We Need to Talk About Roblox

Because Roblox is not good.

I want to talk about how much I hate Roblox.

Christ on a bike I hate Roblox so much. I hate everything about it.

I hate the stupid wee characters and their stupid wee heads. I hate the stupid Roblox “face”. A vacant stare, a squinch. A cocky little smirk. A debased LEGO head infused with the energy of a trust fund teenager. A face you’d never tire of slapping. 

I hate the whole aesthetic. A sub-Minecraft smush. A boring, amateurish collection of colours and shapes with no cohesion, no direction. An exercise in… blergh? A grotesque amalgamation of bad ideas and bad art. Bad everything.

But I hate Roblox for non-trivial reasons too. Because it exploits the hard working community of developers who create content for the game – many of them children. Because it has a suspect record of playing fast and loose with the safety of those children.

I also hate the way Roblox is monetised and the impact it has. The way it finds inventive new ways to inspire envy in kids, to convince them to spend “Robux”, via real world credit card transactions for a new hat or cape or t-shirt or whatever. 

I hate reading, writing and saying the word “Roblox”.

If you’ve got kids who play video games, you’re almost certainly acquainted with Roblox. Alongside Minecraft and Fortnite, it’s part of what I call the “Big 3”. Kids these days tend to rotate endlessly between the Big 3 and it can be difficult to predict which one is in vogue. But while I love Minecraft for the way it inspires creativity and problem solving, and tolerate Fortnite for being a supremely well made third-person shooter (and a surprisingly safe space for older children) I absolutely loathe Roblox for all of the reasons written above.  

So when the “Big 3” roulette wheel lands on Roblox and my son’s friends begin playing it instead of Fortnite or Minecraft, I brace myself. I brace myself for changes in behaviour, arguments about screen time and – inevitably – big difficult chats with my 10-year-old son about why he’s not allowed to play Roblox like his buddies.

He’s not allowed to play Roblox because it sucks, but also because it uses every trick in the book to exploit children and keep them playing and playing and playing and playing…

In case you don’t have kids, or know nothing about apps designed to extract money from kids, Roblox is a video game slash online platform that allows users to build video games or play video games made by other users. It’s free-to-play, and makes its money almost exclusively through micro-transactions and the afore-mentioned “robux” money system. Simply put, you buy in-game cash via a credit card and use that in-game currency to buy clothing, skins or items for your online characters. 

But since there’s an endless amount of user created Roblox games to choose from, the algorithm tends to surface games designed to increase player dwell time and keep them spending “robux”. And you know what that means…

It means garbage. A relentless parade of utter garbage. 

It means cynical video games that use every trick in the book to separate children from their time and/or money. Daily challenges, pay-to-win upgrades, carefully disguised roulette wheel mechanics indistinguishable from gambling. Sure, there are well made video games buried deep within Roblox’s pitch black algorithms but, for the most part, Roblox is a brutal, post-modern factory trading on dopamine drips and credit card transactions. 

It’s horrific. And the worst part is most parents don’t really know that or, at best, have a vague understanding. Roblox’s branding – its whole vibe – is so Minecraft and LEGO adjacent that it sort of just… flies under the radar. 

Most parents I’ve spoken to, think of Roblox as a creative experience, an online space where children can connect and while the hours away with harmless little games. I’ve heard multiple parents say they won’t let their children play Fortnite (because, fair enough, it’s technically a game where you shoot people) but will gladly allow their kids to spend hours getting their synapses fried by video games that place them inside a literal pinball diorama where numbers scale endlessly upwards and children exit dazed, jealous and angry. Usually because they didn’t level up fast enough.

Roblox is completely fucked and we need to talk about it. We need to tell more parents what’s really going on.

We need to tell parents to spend time with children as they play. To see what’s really going on, to see how it impacts their children and their behaviour.

I have kids, I get it. It’s so hard to monitor the media kids consume and how hard it is to wean them off devices. But as far as I’m concerned, Roblox is among the worst offenders, a wolf in Minecraft’s clothing, and the more parents are made aware of that fact, the better.