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The Dopamine Slot Machine - Roblox, Your Child's Casino
211 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of The Dopamine Slot Machine, Andrew and Brandon dive into Roblox, the gaming platform that’s taken the world by storm. With over 80 million daily players and nearly 400 million logging in each month, Roblox isn’t just a game—it’s an entire ecosystem of user-created content.
Andrew, a father of two and lifelong gamer, teams up with Brandon, a consumer psychologist and ex-pro video game coach, to uncover how Roblox hooks young players. They explore its addictive design, in-game currency (Robux), and the potential risks, from overspending to inappropriate content.
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Transcript
Introduction to Video Game Influence
00:00:08
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening. Whenever you are, welcome to the dopamine slot machine, the podcast that discusses what you need to know about the video games that your children are playing. How are they designed to get your kids hooked? How do they make money from your children? And what can you do to make sure that your child's relationship with video games is a positive
Meet the Hosts and Episode Focus
00:00:25
Andrew Wilmot
one? My name is Andrew. I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer.
00:00:29
Bdizzle
And I'm Brandon, a consumer research psychologist and an ex-professional esports coach.
00:00:34
Andrew Wilmot
This week, we're covering one we know you've been waiting for, Roblox. If your child isn't playing Roblox, then we guarantee that their friends are. So let's dive in. So firstly, what is Roblox? It often get referred to as a game, but it's not actually a game. It's a platform on which users can create and play games.
00:00:53
Andrew Wilmot
so More than 80 million people play it every day. Close to 400 million log on each month. This is about five times the number that play Fortnite. And most of these players are 15 or younger. A fifth are less than nine years old. Now, I mentioned that these games are user created. Those users can be children just experimenting, having a play.
00:01:18
Andrew Wilmot
or they can be professional teams. But ultimately, the moderation and the rating of these games in terms of age is down to the team itself. And in terms of quality, that there is very little quality control.
Understanding Roblox's Monetary System
00:01:34
Andrew Wilmot
Roblox makes its money from ah its own currency, Robux, which you which you buy and then can spend on items within the game, as well as a premium subscription, which gives you like a stipend of Robux every month.
00:01:48
Andrew Wilmot
Now, let's before we dive into the games themselves, Brandon, can you walk us a little bit with some of the tactics that we saw on roadblocks with the monetization?
00:01:59
Bdizzle
Yeah, of course. um um And I feel like the the first thing is always setting the scene or the context, which is that these are organisations with large teams of people that are basically deploying tactics to basically create increase their profit margin at all costs.
00:02:14
Bdizzle
and Microtransactions and Roblox is an offender, but isn't the only company doing this. one of One of the techniques that they do is that you don't buy things with real currency. So you don't buy, let's say, a cosmetics, i something that makes you look different for 10 pounds. You can stand by a bunch of currency that enables you to buy that cosmetic that should be worth 10 pounds, but often with a little bit left over. So it kind of incentivizes you to make the most of it by putting another 10 pounds in to buy the next one.
00:02:42
Bdizzle
But the the key kind of reason or the foundational reason why they do that is because your brain is very, very practiced at understanding the price or the value of 10 pounds in the real world. It can buy so a certain number of goods. The moment you put it in a random environment or you take it outside that kind context, such as roebucks, it obfuscates that value. So suddenly you're not spending 10 pounds, you're spending 3000 roebucks.
00:03:11
Bdizzle
And because of that, it kind of ah ah breaks down that cognitive process where you might buy something for £10, be like, oh, that's a good deal or a bad deal, and because it puts it in this kind of new space where your brain's not trained to make that kind of very, very accurate decision.
00:03:25
Andrew Wilmot
And the age ranges that are playing this, they might not necessarily have the strongest grasp over the value of money in the first place.
00:03:33
Bdizzle
Absolutely. And that for the people at home, the only way I can describe the monetization or my apologies, monetization practices within these games is the worst mobile phone game that you might have ever encountered. But it's everywhere. Every 30 seconds in this environment, you are pressured in some way in for purchasing something.
00:03:56
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I mentioned earlier that these are pretty much all user-generated games. Roblox isn't going out and developing a series of games for people to play. It'll be teams of various professional levels creating them.
