of experiences, the company has improved parental controls, allowing parents to customize access to experiences based on age recommendations.

While the proportion of Roblox’s older players is growing, a large number of users under the age of 13 remain. It’s true that Roblox takes a stronger stance on content moderation compared to other content platforms, but even then, changes like these can expose its younger users to more age-inappropriate content on the platform. After tweeting other parents and family members said they deleted the game, and others shared their own horror stories.

Caught between massive changes at a company and the whims of her own children, Carolyn is sticking with the decision to delete her accounts for now. Luckily for her, it seemed like everything went well.

“I was expecting a huge meltdown. But they were really cool with it. You are like All right, you know, when it gets safe, we’ll play again. And then I Yes. Wow. Good. Cool.”