51–60 of 75 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
Do Minecraft, Fortnite, and countless other games not also market themselves to children?
kids should _not_ be playing roblox unsupervised (or at all?). it’s full of inappropriate and seemingly unmoderated content, while simultaneously being built to extract microtransactions. amazing infra challenges, just a shame is a cesspool.
While true this statement generalizes to any internet connected service. 2000s internet had loads of wild content, anyone remember LiveLeaks? And Roblox has decent parental controls. You can disable any chat outside a curated group of friends, and not sign up for micro transactions.
IMO public chat should be disabled by default for U13 accounts, not the other way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If tens of million of people are using a service, statistically at least a few of them are going to be bad actors. The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s. People were "cybering" in World of Warcraft. 4chan was raiding habbo hotel and club penguin with Nazi memes. Kids were chatting with strangers on AIM and ventrilo. If anything, these services pro…
Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
The former implies that rblx has some attributes that are conducive to child predation, which would be worth teasing apart out of scientific interest, while the latter is a very general problem, as (I dare take this as self-evident) any place that has greater than 0 child predators has more than there ought to be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount a child can spend on Roblox is entirely up to the parents. Children, especially pre-teens, don’t have access to credit or money without their parents consent, and a pretty easy way to limit the amount of money your child can spent on Roblox is to just make them have to ask you to buy the in-game currency. There are problems with the game but the amount of money going into it is something a parent can and s…
Clearly you aren't aware how many kids steal their parents' credit cards to buy Robux. It's a very common thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If kids pay 5-10 bucks every once in a while to support their entertainment and pay engineering salaries… is that the worst thing in the world? I’d rather my kids play Roblox than scroll Instagram. One of those is “free”.
Roblox engages the exact same psychological manipulation that gambling does. Would you let your children go nuts at a casino? Or online with sports betting or crypto slots? The problem isn't the $5-10. It's the psychological manipulation.
Where do the gambling tricks come in?
I have two young children, a boy and a girl. They both love playing Roblox, and I play along with them too, and their friends join in as well. Yes, they both always want more Robux, but let's look at this from a different perspective:
They create their own worlds - often amazing, it's not like they can run out of LEGO pieces, their creativity is their only barrier. In COVID lockdown, they could carry on playing with their friends, despite not being physically together. Humans still monitor and care for the "game", yes, some bad actors might get through occasionally, but on the whole, it's a safe and well-controlled, fun place to be. I used the concept of a Roblox Avatar to gently explain to my children, that people online might not be all they pretend to be - after all, in some games, I'm a super weight-lifter with a six-pack, and I have wings too :-O We all laughed. It's already taught both my children some genuine life-lessons - working in a pizza shop and doing deliveries, earning money, deciding how to lay out their dream houses (and Theme Parks!), and so on - plus, the importance of locking the door to keep the "bad guys" out.
All this, whilst having fun. Roblox is a force for good - if you pay the odd time for some credits, then so what, developers and us creatives also have to keep the roof over our heads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
Do Minecraft, Fortnite, and countless other games not also market themselves to children?
I really love the core idea of Roblox, if only it weren't a scam targeting kid's birthday money.
If kids pay 5-10 bucks every once in a while to support their entertainment and pay engineering salaries… is that the worst thing in the world? I’d rather my kids play Roblox than scroll Instagram. One of those is “free”.
Hey Roblox Engineers on here - a brilliant article, by the way - and I want to chip in here, I'm a senior engineer and understand how tech works all the way down. NAND gates, flip-flops and I/O schedulers, and networks? No problem. I have two young children, a boy and a girl. They both love playing Roblox, and I play along with them too, and their friends join in as well. Yes, they both always want more Robux, but le…
That's kind of a weird flex.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roblox specifically markets itself to children, and 40% of its playerbase is 13 years old or younger. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold it to a higher standard than other games.
Do Minecraft, Fortnite, and countless other games not also market themselves to children?
But this can be a problem wherever kids are online. Discord also has huge problems with child predators. And any platform that caters to children should be held to very high standards of child safety.
The games that I think shouldn't be held to such a high standard are games like World of Warcraft. That game is not targeted at children, has far fewer children players, and therefore it is unreasonable to hold them to as high of a standard as Roblox. (Although they do still have some responsibility to make sure their platform is safe.)