00:04:09
Andrew Wilmot
and these teams are also the the The developers are also responsible for labeling how the maturity level of their game. Roblox operates its age rating based on minimal maturity rating all the way through to 17 plus. And ultimately, it's the developers of the game themselves that give that maturity rating. And so these developers are incentivized to have the lowest possible maturity rating I mean, I signed up, told Roblox that I was five years old and I was still getting all of these things that Brandon was saying, you know, log into a game and immediately just in my face, trying to get me to buy
Self-Rated Content and Exposure Issues
00:04:49
Andrew Wilmot
items within the game. Oh, you don't have enough Robux to buy this item? Or can you have you tried? Here's the button to buy £20 worth of Robux.
00:04:59
Bdizzle
Yeah, it's absolutely wild, Andrew. was almost harrowing entering these environments for the first time from an outside in. Obviously, I know a lot about it academically, but for seeing it in person, it really is very, very clear how these systems are designed and how they're completely unregulated.
00:05:16
Bdizzle
And I've got a really great example of this where you can't search in the toolbar for 18 plus. So you can't explicitly ask that question and try to find some of these environments. So instead, the community has veered towards using the 17 plus rating. And instead, a lot of these kind of nefarious or malicious environments that your kids could potentially be exposed to have kind of changed the terminology in the language associated with them so that people can find them easier.
00:05:43
Bdizzle
and and and that's just the crux of the problem of having almost like a decentralized video game platform. We have small groups of people designing games to for in essence children as their target market.
00:05:57
Andrew Wilmot
So we we actually spent a couple of hours just playing Roblox games. So i I mentioned I signed up as a five-year-old brand and you signed up with your actual age.
00:06:08
Bdizzle
Correct, yes.
00:06:09
Andrew Wilmot
The first thing that was striking is what was available on the front page. So by the way, no parental checks. I told Roblox I was five years old and they were like, yep, in you go. We don't need to check with your parents.
00:06:20
Andrew Wilmot
They didn't even bother paying lip service to any sort of parental controls there. But let's let's talk about some of the games we saw. So the first one we played was something called Rivals rivals Arena.
00:06:35
Andrew Wilmot
Just Rivals. So this is a a mild maturity game, so appropriate for five-year-olds, apparently. This is one of the most popular games in Roblox with 106,000 players playing right now. 2.9 billion visits since it was created about seven months ago.
00:06:56
Andrew Wilmot
It's a 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 arena shooter game. So the first thing you'll consider is, is that appropriate content for a five-year-old in terms of what's actually in it? We don't really want to get into that too much, but instead, keeping in mind, Robloxing's on five years old, I got into a game straight away the other players are chatting to me or you're and when you're out of the games you're placed in a chat room basically and at every single opportunity between games at the start games wandering around to the chat room it's trying to encourage me to buy weapons and the weapons in this game all the good ones are locked behind paying for them so again if your child is playing this and
00:07:52
Andrew Wilmot
You've said, fine, you can play Roblox, but we're not spending any real money on it. Then their experience is going to be limited. They're going to be frustrated because they're losing against people who are paying for these weapons. On on top of that, we Brandon talked about how Roblox obfuscates the value of money to encourage people to spend perhaps more than they really should or would by using Roblox. And this game had its own currency. So you've got like two layers of uh obfuscation there which which is crazy and this is on top of we had loot boxes which are now being regulated by the EU as gambling and all of this straight away first game shown to me as a five-year-old
00:08:38
Bdizzle
And one thing I'd like to stress in terms of communicating about this is it's not it's not like we actively search for any of this. As you genuinely log in, you load up into this digital environment and before you understand the environment you're in, while you're there,
00:08:54
Bdizzle
you are immediately surrounded with little nudges to basically spend money. and And this is like, again, a known mechanism. You have a certain amount of cognitive willpower or cognitive load or self-discipline, right? and And you can only deny these kind of little reward circuit nudges for a limited amount of time. And that's why they do them.
00:09:17
Bdizzle
And it's surprising to me that even in the almost like the flagship game, the most common digital environment within Roblox, these practices are unbelievably common. it's is' It's at the forefront of that experience that ah ah your child might be experiencing or all these worlds your child will be going into.
00:09:37
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I actually loaded up roadblocks right now. and Rivals has dropped out of the top trending. So it might not be the first game you see now. Instead, it's a load of Squid Games copycats. Squid Games, if you aren't aware, is this is this smash hit South Korean TV show where a bunch of contestants try and win some money. ah ah it's It's basically reality. to Think The Chase, but if you lose, you die. Right? Very violent, very graphic.
