It’s easy for parents to gloss over what their kids are doing in Roblox because it looks so innocent, but the impact of this exposure can be pretty severe. I think out of embarrassment and the fear of losing the privilege of the game.” Emotionally, when he told me what was going on he was sobbing. He also said he blocked and reported them. He also said when he walked in on a situation like this he would play loud music to try to dissuade the characters from doing this. He said it made him feel uncomfortable and he tried to ignore it. He knew it was sex because the text and “noises” being made during the simulation. “The characters were laying on top of each other and the other was a sitting position between two characters. I asked her what it was like and why Gabe kept it secret from her. Vanessa Moon Kuster’s son Gabe played the game for months before she learned that he’d regularly seen avatars having sex, been asked to “date” on the platform, and more. I spoke to numerous parents with kids who have been exposed to unwanted violent and sexual content in Roblox, despite the company’s best efforts to filter it. Petersen’s case isn’t an isolated incident. Just a day later, Roblox was in the news again for hundreds of sexually explicit videos made on the platform and uploaded to YouTube. Roblox identified the responsible players and banned their accounts, but the damage was done. They proceeded to sexually assault her, miming thrusting on her prone avatar’s body. The girl was playing on her iPad in a multiplayer area when she was approached by two male avatars, one of whom had crafted crude genitals for his player model. The place to start is with North Carolina mom Amber Petersen, who grabbed headlines earlier this year when she posted on Facebook about her seven year old daughter’s shocking experience in the game. Recently, we’ve seen a wave of stories about kids being exposed to Roblox content that’s extremely inappropriate.

That freedom, though, has some serious downsides when it comes to safety. The cartoony, Lego-like visual style of Roblox keeps these games from looking too scary, but designers have a ton of freedom in regards to what they create. Some of the most popular include Jailbreak, a rough-edged Grand Theft Auto-alike that lets kids play as cops and robbers Natural Disaster Survival, which boasts a bunch of apocalyptic phenomena to ride out and zombie survival Apocalypse Rising. Roblox games come in a wide variety of genres. That language allows players – kids and adults alike – to essentially create their own games and post them online for others to experience. For absolute noobs, here’s the basics: it’s a sandbox construction game sort of like Minecraft, but with access to a robust programming language called Lua. With more than 64 million active players every month worldwide, it’s one of the most popular and successful platforms. If you have digital-literate kids, they probably play Roblox.

Roadblocks game characters