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Responding to THOSE Comments from Roblox CEO Dave Baszuki
170 Plays13 days ago
In a pushback against recent criticism of Roblox, CEO Dave Baszuki has given parents groundbreaking advice such as "if you're not comfortable, don't let your kids be on Roblox". Let's dive into his claims about the safety of his platform.
Andrew, a father of two and lifelong gamer, teams up with Brandon, a consumer psychologist and ex-pro video game coach, to cover video games, the way they are designed and how these design decisions impact the children that play them.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dopamine Slot Machine Podcast
00:00:07
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening. Whenever you are, or welcome to the Dopamine Slot Machine, the podcast that discusses what you need to know about the video games that your children are playing.
00:00:18
Andrew Wilmot
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 one?
Solo Hosting and Roblox CEO Comments
00:00:26
Andrew Wilmot
My name is Andrew. I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer.
00:00:29
Andrew Wilmot
It is just me tonight. Brandon's feeling pretty under the weather. And so I wanted to take the opportunity to address some comments from Roblox's CEO that came out to this week. And firstly, what a week it has been for those of us concerned about addictive and predatory design in technology.
00:00:44
Andrew Wilmot
So Monday, all day, LBC radio focused on smartphones. And frankly, the stories were harrowing. That said, it really feels like there's starting to be a shift in the cultural consciousness to understanding that far from the risks and damage of smartphones being limited to few terrible fringe cases, all children are being harmed by this great smartphone experiment.
00:01:10
Andrew Wilmot
And you know as a reminder, my entire career has been in tech. I am a techie. There was somebody who described on Monday people like me as turbocharged tech bros. And you know, I'll take that label wholeheartedly. And I'm saying that we need to be pushing back against this.
00:01:29
Andrew Wilmot
Now, of course, we're seeing some damage control now.
Safety Concerns and Cultural Shifts
00:01:31
Andrew Wilmot
And so Dave Buzuki, CEO of Roblox came up with a few really interesting comments. So an article in the BBC, the top comment from him saying that if parents are worried about Roblox, just don't let your kids play.
00:01:46
Andrew Wilmot
Right? I'll come to that in a little bit. So first, He is lying to us, right? Straight up in this article, he is lying to us. So I quote him here. In November last year, under 13s were banned from sending direct messages and also from playing in Hangout Experiences, she calls it, which features chat between players.
00:02:04
Andrew Wilmot
Look, my Roblox account is set so that as far as Roblox is concerned, I am five years old. Right before I started recording this, I joined one particular experience I've spoken about a couple of times, which is one of these Hangout Experiences, as he calls it.
00:02:18
Andrew Wilmot
called Sad Room. This game, Hangout Experience, is little more than a depression and suicide fetishisation chat room. right You know yet to a certain level after spending enough time in there, you can teleport onto the roof and I'll give you a clue what you do there.
00:02:34
Andrew Wilmot
You go to the bathroom and it's got sad messages on on the walls and a gun on the floor. It's a very childlike view of what depression and suicide is and now And I can talk to other players in that. I literally just did. And again, my account is set to be five years old.
00:02:52
Andrew Wilmot
This game, this experience has had nearly 25 million visits. Right? So here's this whole thing about under 13s being banned from sending so from sending messages or playing and hangout experiences, go try it yourself.
00:03:07
Andrew Wilmot
Go see if he's telling the truth. He's not. He is lying to you. He also goes and says, we watch for bullying. We watch for harassment. We filter all of those kinds of things. And I would say behind the scenes, the analysis goes on all the way to, if necessary, reaching out to law enforcement.
00:03:23
Andrew Wilmot
Let me introduce you listeners to a few terms.
Challenges in Content Filtering
00:03:25
Andrew Wilmot
So to take one example, kids have worked out that the word suicide often gets blocked or leads to reduced reach.
00:03:33
Andrew Wilmot
And that's including on platforms like TikTok. So they might use something like unalived or self-delete. So instead of saying, you know, you know there are days that I wish I could just kill myself, they might say, or there's days that I wish I could just self-delete.