00:10:09
Andrew Wilmot
sexual themes, so it's it's it's really quite a it's quite a disturbing show really. I enjoyed the first season, I haven't watched the second, and we we jumped onto one of these copy-cuts, Squid Games, and again putting aside the violent content, one of the things that really shocked me the most in terms of manipulative ways to get kids to pay robux let's say you've loaded your kid up with some robux you say here's your pocket money for the week go spend it uh sure you can spend it in robux whatever is if you die in this game it immediately gives you a big button to press to spend robux to not die to then go just go through the next round anyway and again if you're a kid who doesn't understand the value of money uh doesn't understand the value of robux because they've been deliberately
00:10:57
Andrew Wilmot
given that extra layer, and you perhaps don't have the emotional regulation or, as you were saying, the the the ability to resist in terms of willpower. You're going to be spending real money just to not lose in a game. It's it's no it's so much more than pay to have an advantage. It's literally pay to not lose.
00:11:18
Bdizzle
Correct. And this environment also deploys other really well-known elements to basically motivate engagement. they have like a leaderboard, which is known as social proof. Same thing with the usual suspects of cosmetics, X, Y, and Z. Very, very specific to the environment that you're currently in. And yeah, it's just a great example of how A small team of people somewhere in the world is incredibly motivated, incredibly well-read, trying to extract as much of your child's attention and money as possible. And unfortunately, one of the things that's so interesting about these games is that they're very linear experiences. I'm i'm pro video
Psychological Tactics and Spending Pressure
00:11:59
Bdizzle
games, and Andrew andrew can definitely attest to how pro video games actually I am. but
00:12:04
Bdizzle
They're such linear, quick experiences. They're more akin to and the short term reward. You might feel playing a slot machine rather than any type of character growth or kind of rich, deep experience of a digital world.
00:12:19
Andrew Wilmot
it's It's funny you mention slot machines here because whilst whilst we were playing, you hopped off to have a look at some other ones whilst I continued through the squid games round I was on.
00:12:30
Andrew Wilmot
And then you're like, Andrew, Andrew, I have found the worst thing. You're not going to believe this. And it was Plinko. So again, for our users who don't know what Plinko is, it is straight up just a casino game. right you It's the one where the balls go in at the top. And then depending on where the ball lands, you either win or you lose some money. Just straight up gambling.
00:12:55
Bdizzle
Yeah, just straight up gambling. And weirdly, as ah ah as a thought experiment, the way this and digital environment was making money was a reskin of all all these other environments we'd just been in. So you had that element of social proofing. So as a leaderboard, you could pay for particular perks to get ahead. it's just It's just part of like the the common furniture of the Roblox environment.
00:13:19
Andrew Wilmot
Oh yeah, every single game from, I will touch on some of the more, but some of the smaller user created ones in a bit, I'm sure, but every game had these things. It's it's not it's not that we found a handful of bad ones, it's that every single experience we came across was doing this.
00:13:36
Andrew Wilmot
And like, with with the Plinko one, they gave us some free money to get started in their own currency. So you log in, you get, 2,000 points, whatever they called it, and then you spent it. And then if you want to keep playing, keep putting balls in at the top, you have to then buy some more with Robux. Now, my son, he's east three, our youngest, he doesn't know what money is really. He certainly doesn't know what gambling is.
00:14:05
Andrew Wilmot
But if we had a card linked to Roblox, and I know that it says the minimum age is five, but you can guarantee there are children much younger than that playing these games.
00:14:16
Andrew Wilmot
If we had given that to him, he would rinse us for thousands without really knowing what he was doing. Just because you press buttons, balls come down, yay, very interesting. oh Eventually the balls stop pressing down, the balls stop going down until you press this big white flashing button telling you to buy money so you can keep the balls going. So putting aside everything else, it is geared towards making it as simple as possible to to spend money to to get you to that point of getting harder and real world cash from you, from your kids.
00:14:53
Bdizzle
Yeah, like ah ah correct, Andrea. And the the other thing that haunts me, maybe maybe even slightly more than the money aspect, is we kind of don't know what happens happens from a neurological standpoint after this period of time. So a really great example of this is that if your ah son or daughter reads a lot, it's a great predictor of academic success, a lifetime salary, these types of elements. And that's because when you're young, you have a lot of something called neuroplasticity. It's one of the reasons why kids are great at learning languages.
