Final Rating: 3/5
As a 90s kid, I remember the Gameboy and Playstation coming out as video games grew. I remember playing Neopets on my grandfather’s work computer using dial-up internet. I remember AOL Instant Messenger and how many people (known and unknown) it allowed me to connect with before I was even a teenager.
All of those things have grown and been replaced by Discord, Minecraft, Roblox, the Nintendo Switch, and many other gaming and social media platforms that are intrinsically connected to the internet and the world. Daily conversations with friends in foreign countries are commonplace. Playing Fortnite and League and Legends with your buddies all over the globe is happening every day and everywhere.
Despite these modern social “havens” having roots that are multiple decades old, most of them still don’t have safeguards. Most of them don’t have protections against predators and grooming. Many of them don’t care. That’s what Ann Shin’s Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed puts a lot of its effort into highlighting. These places are unregulated and the companies at the helm are uninterested in most things that aren’t putting money into pockets.
Dangerous Games focuses on three resilient women: Alex, Janae, and Katie. Despite being relatively young, they work together to tug at the fabric of Roblox and Minecraft and the seediness infiltrating these games.
From the start of the documentary, Alex shares how she is self-policing the virtual spaces she exists in. She’s a content creator with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. She posts videos with allegations about people in Roblox who have treated her poorly or treated others poorly. She tells the camera that screenshots aren’t sufficient evidence. They can be doctored and edited quite easily. Instead, she focuses on screen captured videos that are much harder to fake. This is knowledge that is not comfortable to hear coming from such a young person.
Meanwhile, Janae has been a streamer for a long time and despite initial reservations about the look and feel of Minecraft, has put thousands of hours into it. Unfortunately, her experience in the game has been plagued with unpleasantness. Her character is an avatar of herself and, as a black woman, she always felt like she stuck out within the world of the game. This was confirmed as other players would conspire to kill her character every time she respawned. As she says at one point, it doesn’t take long to connect the persistent violence against her avatar within the game to potential violence against her in real life.
And finally, Katie is a big Sonic the Hedgehog fan who found a huge Roblox game based on the Sega character and created by a user named Doctor Rofatnik (a play on the name of a villain in the Sonic games, Doctor Robotnik). She eventually joined one of Rofatnik’s Discord servers and the two began to message directly with each other. Katie was twelve or thirteen around this time, while Rofatnik (real name Arnold Castillo) was significantly older. Their conversations became unsavory as Castillo’s messages took on a suggestive and sexual nature. Even his actions within Roblox became more sexual.
This is a triggering documentary. And it should be. With the exception of those who have been on the wrong side of these experiences, people need to be shown and told some of the painful details in these stories. The language needs to be direct and confrontational. And the support for the victims needs to be just as committed and passionate.
Watching Alex, Janae, and Katie meet in person to try to figure out the right way forward with how to handle the actions of Arnold Castillo and the greater vulnerabilities in games like Roblox and Minecraft, it’s strikingly childish. Years of real world events show just how herculean their efforts will need to be to accomplish this task. Giant tech companies are beholden to shareholders and money. They’re concerned with microtransactions and drawing more users into the immersive worlds they create. Despite the performative statements at the end of the documentary from Roblox and Discord, it’s abundantly clear that the infrastructure does not exist to handle the problems in these virtual worlds. That three young people are more invested in this conversation than the vast majority of adults is frightening.
Perhaps the most relevant interview in Dangerous Games comes from the Vice President of Roblox Civility & Partnerships, Tami Bhaumik. Many users of Roblox communicate over Discord. Roblox, however, claims that they are not affiliated with Discord. With a smile on her face, Bhaumik says, “Smack talking and bad words tend to happen on Discord, and then when parents are overhearing it, they’re thinking it’s on Roblox, and then we get blamed.” And that’s emblematic of companies and people in positions of power in many arenas throughout the world. Shifting the blame is second nature in these situations.
Other comments throughout the film compare this situation to how tobacco and alcohol industries used to advertise to children. In the same way that some people believe gun companies should be responsible for what customers do with the guns they purchase, Alex, Janae, and Katie want Roblox and their colleagues to be responsible for the actions that take place on their servers. Movies have MPAA ratings. Music and podcasts have explicit tags on them. Ann Shin hammers home how this is not a new fight, just a new battleground.
The uphill battle these women face is frustrating on many levels. Alex and Janae meet with a lawyer overseeing a legal case against Roblox made on behalf of the users demanding better representation of how safe users are while playing the game. Footage throughout the documentary shows visceral racism, misogyny, and the grooming of underage children. They also meet with Congresswoman Lori Trahnan about making laws to hold the companies accountable and creating positions for people to actually monitor what’s happening. Complaints about what’s going on are often being sent to answering machines or given to A.I. to handle.
There’s a bittersweet feeling watching the three of them champion this movement. Alex says early on in the film, “If we don’t band together, no one else will.” The corporations are not doing what needs to be done, forcing the kids playing these games to handle much of it themselves. And as depressing as that fact is, it’s juxtaposed by what Janae says toward the end of the film, “I’m optimistic for the future because of the fact that you’re having so many younger people with a voice.”
The women in front of the camera share personal details about their own experiences as the film works to insert these important topics into the global conversation. Without a doubt, these are issues that are going to persist, and some solution needs to be found. As a documentary, Ann Shin’s Dangerous Games does a good job of laying the groundwork for what’s going on and showing clear examples of where these companies are failing their users. The attempts to incorporate verité footage alongside the talking heads doesn’t work every time. While the people on screen are not performers, sometimes they come across wooden in the vein of a public speaker who isn’t quite sure what to do with their hands.
Nowadays, I use Discord. I’ve met a handful of people in real life that I first met online. My significant other is someone I first met online. And I think that’s an experience a lot of people can connect with. But it’s certainly true that much of the policing in these spaces is being done by the users. At one point in the documentary, someone presents a GoogleDoc showing what transpired between Arnold Castillo and Katie. I’ve seen GoogleDocs in that vein before in communities tangential to my own. It’s impressive that people put in that effort and do the work to help so many others, but it’s unfortunate that there’s nothing in place to handle it when the number and size of virtual worlds continues to grow exponentially.
Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed may not have much new information for people who have been in the Metaverse or played Minecraft, which is a steadily growing number. Even if it doesn’t, it still shares a personal, moving story and ends on a hopeful note for the future.
Thank you to Touchwood PR for the screener.