00:03:48
Andrew Wilmot
And that sort of gets around these filters. And yes, platforms like Roblox or TikTok might then start picking up on those, but this is always going to be an arms race you're going to lose.
00:04:00
Andrew Wilmot
When have adults, parents, So parents who spend the most time with their kids out of any other adults apart from teachers, when have they ever been able to keep up with lingo?
00:04:12
Andrew Wilmot
Kids' lingo is famously adaptive, right? This sort of arms race, even with the best of intentions, and Roblox does not have the best of intentions, but even with the best of intentions, Roblox could never keep up with the evolution of terminology that children use.
00:04:33
Andrew Wilmot
I'm going to talk about bullying or harassment or or racial slurs. Look, I don't use Twitter, or the platform formerly known as Twitter, but there's there's a phrase that I've seen used a few times called a dog whistle, which is the idea that it's an innocuous looking phrase that if you are a racist, for instance, use this phrase and other racists would pick up on it. So one phrase in particular that I've become aware of is using doctors or engineers as a whole phrase to refer to refugees in a sort of tongue in cheek way to imply that, oh, you know, the mainstream media thinks that all the refugees coming over potential doctors, engineers, but actually they're criminals, that type of thing, right?
00:05:23
Andrew Wilmot
So again, this innocuous language that, innocuous seeming language that kids use, Roblox would never be able to filter down. And it's it's just fueling that arms race.
00:05:35
Andrew Wilmot
Let's talk el age
Age Rating and Inappropriate Content on Roblox
00:05:36
Andrew Wilmot
ratings as well. So the BBC said that they put to Dave, the CEO, that some Roblox game titles that the BBC discovered were recommended by the platform to an 11 year old recently, including Late Night Boys and Girls Club RP, RP stands for Role Play, Special Forces Simulator, Squid Game, and Shoot Down Planes, because why not?
00:05:59
Andrew Wilmot
When we asked whether he thought they were appropriate, he said he puts his faith in the platform's age rating systems. He said, one thing that's really important for the way we do things here is it's not just on the title of the experience, it's literally on the content of the experience as well.
00:06:15
Andrew Wilmot
He insists that when Roblox rates experience, they go through rigorous guidelines and that the company has a consistent policy on that. Okay, sure, they might have a consistent policy, but they do nothing to enforce it. I saw all these games just listed as a five-year-old, and I can tell you that, putting aside the title, the content of the games is inappropriate.
00:06:34
Andrew Wilmot
Roblox financially incentivizes developers to sidestep these very same consistent policies and inverted commas that he is on about. Right? Right. the the The top of the article him just saying, just don't let your kids play Roblox. And it took me a while to properly get to grips why, as a parent, this so infuriated me.
00:06:59
Andrew Wilmot
He says that if you're worried about Roblox, just don't let your kids play it. Well, thank you, Dave. I hadn't thought about that. That really helps the parent who's been lulled into a false sense of security because Roblox looks innocuous, or the kid who's been shown sexual content on your platform around a friend's house. And it really helps the families who are under constant pressure because all of my friends play Roblox, leaving their kids isolated and ostracized.
00:07:24
Andrew Wilmot
David Bazooki, your platform doesn't exist in a bubble. it it It both exists within society and yet is this sort of weird parallel hidden society in of itself.
Societal Impacts of Exploitative Platforms
00:07:35
Andrew Wilmot
When your platform is harming my daughter's peers, it is indirectly harming my daughter. What do you think the long-term societal consequences will be when we have a generation raised with their primary space, the primary third space, so that being a space that isn't school or home, being an aggressively monetised, predatorily designed online platform that's stuffed to the brim with sexual content and literal gambling?
00:08:02
Andrew Wilmot
What does society look like 20 years from now when these children are adults having children themselves? We already know that parents are spending less time talking to their children because of their own smartphone addictions.
00:08:14
Andrew Wilmot
And we know that this is having a developmental impact that we are now seeing in schools. Go speak to some early years teachers about the proportion of children coming in with massively underdeveloped language skills.
