The first time I ventured onto the online video game platform Roblox, it was to play Dress to Impressa doll game that has garnered a lot of love from the world’s most influential web personalities, and which scooped three awards of excellence at the Roblox Innovation Awards on December 8. Like the 283,000 other people playing at the same time as me, I’m about to relive those lost hours of my childhood when I tirelessly dressed, undressed and redressed my Barbies.
The idea is simple: I have 325 seconds to dress a slender avatar in accordance with a given theme. Then the fashion show will take place, all players will be asked to evaluate the digital outfits of the other players.
I notice that I can customize the clothes I put on in the colors of Bratthe pop album of the hour, this work in which the British musician Charli XCX praises the merits of party and cocaine. While this special collaboration is bold, it also strikes me as dissonant. After all, 42% of Roblox users are under the age of 13.
IMAGE TAKEN FROM ROBLOX
Clothes can be personalized with the colors of Bratthe pop album of the hour.
It is the omnipresence of children on the site that has prevented me from visiting it until now. At 34, I do not feel comfortable venturing into this space.
Roblox should, however, enjoy greater media coverage, in the sense that the platform structures the daily lives of a growing number of young people and now has nearly 80 million active users each day.
People gather there to have fun, but also to socialize. A true digital third place, Roblox has even become a space conducive to political gatherings. Last October, for example, young Malaysians organized digital demonstrations there to express their support for Palestine.
The sociology of play
In his essay Games and men (1958), the French sociologist Roger Caillois underlines the central place that games occupy in our cultures. According to him, we can better understand the main characteristics of a given society by studying its play phenomena. In this sense, playing Dress to Impress allows me to highlight some of the most sinister features of our time. Because Roblox also presents itself as a digital environment where all sorts of harmful phenomena take shape: bullying, sexual harassment, exploitation of child labor, addiction to games, and so on. The company is also regularly the subject of legal proceedings, such as this recent class action brought by parents who accuse the technology giant of having encouraged their children to play games of chance.
The video games that abound on the platform are not developed directly by Roblox, but by its users, mostly children. It is also said that Gigi, the creator of Dress to Impresswould be barely 16 years old! Little or unpaid, work is reframed as an opportunity to give free rein to one’s creativity, a way to have fun, or even a lifeline for underprivileged children for whom a few dollars can change everything.
This rhetoric helps to confuse the issue and allows the company to circumvent the strict regulations that normally govern all forms of work, particularly child labor.
In addition, the profits made by the video games on the platform are far from being distributed fairly. The company always reserves the lion’s share, in addition to paying its workers in Robux, a virtual currency that is difficult, if not unprofitable, to convert into cash.
Microtransactions everywhere
Like many other free games, Dress to Impress is full of microtransactions that give users advantages over other players. For example, you can spend hundreds of Robux to get a “rich girl bag.” And since styling your avatar to make it stand out from the crowd is part of the competitive spirit, the temptation to spend is great.
When I finally decide to pay for access to VIP clothing, I forget that I’m throwing my money out the window. It feels more like I’m just playing with dolls.
That’s because, in addition to making work seem like play, thereby accustoming a generation of children to normalizing abuse and tolerating inequity, Roblox gamifies the activity of consumption and ends up camouflaging it.
The mechanisms of Dress to Impress thus distort the true meaning of some of our human activities, like social networks. Over the years, they have led us to gamify ever more facets of our existence, starting with our friendships.
If the Roblox experience allows us to better understand our times, it is perhaps because it exemplifies a worrying societal trend, that of transforming into a game what has nothing to do with leisure, such as work. We must ask ourselves who benefits from this conversion. Besides, I know that there is always only one real winner in Dress to Impressand it is never found among the players: it is Roblox.