00:15:23
Bdizzle
But when it comes to neuroplasticity, we don't really know what happens when you push a young mind into a world of monetization for, in effect, 10 years. If they play roadblocks, hypothetically, from the age of five to 15, 14 years old, just as a hypothetical, we don't really know what happens. But what we know from previous literature on things that maybe are bad and are associated with reward networks from a young age, such as cannabis consumption,
00:15:52
Bdizzle
caffeine consumption, alcohol consumption, is that the outcomes are universally not good. And I feel like this might be just like smoking back in the 1970s, where we look back on the fact we were letting such a large portion of today's youth engage in these high, very, very fast, immediate reward and gratification environments that are heavily monetized and the the potential repercussions it has on people's mental health overarching success in the long term.
00:16:23
Andrew Wilmot
That gives me an interesting thought. if If we were to propose a psychological experiment trying to test some of this stuff on kids, would that even get past the ethics committee?
Ethical Discussion on Monetization Effects
00:16:36
Bdizzle
It depends on the format. It really does depend on the the format and what you're what you're testing for and the the scientific value.
00:16:44
Bdizzle
It can be quite a complicated complicated topic, but I'm sure that it's something that will be ah ah spelled out and through literature in the future. I'm sure there's a lot of digital anthropologists, a lot of mental health psychologists that are already on top of this as a longitudinal study. I fully expect twin studies in the future to but basically mine these types of engagements because I almost guarantee you that there is going to be real differences between people that spent four or five hours a day in these heavily monetized reward circles, reward focused environments versus that had charters more reflective back in the day.
00:17:25
Bdizzle
and and that's it's It makes me worried because our our mental health landscape is not great as it is. You don't really have a lot of signs that with the way that we engage with things like social media that that's going to get any better. And I'm really worried that um these types of digital environments are being presented at such a young age for such a long period of time. We're talking about thousands of hours potentially but by the time an individual is 10 years old. And we we we we don't really know the repercussions yet.
00:17:55
Bdizzle
But from what I've read and everything that I know, it might, it genuinely might be not great. It could be a cigarettes level event, if that makes sense Andrew.
00:18:05
Andrew Wilmot
Wow. but That's pretty horrifying to think about. So in our time on Roblox, what's the worst and most shocking thing you saw?
Exploitation and Inappropriate Content
00:18:16
Bdizzle
i think I think we mentioned this in our previous episode. I think it's it always centres around the fact that you've got a kind of large company incentivising groups of adult creators to get as much attention from young people as possible. And unfortunately a byproduct of that is you have a lot of digital environments there.
00:18:33
Bdizzle
are designed to compete for young attention through content that they shouldn't be exposed to and children are ah ah naturally explorative creatures and as a byproduct there's an inevitableit but inevitability they will click on to these environments arguably and Some of these environments are just so on the nose, inappropriate.
00:18:55
Bdizzle
so we we know the the The most absurd one I saw very, very quickly was a toilet role-playing server, is the the glory hole simulator, which i naturally is raised at age range, a minimal range.
00:19:04
Andrew Wilmot
You're joking. Wow.
00:19:11
Bdizzle
So it's that you you you're you're all good to join regardless of the age that you are. And that is a nutshell in a nutshell what Roblox's innate problem is, is that you can't have kind of a decentralized creator community which is self-moderated without producing these environments that are designed to compete for that attention in in nefarious ways and it can be very very it can be kind of more submarine like the the rivals game that we played which is less on the nose or it can be very on the nose not not implicit at all
00:19:48
Bdizzle
being the glory hole simulator or these chat rooms that yeah clearly have a sexual orientation to them. The best way I can describe Roblox to someone who's maybe between 30, 40, 50 that was there during the rise of the internet is it's the exact same as unmoderated chat rooms. It's exactly the same.
00:20:11
Andrew Wilmot
Now, i I saw two types of games which I think our listeners would be really shocked about. The first one was one called Lovesick, which again, Robloxing some five years old, right? The whole purpose of Lovesick is you had ah ah had an array of anime women to choose from and you had a table of weapons.
00:20:31
Andrew Wilmot
So syringes, axes, knives, saws, and look, it's very badly animated, obviously just somebody's personal project, but it it's basically, you know, a violence against women's simulator. But the other one which actually I would be more concerned about is depression rooms, which I started to know how to describe it. It's basically a depression themed room it's all like very immature ways of talking about sadness and depression but again it's just a ah ah chat room with activities you can do and and you know such as climbing up to the rooftop but you know we know that we've we've seen the what happens when children are consuming such
00:21:19
Andrew Wilmot
large numbers of very negative content. That was the tragic case of Molly Russell who consumed huge quantities of self-harm content on Pinterest. This is on Roblox with the added factor of it being a chat room where these kids are at best talking to each other and in this and they're not exactly going to be giving each other the best sort of support or even worse it being a ready-made community of vulnerable children in vulnerable emotional states if you are a predator you know it it would be shooting fish in a barrel it would be that that's where you would go
00:21:58
Bdizzle
Don't worry, Andrew, that minimal age rating is definitely doing its job.
