TY - GEN
T1 - "the System is Made to Inherently Push Child Gambling in my Opinion"
T2 - 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2025
AU - Kou, Yubo
AU - Hernandez, Rie Helene
AU - Gui, Xinning
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
PY - 2025/4/26
Y1 - 2025/4/26
N2 - User-generated game (UGG) platforms like Roblox are enormously popular among children but are increasingly scrutinized for safety risks, such as gambling-like gameplay features and disturbing game themes such as slavery and Nazi roleplay. Researchers have started to examine harms in UGGs, but little attention has been paid to how game creators themselves consider child safety in their game making practices. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with 20 Roblox creators with varied degrees of success. We found that our interviewees observed several types of risks to child players' safety in their games, such as child-specific deceptive design, gambling-like gameplay, sexual abuse, and scamming. They further reasoned about major causes of these safety risks, such as Roblox's profit-driven monetization model, and leaving the burden of moderation to individual game creators. We discuss implications for platform governance on UGG platforms as well as policymaking.
AB - User-generated game (UGG) platforms like Roblox are enormously popular among children but are increasingly scrutinized for safety risks, such as gambling-like gameplay features and disturbing game themes such as slavery and Nazi roleplay. Researchers have started to examine harms in UGGs, but little attention has been paid to how game creators themselves consider child safety in their game making practices. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with 20 Roblox creators with varied degrees of success. We found that our interviewees observed several types of risks to child players' safety in their games, such as child-specific deceptive design, gambling-like gameplay, sexual abuse, and scamming. They further reasoned about major causes of these safety risks, such as Roblox's profit-driven monetization model, and leaving the burden of moderation to individual game creators. We discuss implications for platform governance on UGG platforms as well as policymaking.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105005757477
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=105005757477&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3706598.3713170
DO - 10.1145/3706598.3713170
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105005757477
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2025 - Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 26 April 2025 through 1 May 2025
ER -