image of young child sitting at a desk and playing Roblox, with the Primer icon next to him.
Primers

Primer: 5 Ways to Evaluate a Roblox Game and its Developers

Normally when parents evaluate a game, you pay attention to two elements: the gameplay and the game’s story.

Roblox games are more complicated. For one thing, Roblox is a platform, and independent developers create and upload their games onto it. So you must look carefully at these elements of each game:

  1. Gameplay: How you play the game. What you do in order to play and win the game. Some examples of gameplay that I mention often are: FPS (first-person shooter), couch co-op, puzzler and party games, sandbox, role-playing, simulation and sports, multi-player battle, and real time strategy (RPS).
  2. Game Story: The game story includes both the back story and the story that unfolds during a game. There isn’t normally a lot of story in Roblox games.
  3. Social/interactive aspect: How other players interact as part of the gameplay and how they treat your child/each other during the gameplay.
  4. Creator, typically called the developer, and their reputation within the Roblox community: If you do a google search for the developer’s name, you can often learn more about them. Some things to look out for is if they have numerous developer aliases (this may mean they’re running from their history), if they use underage labor, or ever been accused of grooming minors. More on what to research below.
  5. Economies of the Games: The Economy of Roblox is complicated and harried. The short of it is that players cannot play more than a basic aspect of games without Robux, and developers often pay their labor in Robux, plus it costs Robux to advertise your game so that players even see it in order to play it — and make you money, etc., etc.

Since we will tackle gameplay, story, and social/interactive safety within each separate video game, I’ll focus on how to do some quick research on the developers of each game before letting your child play it.

Developer’s Reputation

One late night I did a deep dive into the economics of Roblox, mostly because our sons enjoy light coding and I was considering a holiday project to build their own Roblox game. Not to make money, just to lean into their interests.

Yeah, not anymore.

I’ll go deeper into the screwed up economics in another post, but here’s what to look for when researching a Roblox developer. Full disclosure: Roblox is still allowed in our house, but under strict supervision and without getting into the development of games for the platform. Some are obvious and others are less clear:

  1. Are they a small group doing this for their living and to build a portfolio, or are they a large company making money off the unpaid labor of their worker bees (sometimes even underage children)? This is hard to determine on a simple search, and I’ll see how well OutThink Media can track it on our site. You can’t count on Roblox to identify bad actors if their track record of dodging responsibility tells us anything.
  2. Are there pending lawsuits against the developers? So how can you research a game developer who built the game your kid likes to play? Although you can’t count on Roblox for content moderation, you can google the developer’s name and “lawsuit” to see any news. The Roblox Fandom Wiki will show you the most obvious offenders — if they’ve been brought to light — but it takes a LOT, and usually, a real physical assault has to happen. We’ve seen, however, that grooming doesn’t always have to end in a physical act for it to be dangerous.
  3. Do they make sexual games? Google the developer’s name and “condo games” to see if they make this kind of content:

condo games /noun/

Roblox sex games are commonly referred to on the platform as “condos”. They’re spaces, generated by users, where people can talk about sex – and where their avatars can have virtual sex. In these games, Roblox’s rules are thrown out of the window.

Clayton, James & Dyer, Jasmin, “Roblox: the children’s game with a sex problem,” BBC News. February 15, 2022.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60314572

4. Just monitoring Roblox isn’t enough. You must check that kids aren’t being directed to Discord or TikTok, where it’s as easy as a search term to find such condo games. It’s also an easy place for adults — including some developers — to groom underage children, as shown in this 23-minute video by YouTuber Visual Venture called “Roblox is Darker Than You Think“.

As you can see, letting your child play Roblox has a lot of layers to keep it safe. I’ll add more primers as soon as I can, so please subscribe to our OutThink Insiders mailing list to stay informed.

Photo/Image Credit: Cindy Marie Jenkins, Canva

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