The question of safety has been asked of Roblox quite a bit this year. Granted, it’s been asked in past years as well, but due to certain events in the game, things have been taken to another level in some respects. There are many who feel that the game is unsafe for younger audiences, which is a bad thing because the game’s player base is 40% comprised of kids under 13. The dev team has done things to try and curb these sentiments against the game, including adding more and more parental protections and some new ones have apparently been added to the game recently.
As noted by BitDefender, parents have the ability to block specific friends in their child’s accounts. That’s a big change from before, as parents were only allowed to see who was within their child’s “circle of friends” but not do anything about it. So, if parents want their child to not interact with a certain someone anymore, they can straight-up block them. Plus, the child can’t undo the action without parental permission.
Arguably, one that’s just as important is being able to block certain “experiences” that their children can visit in the game. That means that some of the more “adult-only” worlds that exist within Roblox, for better and for worse, can’t be visited by the user so long as the parent lists them out in the block features.
If that’s still not enough, parents can also get very detailed reports about what their kids have been doing within the game, allowing them insight into how things are going and if their kids are “wading into waters” that they shouldn’t be.
Of course, even with these tools, which, we’ll admit, are pretty darn good, they do carry a certain caveat with them.
That caveat is that the parent has to know not only how to use these tools but also understand what is going on within this gaming universe and how they should better handle things with their child. While the dev team has put the “pressure” on the parents in the past to “keep their child off the game if they don’t want them on it,” the fact of the matter is that parents can’t monitor their kids 24/7. Plus, even with the reports, it wouldn’t tell them everything, especially with kids being savvy about how to take certain “interactions” off the game’s tracked channels.
In other words, this is a step in the right direction, but it can’t be the only step.
