I want my kid to hate Roblox

My daughter is at the age where a screen is mostly an elusive rectangle that occasionally plays songs about buses. She’s not playing games yet. Yes, I know. And still, I keep circling this thing, because I can already see the shape of the problem from where I sit. Okay, I’m not really sure where I sit exactly, but I know how very, very tired I am and how I’m choosing to write this rather than sleep while my toddler lets me.

My nieces and nephews are older though, and they play Roblox on an iPad. Three kids, one charger. The diplomacy around that charger is more intricate than any Kingdom Crusaders campaign I’ve ever run. Someone is always low on battery. Someone is always negotiating. It’s funny until you remember that iPads are running Roblox. Which I don’t like.

For the unfamiliar: Roblox is a free-to-play platform of thousands of user-made games, aimed mostly at kids and running on whatever device they can get their hands on - iPads, phones, the family laptop. Inside it, players spend a currency called Robux that the platform is happy to sell them for real money. It’s massive. I haven’t played it, because I play big boy games like Minecraft.

It’s impossible to find non-copyrighted screenshots of Roblox gameplay, and the Roblox press kit is very… vague, and is aimed at shareholders. Gameplay looks a lot more like a student project from early 2000s.

And I want my kid to hate Roblox (when she’s older).

Look, I know how that reads. I’m not wishing misery on children, and I’m not running for best uncle on the Internets. What I mean is closer to taste, the boring grown-up version of it. I want her to grow up with enough exposure to better things that Roblox eventually feels thin. I want her to bounce off it the way you bounce off a snack that looked great in the moment and left you feeling empty.

The reason this is on my mind isn’t really Roblox specifically, though. It’s money.

Games keep getting more expensive. Consoles too. The base PlayStation 5 used to be $500, and now it’s $600. A decent gaming PC is still a few thousand dollars - I know mine is, and it’s getting old. Nintendo Switch 2 games broke the $80 ceiling, which still fills me with a bit of dread as I type it out. All Freedom dollars, of course - your local prices may be politer or worse, mostly worse.

You know who can afford that? Grown-ups. You know who can’t? Kids.

So the hobby keeps quietly optimizing for people with jobs and credit cards. Our kids are playing free-to-play games on whatever devices are around the house. iPads and stuff. The only thing that fits an iPad without anyone having to spend $80 up front is Roblox-shaped, or Fortnite-shaped (yeah, there’s a beat-up Nintendo Switch in the household too - and of course a free game’s on that), or some other free-to-play thing built around getting you to spend later anyway. Free isn’t free. Adults pay in cash. Kids pay in time and attention - the only currency they’ve got plenty of, and the one F2P bills against.

And here’s what gets me. The grown-ups are buying remakes. Constant remakes. I’ll happily drop $70 on a game I already played in 2003 - because it looks pretty now and I can - while my nieces and nephews are stuck with Roblox on a hand-me-down iPad. I’m reliving my childhood. They’re being sold theirs.

I love games, and my annual video game budget probably (easily) crosses a thousand dollar threshold. As a grown up, I get to prioritize how I spend my income, and if I want to drop $60 on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, or maybe drop $25 on a DLC which lets me play as even angrier dwarfs in Total Warhammer III - I’m free to do that. Hell, I even buy a console or two here and there - from Nintendo Switch to a Steam Deck to a nifty little Anbernic handheld.

I took my nieces and nephews to the mall, they stared at games at a GameStop for over an hour, and went home empty handed because they already went through their allowance. Okay, that’s not entirely true - I did buy them a copy of Skyrim for the Switch so they have something to play besides Fortnite - but the point stands.

I also haven’t played Fortnite, but I’ve played through my fair share of battle royale games, and I’ve talked to enough teens and preteens to get the gist.

That’s all I can really do, though. They aren’t my kids. I get to show up, play cool uncle for an afternoon, and peace out for months or years at a time. Buy them a game. Talk excitedly about whatever I’m currently into. Boot up a console with them for a weekend. Then their parents pick up the slack. Their parents are great people. They also care about games very little and know about them less. Eh, it is what it is.

Funny enough, I followed Fortnite back when it released in 2017. I remember when battle royale got bolted onto what was then a PvE monster-horde shooter. The thing the game is now mostly known for arrived in a later update, almost like an experiment that ate the whole building. Weird in hindsight, but also: that’s the moment “free” became the default genre for a generation, and the rest of the medium quietly became the expensive option.

And it’s not even just about money. The kids whose parents did spring for a Switch still end up on Roblox eventually, because that’s where their schoolmates are. F2P doesn’t compete with paid games on quality. It competes on attendance. Nobody plays Skyrim with you at lunch in 4th grade. Roblox is where the chatter lives, and that gravity is bigger than the price tag.