00:08:32
Andrew Wilmot
Go do it. It is harrowing. This, parents are letting Roblox and other platforms mold their children at a time when the children have so much neuroplasticity, the sponges.
00:08:46
Andrew Wilmot
And Roblox both know that this is happening and how to make as much money out of it as possible. This impacts everything from productivity. we we talk about productivity crisis in this country, right?
00:09:00
Andrew Wilmot
It's set to get worse. You look at the the so hyper short-term gratification and feedback and reward loops that Roblox incentivizes its developers to build in.
00:09:15
Andrew Wilmot
we We look at how it approaches crime and impulse control. to social attitudes, right? You know, I think back to when Brandon and i spent a few hours on roadblocks going through games, playing these games together.
00:09:30
Andrew Wilmot
Think about what we saw in, it was a game queuing up to go get a low taper fade, right? And again, my account's set to be five years old, just unnoticed.
00:09:41
Andrew Wilmot
and endless stream of racist, sexist and sexualized content. I think about, there's one game I think was called Lovesick, which was little more than a table with a set of tools and a set of anime women to use them on.
00:09:59
Andrew Wilmot
What do we think the impact of that being a digital third space is going to have on the children growing up, potentially spending four, five, six hours a day on these platforms?
00:10:10
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I've seen a few times in debates about children's use of smart devices that we couldn't do anything about it in case we hurt their digital literacy. Now, I'm not an educator. I'm not a teacher, but I have volunteered in tech outreach in the past.
00:10:25
Andrew Wilmot
I've got a bachelor's and a master's in computer science. I like to think that I've got some idea of how to teach this and how to reach out to children in digital literacy.
Misunderstood Digital Literacy
00:10:39
Andrew Wilmot
Let me tell I've worked with some of the brightest developers you could ever hope to meet as well. And let me tell you, this argument is nonsense. It is the language of big tech public relations.
00:10:50
Andrew Wilmot
It is letting Facebook, Snapchat, Roblox set the terms of debate. It's like saying that we should let our children drink 12 pints of beer a night with their mates because some of those beers have electrolytes and their socialization is good.
00:11:03
Andrew Wilmot
It beggars belief. It really does. so There's a quote by Edske Dijkstra, mathematician and a programming pioneer that I think about a lot with this. He said that it is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to basic as potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
00:11:25
Andrew Wilmot
Now, without getting into whether he was specifically right about BASIC as a programming language, his whole point was BASIC allows you to skip too much past the principles of programming. So you you sort of, shortcuts, if you will.
00:11:39
Andrew Wilmot
I think about this a lot when I see the digital literacy argument. Now, my technical literacy, the the root of my entire career really started when I was trying to install games that I had illegally downloaded, that I pirated off the internet.
00:11:53
Andrew Wilmot
And to do that, I would have to edit drivers, edit configuration, really get into the nitty gritty, the guts of my computer. And then when I, in FTP, broke my computer doing this, I then built on that technical literacy by fixing it.
00:12:09
Andrew Wilmot
was on YouTube consuming algorithmically driven content or Fortnite playing the same game on repeat because of the short form dopamine feedback loop, or Roblox does not equate to digital literacy. It just doesn't.
00:12:29
Andrew Wilmot
Smartphones, tablets, games, consoles, they are all so streamlined in their user interface that you can become... really competent at using them for the specific purpose without ever building any actual digital literacy, without ever understanding how they work.
00:12:45
Andrew Wilmot
My three-year-old son, and we we don't we don't give him a phone, but he he could navigate to Thomas the Tank videos on YouTube if I gave my phone. but Do you think this is a good thing?
00:12:57
Andrew Wilmot
Is this a foundation to build digital literacy on? Do we think that my three-year-old son being able to find YouTube on a phone is somehow going to help him become a developer? No. There's a member of the smartphone-free childhood group I'm in, who has asked to remain nameless when i asked if I could use her comment here, who who had the most fantastic to comment on it, saying it better than I could.