00:22:02
Andrew Wilmot
Yes, I'm sure glad that Roblox has the tight age controls.
00:22:03
Bdizzle
yeah i yeah I can't believe in this. I think we'll look back on this age as it's buyback, but absolutely barbaric. And to just build on your point, this is something that digital anthropology has had pinned down since the birth of the internet. So even in early pranorexia forums, one of the things they documented is if you put a load of people in the same place with a particular problem, what tends to happen is they start policing that community and then escalating in their points of view.
00:22:31
Bdizzle
we all know how echo chambers online can kind of radicalize your points of view and that's that's dangerous when it's maybe political it's life threatening the moment it's associated with mental health problems and and just the fact these environments are predominantly very very young children that yeah the the the dangers of just linking those kind of almost undisputable points together almost speak for themselves
00:22:45
Andrew Wilmot
Yeah.
Parental Supervision and Safety Advice
00:22:59
Andrew Wilmot
So we actually have a very pertinent question that we've received on Roblox. A few people have been asking about our opinions on Roblox, so we've had a few questions. But one from Jane, who is also from Bournemouth, says, my nine-year-old daughter has asked to have Roblox so that she can play with her friends from school. Whilst we disapprove of Roblox, we don't want her to feel left out. Is there a safe way she can play Roblox?
00:23:27
Bdizzle
This is a really tough question and as far as I'm aware there's not they don't have a mechanism in place to ensure that your young child can be exposed to these types of communities and ultimately video games are a a really it very difficult to very directly regulate.
00:23:46
Bdizzle
ah ah with the type of content your son or daughter is engaging online because these sessions can last a couple of hours and I'm sure what we've got things to do, we're adults, right? and So I'm going to say something that I don't think I've ever said before and I may never say again and i and I'm almost surprised by these words coming out of my my mouth but I don't think I would recommend anyone under the age of maybe 15, 16 to be exposed to these environments because you have to be very, very you You have to have a lot of contextual knowledge in order to navigate these environments safely. And the best argument I can give is because I almost guarantee you when your son and daughter gets to 15, 16, if they haven't played it already, they won't want to play it.
00:24:31
Bdizzle
because it's not a deep, rich experience and the content that's there is just... Yeah, I'm almost surprised by myself saying that, Andrew. like would Would you agree from our experience or would you have like a lighter view?
00:24:46
Andrew Wilmot
i I guess if if you were already decided that you were going to find a safe way to do it, the only way I could think of is for it to be supervised. 100% and I don't mean supervised by in terms of oh I'm sat on my phone in the same room, I mean you are playing it with them. daughter, she's seven, her friends her friends will play Roblox. They have done for years. And so I do understand the pressure, the huge amount of pressure, to say yes to Roblox specifically. And it it looks fine. It looks kind of juvenile. The games are kind of juvenile. But just below the surface is, it's just a nightmare.
00:25:33
Bdizzle
Don't become a psychologist, become a parent, because you become a psychologist anyway. Andrew, I think that's a really, really beautiful answer. And I do think that's potentially the only solution is heavily supervised engagement and not light supervision. Oh, I know my son or daughter is engaging in X content, real time supervision of the type of environments they're going into, because unfortunately,
00:25:58
Bdizzle
for the sake of profit. They're not regulated in that way. That's a great really eloquent answer Andrew, I agree with you.
Conclusion and Next Episode Tease
00:26:06
Andrew Wilmot
And don't forget that if you've got some questions for us, or if you or your children have been impacted by the issues we've discussed today, that you can get in touch with us on our website, thedopamineslotmachine.co.uk, or find us on the Dopamine Slot Machine Discussion Corner corner Facebook group. All links can be found in our artist profile, and we would love to hear from you. Brandon, to wrap us up, what's your reading recommendation for this week?
00:26:30
Bdizzle
I've put together an article going over from the mouth of the industry itself, the ways that free games aim to get their hands on players money. You can find it on our website or a link will be in the episode description.
00:26:42
Andrew Wilmot
Thank you, Brandon. That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'd love to have you here again with us next week, where we're going to be deep diving into Minecraft, the international smash hit block building game that has some surprising benefits, yet still has pitfalls that you need to know about. This has been the Dokom Insolot Machine. Thank you and see you soon.