Let me also say the simpler version. I just fucking hate blatant monetization targeted at kids. Not the taste version of hate I opened with. The plain angry one.

Roblox sucks for many reasons - from predatory monetization to the way it treats the kids making things on it (see this fantastic hbomberguy video). But my angle here is narrower.

And look, I should be honest about the limits of my angle. My daughter is not even two yet. I haven’t watched a kid navigate a Roblox chat. I haven’t been begged for Robux (apples, I get begged for apples a lot though - this kid loves apples). This is all guesswork and early anxiety. But the iPad my niece carries around isn’t just a game console: it’s a chat client, an ad surface, a slot-machine. Even if the games on it were great - and they aren’t - that combination is doing something to kids that nobody fully understands yet, and it makes me twitchy.

I grew up on games that didn’t try to bill me every time I logged in. They had a beginning, a middle, and an end - sometimes a credits screen so abrupt it felt rude. I played Resident Evil 2 on my uncle’s PlayStation 1, and while I didn’t understand much and didn’t get far, it informed my taste in survival horror. I loved getting lost in Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind lore - exploring the world for hours - without anyone trying to sell me anything mid-quest. I want my daughter to get that, eventually. Not because every game has to be high art, but because there’s a difference between a game and content that’s mindlessly consumed.

Now that’s quality entertainment. No microtransactions, just good ol’ trauma from playing horror games when you’re too young. Just like dad. Actually, maybe let’s hold off on Resident Evil.

When I picture her at seven or eight, I’m not picturing a tiny critic. I’m picturing her with a controller and a save file that belongs to her - one she can leave alone for a month and come back to without missing a season pass. Maybe it’s Minecraft creative. Maybe it’s some weird indie thing I’ve never heard of. I don’t know yet. I just know I want her to have something with edges that aren’t designed to keep her in the room forever.

Minecraft creative is the obvious good answer, by the way. Building stuff is great fun, and creative mode is essentially LEGOs without the price tag and without the pain of stepping on a piece at 2 a.m. Although don’t get me started on modern Minecraft - I yearn for the beta days when the game was smaller and there was less to keep track of. I’m a believer in constraints supporting creativity, and beta-era Minecraft had constraints almost by accident, ones modern Minecraft keeps trying to bulldoze in the name of more.

And even Minecraft has been catching the bug. Skin packs. A marketplace. Realms subscriptions. The monetization gravity doesn’t spare the games I’d actually recommend - which, I think, is the whole point. This isn’t a Roblox problem. It’s an industry problem, and even my obvious good answer is being slowly shaped toward the same fate.

Right now our focus is all on stacking blocks and naming colors. Video games aren’t in her vocabulary, and I don’t have to change how I approach the medium around her yet. But I will, and I’m really excited to see how - she’s a curious kid who likes to patiently figure out how things work. Maybe dear reader could have a recommendation for me?

I’m already keeping my Switch in tip-top shape for her. Charged, updated, sitting on a shelf for whenever she’s ready. It’s a small concrete thing - one console, no manifesto - but it’s something I’m actually doing instead of just having opinions about.

I don’t have a tidy policy here. I’m not going to pretend I’ll never hand her a tablet on an airplane, and I’m not going to build a perfect childhood out of principles and USB-C cables.

I think earlier Minecraft was awesome in supporting creativity without the predatory monetization practices. It was easy to get bored.

My wife and I are aligned on intentional screen time, at least for now. We haven’t crossed the “whatever keeps her quiet” threshold, and we don’t intend to. I don’t judge parents who have - it just doesn’t align with our values.

What I don’t know is what happens later. We aren’t the only influences here. There will be classmates. There will be cousins. There will be whatever Roblox-Fortnite-fast-food-entertainment thing gen beta inherits next. I don’t know if I’ll be able to say no, or if I even should.

Here’s the thing about boredom, since that’s where this is landing. Boredom is where taste forms. Kids who get bored try weird stuff. They put down a game because it stopped being interesting, pick up another, and notice they actually preferred the second one. That’s how taste works. Games with a clear end support that, eventually - they finish, they let you go. Always-on games don’t. They’re engineered to keep the moment of boredom from arriving, because the moment of boredom is when you’d leave and find out what else is out there.

I just know what I want her Tuesday-afternoon boredom to look like when the free stuff shows up to become her whole taste. I want there to be room for hate that’s actually just preference - earned the slow way, by knowing what better feels like.

Oh, and if any of this resonated, you might enjoy gaming identity, parenting, and handhelds and rediscovering gaming as a new parent - same brain working the same knot from a different angle.

P.S. Lots of travel coming up - see you all in June! I won’t lie - I’m excited to pause writing every week for a short while - no matter how rewarding it feels.