The Surprises (and Dangers) of Finally Letting Your Kid Play Roblox

Some things in life are inevitable. For many parents, it's when they encounter Roblox, and begin dealing with microtransactions, interactions with strangers, and so much more.

The logo for Roblox, which reported explosive growth during the pandemic, while children were remote learning. It’s come down a bit since, but it’s still huge.

There are key moments for every parent where control begins to slip away. Early on, parenting often feels like planning a class on life, where you introduce ideas and experiences like curated milestones, as your kid’s mind is ready for them and, if we are being honest, when you are ready to have those conversations and engage with those topics. The reality of parenting is that kids define their own path: "ready" is relative, and plans are quickly tossed out when confronted with your child’s own agency. 

Like, for example, when your kid comes home and asks "hey, can I download Roblox?"

The creators of Roblox describe it as "home to 6.4 million immersive experiences, from gaming to social hangouts, to concerts, sports, fashion shows, education, and entertainment." It’s better described as a digital Pandora's box. Opening it in our house ushered in unexpected questions about interacting with strangers, spending money online (aka the dreaded robux), trying to navigate age-inappropriate content, and more. 

Roblox entered our home because of social pressure and algorithmic feedback loops. My oldest daughter, five years old at the time and nearly seven today, was introduced to Roblox through videos recommended on YouTube, and by her best friend down the street playing it regularly. I was vaguely aware of Roblox as a concept because of my work as a reporter covering video games, but if I'd been asked to describe Roblox to anyone at the time, I'd have drawn a total blank.

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In hindsight, maybe I should have put up more of a fight. But at the time, we were delighted our daughter was connecting with a friend, and erred on encouraging that bond to flourish. Parents are frequently presented with situations like this, where they're weighing personal values against other considerations. Would we have introduced Roblox this early normally? Probably not. Did it seem like a risk worth taking in pursuit of a meaningful friendship? Yes. And it was worth it.

"In my work helping families manage video games and screen time, something I notice is that adults often struggle with how to manage gaming because it feels 'different' or unknown to them," said Ash Brandin, a middle school teacher in Colorado who goes by the online moniker The Gamer Educator and helps parents navigate video games and technology, to Crossplay. "Even if caregivers are gamers themselves, they aren't necessarily playing the same games as their kids."

I do play regularly games with my oldest, including Roblox. (The "obby" stuff is genuinely fascinating). And we are, generally, a permissive household. Within reason, we allow our children to choose to watch or play media that might be beyond them intellectually and become frustrating, or prove scary and cause a conversation about what upsets them. As parents, we're guides for them to make choices, knowing they'll often be making them without us present.

But that's an easy philosophy to tell friends over a drink, and another to actually deal with.

Who’s Huggy Wuggy?

"My oldest son discovered Roblox during the pandemic and just from listening in I could tell it was totally a social thing with his friends," said Kevin, a father of two boys (5 and 9) from Ohio.

Kevin had played games with his children, in the past, and while not intimately familiar with Roblox specifically, mostly figured it was "a social platform wrapped in a bad video game."

"I liked a lot of bad video games when I was a kid, so who am I to yuck his yum?" said Kevin. "He was talking to his buddies from daycare and school, and honestly it felt like he needed it for social interaction that was missing. It wasn't until the night when he was scared to go to bed that we realized Huggy Wuggy was a problem."

Huggy Wuggy, a lanky blue monster who looks like a nightmarish Toy Story reject, will be identifiable to anyone with a child who's spent meaningful time on YouTube or Roblox. The character debuted in the video game Poppy Playtime, a horror adventure game where players are trying to escape an abandoned toy factory full of monstrosities like Huggy Wuggy. It's part of a long line of young adult horror that can be traced back to things like Five Nights at Freddy's.

Scary characters like Huggy Wuggy is all over Roblox. It's unavoidable. Sitting right next to a seemingly adorable experience like Adopt Me, where players care for virtual pets, are games centered around jump scares. My oldest has never had a nightmare because of a piece of media, so I didn't really blink when I saw her Roblox feed completely filled up with this stuff. If anything, the horror-loving part of me beamed with pride when she'd try to scare her friends with them!

Roblox has parental controls, but they're limited. In other words, they’re probably gonna find Huggy Wuggy. A lot of kids playing Roblox are much younger than 9 or 13, which means the onus falls onto parents playing with their kids, keeping an especially close eye, or more likely, knowing their kids are about to shuffle away with the iPad and do what they want.

