Alex, a subject in the documentary Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed, plays Roblox at home.Fathom Metaverse
A User Magazine article caught my eye the other day as a parent who was once an early adopter but has developed a serious case of technophobia since having children.
It was about how American kids were protesting against Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Roblox, one of the world’s biggest online gaming platforms with 200 million monthly users worldwide.
Internet culture journalist Taylor Lorenz reported in recent weeks on clashes in a popular Roblox experience named Brookhaven, echoing ones in the streets in the United States.
I was captivated by the idea of little pixelated avatars waving Mexican flags confronting those of players in SWAT gear.
“Despite being primarily a children’s game, Roblox has evolved into a sort of emergent civic theatre for kids online,” wrote Lorenz. “The game is now where thousands of children go to process major world news events through highly intricate role play.”
My romantic imagining of Roblox as a safe alternative universe for young citizens in training, however, was quickly demolished by a documentary streaming on TVO I caught up with this week.
Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed paints a picture of a virtual world where children experience real exploitation and radicalization.
It argues – persuasively – that we need to stop imagining that there’s a substantial difference between online and IRL (in real life).
“There are no magical walls that keep what happened in these gaming spaces or in any spaces on the internet only within the internet,” said Rachel Kowert, a researcher and co-editor of a book called Gaming and Extremism. “Some of these things are really traumatic and it seeps out into our everyday lives.”
The main focus of Dangerous Games is on Roblox users who began playing on the platform as kids and observed or experienced harmful interactions.
Alex, a Toronto-based Roblox fan who evolved into an investigative content creator dedicated to exposing predators on the platform, is the star.
She relates her frustrating experiences in trying to get the platform to pay attention to predation and grooming, including by users who create games and become powerful within the communities that form around them.
Janae, left, is also interviewed in the doc. She and Alex, centre, want to save Roblox by making it safer. As part of those efforts, they met with U.S. Congresswoman Lori Trahnan.Fathom Metaverse
The main story explored is the one of a DoctorRofatnik, creator of a popular (and Sega copyright-infringing) game called Sonic Eclipse Online.
Though that username was eventually banned, the New Jersey man behind it, Arnold Castillo, used a different identity to communicate with a 15-year-old girl on Roblox, Discord and Instagram in 2022. He hired an Uber driver to transport her from Indiana to his home.
In 2023, Castillo pled guilty to charges including coercion and enticement of a minor – and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Janae is another young woman interviewed in the doc. The Florida-based streamer talks about the racism that she has experienced on the Roblox platform and in Minecraft. She’d be the victim of “spawn killing” – being killed as soon as you enter a game – when she used an avatar that is Black, like she is, and could only actually play on some servers if she used a white avatar.
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Janae’s story segues to a recap of the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting where 10 Black people were killed by an 18-year-old white supremacist who live-streamed part of it on Twitch. “The Buffalo shooter said if it wasn’t for the game Blood and Iron on Roblox, he probably wouldn’t have been radicalized,” Kowert said.
Alex and Janae don’t want to shut down the metaverse; they want to save it by making it safer – and the doc shows them meeting with a congresswoman and a lawyer in the U.S. who might help them in that quest.
(A shortcoming of Dangerous Games – which was created by Erica Leendertse and directed by Ann Shin, and produced by Fathom Film Group – is that its timeline can be unclear. A Roblox statement provided to the filmmakers reads in part: “We continually invest in and evolve our safety approach to help detect and prevent malicious or harmful activity on the platform.”)
What should on-the-fence parents like me do when their kids ask to sign up? Quintin Smith, a U.K.-based investigative gaming journalist, at one point says Roblox is “reinventing child labour for the 21st century.” But he nevertheless advises not to stop kids from using the metaverse, comparing it to pulling a kid away from a playground.
“As imperfect as these platforms are, they’re also how your children socialize,” he said. “The thing to do is push these platforms to be better.”
And yet: Canada’s long overdue Online Harms Act died when Parliament was prorogued in January. Justice Minister Sean Fraser said the federal government is going to discuss over the summer whether to rewrite it or reintroduce it.
Tech companies move fast and break things; governments move slowly; kids grow up in the blink of an eye.
Dangerous Games, currently available free on www.tvo.org, the TVO Today app and on the TVO YouTube channel, is recommended for 16 and up. A 60-minute version, for viewers 13 and up, will air on TVO in the fall and be available for educational screenings.
