For many families during the pandemic, the massive Roblox gaming platform has been a fun way to keep kids busy and connected with friends. Its popularity among cooperating children helped drive a successful public debut for the company, which relies on its users to create games and other content.
Still, this platform of 32.6 million daily users (more than half of whom are under the age of 13) has some dark corners. In some games, blocked avatars of players simulate sex, engage in blatant chats, and “cite” other avatars. While much of this isn’t new, Roblox’s explosive growth has drawn attention to what’s happening on the sidelines and what the company’s responsibility is to protect its young audience.
Now, Roblox is working on developing content ratings for games and ways to make it easier to find and use parental controls, said Remy Malan, Roblox’s vice president of trust and security and head of privacy.
Even when children say they are under the age of 13 when creating accounts, age-inappropriate games can appear on “recommendations for you” lists. Within hard-to-find controls, parents can restrict games that children can play in Roblox to those the company deems appropriate. But of Roblox’s tens of millions of multiplayer games, only about 1,000 are on this curated list.
Bryan Buffinton, a father from Tampa, Florida, had done his research before allowing his 8-year-old son to play Roblox. He read the company guide for parents and knew how to restrict the games his child could access. So he was surprised one day last year when his son came up to him with his iPad and said, “I think something is wrong.” The boy had entered a Roblox role-playing game where, instead of the typical blocked images, there was a real photo. She was a woman wearing a thong. And it had several scratch marks on the bottom.