[OPINION] ‘Violence’ in video games is not the problem, their social features are

Illustration by Raphael Reyes The real danger isn’t violent gameplay but the monetized, unguarded social environment built into or around these platforms catering to kids Authorities and lawmakers are quick to blame video games like Roblox for a recent school shooting, despite a lack of forensic evidence linking them to the incident. Research indicates no strong correlation between violent video games and actual criminal behavior, suggesting that radicalization occurs in social environments associated with gaming rather than the games themselves. Experts advocate for addressing the unmoderated social layers of gaming platforms, emphasizing the need for better safety measures and parental controls to protect children from potential harm. This is AI-generated. Read the article for full context. Report any errors. Within days after the tragic shooting in Zamboanga City, and even before investigators had finished piecing together how a child ended up armed and inside the school, authorities and at least one lawmaker have already set their eyes on a culprit: video games like Roblox and supposedly “violent” first-person shooters. All this comes before an actual forensic analysis on the device used by the shooter. Interior and Local Government Secretary Jonvic Remulla did qualify that “Roblox in itself is not a dangerous game,” but pointed to “the chat group that is inside it” where the malign influences may happen. He then asked Congress to help “control and curb the use of first-person shooter games that influence these young minds.” Senator Robin Padilla, who leads the Senate Committee on Public Information and Mass Media, vowed a reckoning for video games and streaming platforms, specifically Netflix, for their supposed negative influence on children. The gaming community has been quick to react to these issues online, and criticized these as “knee-jerk” reactions from politicians. Many of us have been playing these video games, after all, and watching the same shows (this author included), and have not ended up in shooting sprees. But I also wouldn’t be fully dismissive of Roblox and these gaming platforms’ potential role in these. Let me explain. What research shows First, people have been complaining about violence in video games for decades, but research has refused to cooperate with this narrative for just as long. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute have found no relationship between aggressive behavior in teenagers and the amount of time spent playing violent video games. The American Psychological Association said that studies link violent video games with aggressive behavior, but there’s still not enough scientific evidence linking it to actual criminal violence. We can also look into our neighbors where a lot of these “violent” video games are made — Japan and South Korea. These countries’ citizens consume video games a lot more than others. Why then are they consistently regarded as among the safest societies in the world? But experts looking into recent incidents of minors groomed into violence raise a point that a lot of people tend to miss: the radicalization is happening in gaming-adjacent social environments where kids are talking to virtual strangers with no adult supervision. Why is this important? A lot of the conversations shaping government action on this problem seem to confuse radicalization as a product of children’s exposure to violent media. The premise is that the simulation of violence in video games and media is somehow pushing these kids into shooting sprees. The public is mostly reacting to these insinuations as well. But if we listen closely to the experts who have looked into these recent shooting incidents, especially in the case of the Tacloban shooting, the radicalization has not been through the games themselves, but the social environment either built into the games, or adjacent to them. Through messaging platforms, violent online extremist networks, including ones highlighted in recent hearings, have been targeting and pressuring children and teenagers into committing harm towards themselves and others. While the initial touchpoint is video games like Roblox, they’re funneled into closed spaces such as private messaging groups and Discord channels. Now does this absolve games like Roblox from scrutiny? Not really. Roblox, after all, is not just a video game but a social platform, much like Facebook and X. In Roblox, users create simulated experiences (including grotesque ones) and the platform hosts them, monetizes them, and lets people walk in almost completely unguarded. That’s a business model, and it’s a choice. It’s a choice to build a business with a largely young user base, have weak age verification, create spaces where adults and children are not differentiated, and allow them to be easily funneled into closed messaging channels. These choices are investigable and require scrutiny. When you build businesses that target children, damn right you’re expected to protect them at all costs. When the problem is conflated with the hard-to-substantiate claims against violence gameplay, platforms like Roblox get a sigh of relief because we’re not arguing over the real problem: the online social environment they made for children and are failing to moderate. Should we be allowing kids in these spaces where they could be exposed to predators? This reframing is important because the problem, again, is not the games, but the ecosystems bolted onto them. If we listen to the actual experts talking instead of the grandstanding politicians riding on the wave, you’d realize that they actually are pointing towards real solutions: addressing an unguarded social layer, with age-gating, default privacy settings, friction against off-platform migration, real moderations, and actual parental tooling. These things actually touch the harms demonstrated so far. We don’t know yet the full pathway that led to the shootings in both Tacloban and Zamboanga. But if we truly want to prevent these tragedies from happening again, we should be keenly aware of which questions produce answers, and which questions produce scapegoats. – Rappler.com How does this make you feel? Loading