"I do not think that any gaming platform has sufficient moderations to give parents complete peace of mind," said Dr. Rachel Kowert, a research psychologist focused on the impact of games, to Crossplay. "That said, some spaces are more effectively moderated than others. But there actually lies the problem—that there is no consistency in quality or quantity of moderation or with the tools available to parents within any particular gaming space. It can be really challenging for parents to navigate these spaces, especially when they are unfamiliar with them."

Kowert does allow her children to play Minecraft on a private server with friends and family, but does not allow her children to play Roblox, despite acknowledging "everyone else is playing it."

Even assuming the best of intentions from a platform like Roblox has risk. Online moderation is tricky, expensive, and full of loopholes. The real-world has many dangers out of eyesight, and so does the internet. Sometimes the loopholes are harmless copyright violations, like when Morgan, a father from Arkansas, absentmindedly downloaded Roblox for her six-year-old while recovering from a surgery and heard these lyrics start blaring out of his phone speaker:

It’s raining tacos
From out of the sky
Tacos
No need to ask why
Just open your mouth and close your eyes
It’s raining tacos

"It's Raining Tacos" is a very funny song from Parry Gripp, who makes all manner of goofy songs about tacos, animals, sandwich turtles, and other things that make kids laugh a whole lot.

"I must admit that the chorus was a true banger, but it was so much louder than the rest of the game that I leapt out of my chair," said Morgan. "This then caused my son to laugh every time it looped and hold the phone to my ear until we had to have a long conversation about boundaries."

An Unexpected Racial Slur

Far more upsetting, however, was the loophole discovered by the nine-year-old daughter of Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Mac software developer Panic, who also created the Playdate handheld. (The adorable yellow handheld with a crank!)

In 2022, Sasser's daughter randomly launched a poop-themed multiplayer shooter in Roblox called Poop Land because she was trying to make her dad laugh. But upon launching the game, the father and daughter heard a horrifying noise: the n-word being blasted at full volume.

Sasser captured footage of the incident as it was happening, which was reviewed by Crossplay. [Editor’s Note: I considered sharing the footage in this piece, but I have no idea where to host it without immediately getting in trouble myself? You’re spared hearing it.]

For years, players in Roblox could upload their own audio and share inside of games. This created situations where people uploaded copyrighted music, audio at obnoxious volumes for the sake of annoying people, and plenty of offensive content. In March 2022, likely fueled by lawsuits regarding the amount of infringing material on Roblox, the platform announced it would no longer allow so-called "public" audio on Roblox. It's still possible for unexpected audio snippets to slip through, as this incident took place after the policy change, but broadly, these days Roblox seems to be a place where you're less likely to hear this or "It's Raining Tacos."

Poop Land, the game Sasser’s daughter started playing. It’s still operational, albeit without the blaring racial slurs. You do get to fire guns, though.

"When the sound started looping, she didn’t know what it was, I think it just sounded like yelling to her," said Sasser. "But I lost all hope of a measured response, and I was instantly really quite upset—not at her, of course, and I told her that a hundred times, but at the game and whoever made that game and shitty trolls and Roblox and all of it. Of course, then she was super embarrassed and very upset, because that wasn’t what she expected to have happen at all. She ran and hid under the sheets. We all felt bad."

In the aftermath, Sasser reported the game to Roblox, who declined to address the incident without an uploaded YouTube video. Because Sasser was smart enough to record what happened, he was able to do that. The kicker, of course, was that Roblox's response to Sasser was boilerplate and without an explanation for how this happened, and soon after, YouTube knocked Sasser's own channel with a community strike because it was hosting "hate speech." (This is also why Crossplay didn’t host it.)

"YouTube could detect and ban a video of Roblox hate speech," said Sasser, "but Roblox itself couldn't detect that same hate speech."

I'd originally heard about this incident last year, at which point I contacted Roblox for more details about its moderation policy. In the process, I also put the company in touch with Sasser.

"Roblox is committed to delivering engaging, immersive, social experiences that are age-appropriate and that our vast global community can enjoy in a safe, civil environment," said a Roblox spokesperson in a statement to Crossplay. "Our moderation team monitors millions of experiences, by machine learning and human review, for content that violates our Community Standards. We apologize this inappropriate content was not caught sooner. Occasions when inappropriate content is not caught prior to publishing are rare, but our community works with us to flag any content that doesn't adhere to our guidelines so we are able to take it down quickly—typically within minutes."

The company told Crossplay that its moderation process involves "a combination of machine learning and a team of thousands of trained professionals monitoring for safety 24/7." 

But at the end of the day, it's a patchwork and can fail. 

"It did open up some important conversation about being online, words we never use and why we don’t use them, and why some people provoke reaction for fun," said Sasser. "They’re good things to talk about. But I would’ve loved to have had those conversations in a, you know, less-Roblox way."

