Roblox: gaming with mental health 

The school holidays are upon us and one place most young children in Ireland are planning to spend time is their favourite digital playground – one that offers millions of experiences for them to explore – Roblox.  

Most parents with any sort of knowledge of the platform have heard about bad actors on Roblox and may have accessed parental controls in an effort to reduce potential contact harms, but what about the content itself? 

MILLIONS of experiences – moderation of content will always be a problem

Your child’s age is used to determine which experiences can be accessed by default so for example a child of 5-8-years accesses minimal or mild experiences. 

A concerned parent, seeking reassurance that their child will be protected from harmful content, could adjust that so that only minimal experiences are available. Minimal is, after all, the lowest level and described as “may contain occasional mild violence, light unrealistic blood, and/or occasional mild fear.” Job done or is it? 

Herein lies the problem – MILLIONS of experiences. With a platform of this scale moderation of content will always be a problem and mislabelled experiences allow children to access highly problematic content. 

Potentially harmful mental health experiences 

Parents are likely unaware that Roblox hosts unregulated and potentially harmful mental health experiences, including mental health assessments and AI therapists. Many of these are labelled Minimal, i.e. suitable for a 5-year-old. Whatever disclaimers may be built into the profile of these mental health experiences, vulnerable children may engage with the advice and may in some cases be exposed to upsetting disclosures by others. 

While the focus of regulators and politicians is on the damaging effects of social media, Roblox is flying under the radar and could be gaming with the mental health of children.

Poor content classification

Of course mental health is just one example of problematic content on this immense platform. This should be where content settings kick in but they are insufficient to the task and they may actually provide parents with a false sense of security. 

What can parents and caregivers do?

As previously mentioned a parent can adjust the overall content maturity but this is far from a fail safe given the amount of mislabeled minimal and mild experiences available on the platform.

A parent could also block individual experiences if they find their child is accessing an experience that they deem to be unsuitable but this does not scale well. 

Remember there are millions of experiences, in some cases clones popping up to avoid higher maturity ratings, and Roblox has capped this blacklist setting at 100. A better solution for child protection would have been to have a whitelist facility, letting parents create a limited library of experiences that they are happy for their child to access rather than the approach taken today. 

Allowed games under content settings today merely refers to additional games that a parent has unlocked, which by default their child couldn’t access based on their age. 

It is notable that by default Roblox disables access to sensitive issues for younger users and this is described as games that focus on sensitive social, political, or religious issues like immigration or abortion. Mental health is not included as a sensitive issue, even if this is the main or sole focus of the “game”. 

Our advice 

So this summer, if you don’t have the time to constantly supervise your child on Roblox, there is one foolproof solution: remove it altogether. And if that feels a step too far, then strictly limit its use to times when you can be right there next to them.