When you’re a parent, there’s nothing more important than protecting your child from things they shouldn’t do or shouldn’t see. It’s never easy, but no one ever said that parenting would be easy. In the case of video games, there are protections in place to help parents know whether a game is good for them or not, but those only go up to a certain point. For example, the ESRB helps with its ratings, but those ratings don’t go to all titles, such as Roblox. Plus, because it’s a free-to-play title that you can play on almost any electronic device, it can be incredibly easy to pick up…and never put down.
That’s why the site Only My Health has made a guide to help parents understand what’s going on with games like Roblox and whether it’s actually safe for their kids to play. The honest answer there is: It’s complicated.
On the surface, the game is a title where anyone from a kid to an adult can play games or make their own content. In fact, the dev team continually builds upon the universe’s creation tools so that more creativity can be had. The CEO has even tried to make it seem like the problems are only “niche” and that if parents don’t want their kids to play it, “don’t let them play it.”
Obviously, that’s not that simple, though, and there are plenty of problems that are below the surface that parents need to know about and that the guide points out.
For example, while there are parental controls in place, there are still plenty of areas in the game that are not safe for kids or teens. Chat rooms are easily a place where kids and teens get exploited the most in the game, and that has led to many news reports about predators and grooming.
There’s also an issue with microtransactions, which the game has in abundance. As we’ve talked about in the past, parents have been accidentally burdened with huge bills from the game due to the kids buying stuff without realizing that it was a paid transaction and not just something with the in-game currency. It doesn’t help that the dev team does its best to enforce a “no refund policy” for these kinds of things, which helps build up the friction even more.
Check out the guide itself for the full breakdown, but the TLDR version is, “If you’re a parent, just be mindful of what your kid is playing and be sure they’re investing ALL of their time into it.”