Daddy, Can I Have Some Robux?

No parent with a child running around in Roblox has made it long before they're asked for robux, the in-game currency required to buy anything. You've probably seen the "Roblox" logo on cards at places like Target—this is what those cards are for. Robux can be used to buy weapons, items, and cosmetics within individual games, or purchase cosmetics for the avatar that jumps between all games within Roblox. It's virtually impossible to play a game that's not begging for money, and while some of the more popular games have forms of currency players can earn, nearly all of them are pushing robux. It feels like Disney World, where items are strategically placed at kid-level heights, so they can grab them and start bugging a tired parent to buy it.

"I've had tough conversations with my kids regarding robux and other Roblox related purchases," said Joel DeWitte, a father of a nine and 11-year-old, who said saying yes to robux was a slippery slope that went from gifts to allowance to headaches.

To date, we have not allowed our daughter to buy cosmetics within a single game, instead allowing allowance, saved money, or gifts to be used towards cosmetics for her generic Roblox avatar that can be universally carried throughout the game. My kid treats Roblox like YouTube: a platform to jump between experiences every few minutes. Thus, buying anything in an individual game would be a waste. Maybe that'll change?

The pricing structure for robux. You can see how this might get out of control quickly. 400 robux isn’t buying more than a few items, and pricing isn’t consistent.

"It was challenging for our kids to grasp the idea of spending money for a chance to win something (gambling) rather than getting exactly what you pay for," said DeWitte, "and why it's easy to spend a lot of money and still not get what you want."

My kid knows and respects our rule, but the temptation is everywhere in Roblox. You cannot enter a game in Roblox without being blasted with an offer to buy something within seconds. It's part of the design culture in Roblox to treat microtransactions like they're part of the aesthetic.

"I think it's complicated because most Roblox games, and almost all the top Roblox games, were created by young developers who grew up on the platform," said a developer who previously worked on Roblox games and asked to remain anonymous. "And they made games they wanted to play, informed by other stuff on the platform and things they were playing. They weren't making things 'aimed at young demographics', they were making things for themselves and their friends. So to make a 'hit Roblox game', you generally have to be the type of person who enjoys playing Roblox games, including the popular forms of monetization. That's the mindset of a lot of creators: they like the platform. It was, in most cases, a big part of their childhood and lives."

It sets a frustrating expectation for especially young kids, however, when they're still trying to understand the concept of spending and losing money. When my oldest plays New Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on her Switch, it's expertly crafted to dish out power-ups at just the right time. It's both an empowerment and teaching mechanism. On Roblox, those same power-ups exist to tempt you with things you can't have, or to make you feel bad because you don't have robux. 

"If you pay $70 for Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo already has your money, and therefore the game has to be deeply intrinsically motivating so that you feel you got your money's worth. Intrinsic motivation is a good thing," said Brandin, aka The Gamer Educator. "My go-to advice if a family still wants to say ‘yes' to these types of games: have very clear boundaries established ahead of time. Maybe the game is allowed so long as no money is spent (and kids will likely tire of it quickly). Maybe there's a set spending amount based on allowance as kids figure out what is and isn't worth their time and money."

This psychological loop is often reinforced when children move from Roblox to YouTube, where they're likely to watch creators playing the same games they were playing on Roblox. Those creators will often drop money on in-game items, making them seem even more attractive. 

“Because Roblox is popular with kids, it’s been more thoughtful than other social media platforms about some things,” said Bloomberg reporter Cecilia D'Anastasio, as part of a larger Roblox Q&A that will run on Crossplay early next week. “But because it’s ultimately a collection of millions of separate gaming instances, where it’s enormously difficult to police role-playing, it’s always going to be a little dicey.”

It is, at the end of the day, a lot. Roblox is a lot. YouTube is a lot. Twitch is a lot. Fortnite is a lot. Take your pick! It's a complicated and messy world for kids and adults, even with the best of intentions and a careful eye. You cannot watch and play everything. That's the real truth, and any parent knows it's not as easy as just saying "no" or just deleting the app off of a device.

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Also:

• Roblox was instrumental in teaching my oldest about 3D spaces. The platforming feels spacey and unorthodox, but it’s absolutely the reason she has a better sense of movement. I’ve seen it directly translate back into Mario games.

• The best way to understand Roblox is just to play it yourself. There are actually some very cool and interesting experiences in there, but you gotta dig around.

• If you wanna play with a controller, Roblox is actually on Xbox, too. I’ve used that to goof around with it in the past. Mostly, though, I play on an iPad, because that’s the way my kid is playing. I’ve learned to grit through the virtual buttons.

• Space Unicorn was the go-to Perry Grip song in our household for a long time.

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