Roblox: The child’s game with a sexual problem

BBC News Brazil

Warning: This text contains text and images with sexual content.

A naked man, wearing only a dog collar and a leash, is led across the floor by a woman wearing a sadomasochistic outfit. Two strippers dance beside a bar.

A group gathers around a couple who have sex in plain sight. People watch and occasionally comment. A man wears a Nazi uniform.

This isn’t happening in the real world — it’s happening on a gaming platform where kids are in the majority.

Roblox is an extensive virtual world for gamers often described as a kind of primitive metaverse. It is one of the most popular children’s games in the world. The exact numbers are a bit hazy, but in 2020 the company Roblox told Bloomberg that two-thirds of all American children ages nine to 12 use the game.

In August 2021, an internal report pointed out that 48 million players were accessing Roblox daily. A survey published in 2021 by Pesquisa Game Brasil says that 43.7% of Brazilian gamers know Roblox. The PlayerCounter website places Brazil as the second in number of users on the platform, behind only the United States.

Roblox allows users to create and play games together. It’s a way to connect, in real time, with other people in a digital world.

The platform offers the tools for users to develop their games, which is a marked difference from traditional titles in the gaming world. It’s an extremely successful business model, but it also brings problems.

Roblox sex games are commonly referred to on the platform as “condos” [condomínios, em inglês]. These are user-generated spaces where people can talk about sex — and where their avatars can have virtual sex. In these games, Roblox rules are thrown out the window.

The company admits the problem: “We know that there is an extremely small subset of users who deliberately try to break the rules,” a spokesperson told the BBC.

Games in the “condos” are usually live for a short period of time—usually less than an hour—before they are discovered and taken down. The company says it is constantly trying to take these games offline — using both manual and automated systems.

“We perform a security review of every image, video and audio file uploaded to Roblox, using a combination of human and machine detection,” he said.

But some explicit content leaks through the net. It’s a game of “cat and mouse,” said Larry Magid, president of ConnectSafely, a nonprofit that raises awareness of children’s online safety.

“There are people who are doing everything they can to fool the system,” he said. “Condos” are not easily found games. Active search is required. But its very existence bothers people like Magid: “Roblox is a very popular platform for kids and it allows children under the age of 13. So there’s a special responsibility to protect its users.”

Particularly worrying is the potential coexistence of children and adults in these spaces. One part of the game has a messaging tool where users can chat with each other — and with all other participating players.

Much of what is said in the “condo” chats could not appear on an adult news site, let alone a platform aimed at children.

Roblox told the BBC that parental control tools were developed with the aim of “restricting who children interact with and what experiences they can access”.

But this assumes that parents have a reasonable knowledge of technology to configure these settings. The spokesperson emphasized that “condos” are often difficult to locate. But the BBC also found sexual language in regular and accepted games on the platform.

According to Liraz Margalit, a digital psychologist who studies online behavior, people behave differently in the metaverse — basically the spirit of online behavior. “You have the anonymity and it has the disinhibition effect. This platform gives you a playground to do whatever you want,” she says.

Last week, Facebook’s parent company Meta introduced a new feature, called “Personal Limits”, in the virtual reality game “Horizon Venues”. The platform allows people to meet in different spaces — where their avatars can watch games, concerts or take exercise classes together. The changes were adopted after a woman reported being sexually assaulted on the platform.

Roblox told the BBC: “We have zero tolerance for sexual content or behavior of any kind, and we take swift action against anyone who is acting in violation of our community standards.”

And a few days after the BBC presented its findings to the company, Roblox published a blog post summarizing what it is doing to protect young people.

Companies like Microsoft, Meta and Roblox are currently in the race to build metaverses. But there are already signs that they are finding it difficult to police these virtual worlds.