Roblox Is Growing Up, But That Doesn't Mean It's About to Get Flooded With Sex and Drugs (Yet)
In opening the door to "17+ experiences," the chaotic platform is allowing kissing, alcohol, and a whole lot of complicated moderation questions. Here's what to you need to know.
Last week, Roblox announced it would allow “experiences for people 17 and older” on the platform, a long-awaited step in recognizing a long-known fact that Roblox, which has been around since 2006, has an audience wider than children. What it actually means for Roblox to allow entertainment with, as it said in its press release, “more mature things and storylines like in TV shows or stand-up comedy,” has been unclear.
Here’s how Roblox, who claims 38% of their daily users are 17 years and over, describes the new 17+ “experience guidelines:”
“Content is only suitable for ages 17 and up. May contain intense violence, heavy realistic blood, moderate crude humor, romantic themes, unplayable gambling content and/or the presence of alcohol.”
“I believe it may take a while for a 17+ player base with full games to become an actual reality on Roblox, as Roblox is known as being a ‘kid's game,’” said Patrick, a 16-year-old who runs the Roblox news account Event Hunters. “It will most likely start out with just a few games with a small player base but slowly develop and gain traction. This small start will be due to Roblox’s tough security verification system, where one has to submit a form of ID to prove they are 17+.”
Most age verification systems are a joke, where you invent a birthday that satisfies the requirement and move on. With Roblox, players have to submit a government ID, then snap several live photographs to authenticate the picture on that ID, and wait for Roblox’s verifications partners to say it’s legitimate. The whole process only took me a few minutes on my own Roblox account, which now says that I’m “age verified.”
As for kids getting around the system, a Roblox spokesperson told me their “vendor uses advanced image processing technology to detect fake IDs by comparing inconsistencies between face portraits and PIIs.” But, uh, kids are smart and will want to play this stuff, so I’ll be keeping an eye on what they try to get away with soon.
The response to the news by Roblox fans on Twitter and Reddit was funny and appropriately crude, with people calling this “the sex update,” declaring more conservative games like Minecraft cowards, and celebrating the arrival of Roblox porn.
First of all, bad (??) news: Roblox prohibits sexualized content even under this context, and won’t allow anything that “depicts sexual activity or seeks real-world romantic relationships,” “nudity,” and “sexually suggestive avatar clothing items.” So, no, Roblox isn't getting into the pornography business. But it does open another can of worms about what Roblox defines as sexual. Is kissing sexual? When does it become sexual?
“Non-sexual expressions of love or affection are permitted with 17+ content such as a quick kiss on the mouth, hugging, and holding hands,” said a spokesperson.
Hm. Trying to pin down what is a “quick kiss on the mouth” seems slippery, but presumably Roblox wants to see what people build and not commit to firm rules yet.
Roblox’s release was vague on details about what’s allowed, but its support documents and guidelines for creators are more specific. Take violent content, which Roblox says may now include “graphic and realistic-looking depictions of violence and heavy bloodshed,” but not, among other things, “animal abuse and torture.”
One sticking point for Roblox is the difference between real and “realistic-looking.”
“Real-world refers to real-world footage (e.g., UGC [User Generated Content] video) whereas realistic looking refers to fictional content that looks real,” said a company spokesperson.
Again, this gives the platform a lot of wiggle room.
Alcohol? Yes.
Swearing? No. (This isn’t mentioned in their rules, but “no” was the answer I got.)
Drugs, despite marijuana being legal in a number of states? Again, no.
“Our policies and systems will eventually be updated to consider content relating to illegal and regulated substances beyond alcohol,” said a spokesperson. “Our first priority is always safety, which is why we’re rolling this out slowly and thoughtfully. Since our platform has users from all over the world connecting and co-experiencing together, marijuana legalization in the US won’t necessarily directly impact or change our policy approach to content related to marijuana on the platform.”
Perhaps the funniest explanation Roblox is forced to give as part of this is explaining the difference between varying depictions of poop:
“For example, if you depict or reference flatulence, vomiting, and/or unrealistic looking feces, such as poop coils or the poop emoji, your experience meets the mild criteria. If you depict or reference urine, urination, or realistic looking feces, your experience meets the moderate criteria.“
Just tremendous stuff.
