Should Roblox also join the underage protection system?
Recently, "Roblox", which is widely popular with young people in Europe and the United States, has been exposed, and there are many mysterious "apartments" in the game. Damn, in this apartment, teenagers are not using their characters to play over the house online, but are engaged in some restrictive party?
Roblox relegated to "Love Apartment"
According to Bloomberg, 2/3 of American teenagers between the ages of 9 and 12 have played this massively multiplayer online creation game that has taken the world by storm. "Roblox" not only has a cute picture style similar to Lego, but also meets the social needs of users. What's even more appealing is that one of the features of this game - favorite game types, clothes and items, players can create their own.
But while this game model was a great success, some extended problems began to surface.
Recently, some users found that the game has become a place for minors to carry out online parties, and reported it.
In Roblox, this virtual party is dubbed a Condos game. In this secret space, in addition to some large-scale pornographic chat records, there are also some "high-end" players who will use game characters to directly carry out "actual combat drills".
If the player enters these "apartments", they may see some female characters in SM bundles and male characters wearing pet collars wandering around; in another corner of the apartment, there may be two characters rolling the sheets fiercely, a group of melon-eating masses watching with relish; and sometimes, even one or two German Nazi officers.
The "apartment" with no lower limit suddenly upgraded Roblox into a cute 18-forbidden game.
Videos related to "apartments" (not suitable for minors)
High risks of freedom
Dr. Liraz Margalit, a digital psychologist on online behavior, believes that in the virtual world, people behave very differently than they do in real life. Because of the protection of the anonymity mechanism, the "Online Disinhibition Effect" (Network Loosening Effect) has more room to play. The Roblox platform provides a high degree of freedom to make behaviors that break free of real social constraints.
Roblox also admitted: "We know that there are a very small number of users trying to break the rules of the game. ”
"Apartment" games generally survive for less than an hour and are deleted when they are officially discovered. Officials say they are trying to improve the countermeasures to make this type of game disappear completely, and in the future, every picture, every audio and video content will be strictly censored.
However, from the current situation, the more the official uses ways to eradicate the "apartment", the more explicit content will spring up like mushrooms. As long as the "Roblox" platform is open enough, it is difficult to resist the "curiosity" of teenagers. Even if one kind of "apartment" disappears, there will be other types of "apartments" that will complete the pick-up and continue to flow.
"It's a 'cat and mouse' game." Larry Magid, president of Connect Safely, a nonprofit dedicated to improving cybersecurity for teenagers, is concerned about the game's existence. In cases where the main user group is teenagers, he believes Roblox has an obligation to ensure a healthy gaming environment for teenagers.
Roblox's attitude towards anything that involves sex is "zero tolerance." Roblox has developed a "parental monitoring feature" that allows parents to limit who their children interact with in the game, ensure that the children's play character dress code, and control the specific types of games that children access.
Last week, we just covered a sexual harassment scandal in Meta's Horizon Worlds. Meta's countermeasures are different from Roblox's, they add a "personal dividing line" function to the game, refusing to allow players to do some extreme actions.