The first time I ventured onto the online video game platform Roblox, it was to play Dress to Impressa doll game that has the world’s most influential web personalities raving about it. 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, a fateful moment where all players will be asked to evaluate the digital outfits of the other players on a scale of 1 to 5.
So I awkwardly wander around a kind of digital department store, looking for clothes that will make me shine. Amused, I notice that I can customize the dress I’m wearing to 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, according to the platform.
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 where I act as an intruder.
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.
On the online gaming platform, it is above all work that is treated as a game. Little or no pay, it is reframed as an opportunity to give free rein to one’s creativity, a way to have fun.
This obfuscation allows the company to circumvent the strict regulations that normally govern all forms of work, particularly child labor.
It must be said that 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!
It should also be noted that 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. You can spend hundreds of Robux to get a “rich girl bag” or a personalized makeup. And since styling your avatar to make it stand out from the crowd contributes to 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 also gamifies the act of consuming and ultimately 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 and our relationships of influence.
Caught up in the popular dress-up game, I remain lucid. I know that there is always only one real winner in Dress to Impressand it is never found among the players: it is Roblox.