“Our goal is to give these tools to the community so that they can actually surprise and delight us,” said Roblox chief product officer Manuel Bronstein in an interview with TechCrunch about the news. “And we’re excited to see what happens when we open this up to the community, what are they gonna come back with? You and I can brainstorm about a bunch of things, but we’re going to see 10,000 other things that we didn’t think about.”
“Surprise and delight” is likely “pushing boundaries” and “making moderators’ lives hell,” especially on a platform where, as pointed out Roblox video creator Jake “Flamingo” Green, it’s easy to access games called Public Bathroom Simulator, where players can pretend to, among other things, urinate. It’s not sexual and probably harmless, but I’m not sure it’s something I’d be psyched for my kid to stumble into?
(For the record, Roblox declined my own interview request.)
(Second side note, but there’s another Roblox game also called Public Bathroom Simulator that does, at least, ask people to be chill and that the point of building the game because they wanted to make a “game just to have fun flushing toilets and such, not to be inappropriate, so please just be a decent human being.” Fair enough!)
All of this sounds like an enormous moderation headache for Roblox. The company has warned that making 17+ content available to players under the age of 17 can result in “enforcement actions” against offending Roblox accounts, but it’s easy to imagine creators messing with the mods, and players working together to mess with Roblox.
“Safety and civility is our top priority,” said a Roblox spokesperson. “We have an expert team of thousands of people dedicated to monitoring for safety on Roblox 24/7. We conduct a safety review of every single image, video, and audio file uploaded to Roblox before that content is posted on the platform, using a combination of human and machine detection.”
Roblox creators are currently required to fill out what the company cals a “questionnaire” that determines the content guidelines that appear below games in Roblox. The game Flag Wars, for example, is recommended for ages 9+ and features “violence (mild/frequent) and blood (unrealistic/light),” but the guidelines are hidden below the much cooler stuff like screenshots, game features, and most importantly, the big green button that launches a game like Flag Wars.
Which gets back to the most pressing potential issue about this update: the potential exposure of adult content to kids. Right now, Roblox is counting on a combination of defenses—age verification, gating content behind age verification, automated and human moderation, experience guidelines—to fill every conceivable gap. We’ll see.
It’s also asking Roblox users to “report experiences which they think do not fit that specific age category.”
It was inevitable Roblox would go this way. But Roblox is already messy and chaotic!
It’s also an open question on how much content will be made for this audience. Though it’s possible to be age verified on Roblox now, there are no 17+ experiences available yet—those are coming later. How much is coming remains to be seen.
“A problem with this update is that it suppresses a large chunk of the audience since most of Roblox's player base is around 13-15 years old,” said Md17, an 18-year-old clothing creator on Roblox who makes a few hundred dollars per day selling items on its marketplace. “Many of the small crowd this is intended for will be uncomfortable submitting their ID to an online database due to breaches and security reasons.”
So far, at least, Md17 has no plans to make any content for the 17+ crowd on Roblox.
Also:
I’m excited for this update. It’s going to be wild, and I’ll be covering it in real-time for Crossplay. Let me know what you end up seeing out in the world.
People are going to try and have sex in Roblox, and I’m interested to see how Roblox attempts to leave some of that sexy in without moderating all of it out.
If you work in Roblox content moderation, email me. I’d love to chat with folks who work within those walls about what it’s like to try and manage Roblox.
As a kid I played a lot of Roblox on my family Windows XP desktop around 2007, and this seems like a very weird change to see as an adult now (I imagine this group of grown up players are a large demo their trying to net)- I bet I would of tried my absolute hardest back then to try and access the 17+ content, especially if they advertised or surfaced the change to users. One thing I disliked as a child was knowing there was stuff I wasn’t allowed to check out, especially in a game I was occupying tons of hours in.
It’s really funny to me how „urination“ or kissing in the mouth are a 17+ experiences in the US. Meanwhile, „light violence“ like the Roblox avatars shooting each other with realistic looking guns is 9+.
From my European perspective, that is really absurd. Video games were much less realistic when I grew up, but I know my mom didn’t approve of Yie Ar Kung-Fu on the C64 when I was 12.
Roblox mentions Marihuana as a sticking point for international audiences, but really violence and romance will be as well, just in different countries.