00:13:19
Andrew Wilmot
They said that And I quote, I hate the argument that they need to learn how to use smartphones. Trust me, kids will pick that up in about five minutes when they finally get one What I notice about young people that come to work for me is that they are terrible at using Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
00:13:35
Andrew Wilmot
They don't necessarily know how to type properly. And this is young adults that have been through university and law school. Let's get kids on proper computers in school, not tablets, and teach them how to use those applications, how to code, how to touch type on a keyboard, how to research things properly and work out what sources to trust, how to use AI features, but fact check and edit the output as well as internet safety.
00:13:56
Andrew Wilmot
And i couldn't agree more with that. I remember in school when we had IT, feeling like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint was just such a drag to get through the lessons.
00:14:10
Andrew Wilmot
Not because they were difficult, but because it was so basic and we had all effectively taught ourselves.
00:14:18
Andrew Wilmot
What's changed since then? I can tell you what's changed. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets. They mention touch typing. And again, touch typing is a really useful lifelong skill.
00:14:30
Andrew Wilmot
I covered touch typing in school. My daughter has currently been learning about touch typing and improving typing skill in school. But again, once you shift from a physical keyboard to one that you just use your thumbs for, you're not building that typing experience.
00:14:50
Andrew Wilmot
So when when we see people who frankly, don't have any digital literacy themselves, using this argument about how we have to continue letting our children use smart devices for the sake of their digital literacy.
00:15:07
Andrew Wilmot
I have to ask them, what digital literacy? Digital literacy is going down. Being able to follow TikTok trends is not digital literacy. We are crippling the skill set of our children through this.
00:15:25
Andrew Wilmot
I want to leave you all with a question.
Call to Action and Listener Engagement
00:15:26
Andrew Wilmot
I know we normally take a question and give our thoughts on this, but to be honest, without without Brandon here, who's who's the real brains, is without his psychology experience, I want to push question back to yourselves here.
00:15:40
Andrew Wilmot
David Buzuki finished his article with the BBC saying that in his view, Roblox is the future of communication. With the user growth that they are seeing,
00:15:53
Andrew Wilmot
I think he's right. I think he's right in all the wrong ways. That is unless we start to pushing back. We need to push back on the tech companies that are exploiting our children and actively causing harm.
00:16:05
Andrew Wilmot
need to be pushing back on politicians who don't realise that this is a public health crisis right now. Not potentially in a few years, not something we need to look at. Children are suffering en masse and And unfortunately, in far too many tragic cases, dying now.
00:16:27
Andrew Wilmot
And maybe, and I appreciate this is hard. I find this very hard. I find it so awkward talking to other parents on this. But yeah, maybe we do need to push back on other parents. when when when When my daughter's trying to talk to her friend at the school gates, but she's got headphones and a tablet on, like again, outside the school gates, maybe we should speak up.
00:16:49
Andrew Wilmot
You know, if it was a seven-year-old chucking a bottle of vodka outside the school gates, somebody would say something. So what's something that you can do, or even better, have done to push back on this ongoing exploitation of our children?
00:17:03
Andrew Wilmot
Have you got in touch with your local councillors to ask them about smartphone-free childhood? Have you written to your MP? The the bill that went through Parliament recently, look, I don't want to give my thoughts on what happened with that bill in the end,
00:17:19
Andrew Wilmot
but it was it was a good opportunity to raise this issue with your MP. If you can speak to other parents, if you are brave enough, then yeah, that that's a fantastic thing to do as well.
00:17:34
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, thedopamineslockmachine.co.uk, and we would love to hear from you.
00:17:48
Andrew Wilmot
But that is all we've got time for today. Thank you so much for joining us and would love to have you here with us again in next week's episode. Now, that's what is the one that we promised last time, but again, with Brandon away, I really wanted to get his insight onto this. So we'll be covering what gaming could look like in five years if the current trends continue.
00:18:07
Andrew Wilmot
This has been the Dopamine Slot Machine. Thank you and see you soon.