How 'Roblox' Became a Playground for Virtual Fascists

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Cecilia D'Anastasio
@cecianasta
Redpilled on Roblox. Far-right players ran a popular ancient Rome role-play that sources say turned fascism into a game and gamified access to fascists. My deep dive questioning the scale of radicalization over games while showing what it might look like:

How 'Roblox' Became a Playground for Virtual Fascists
Thousands of players flocked to a digital world filled with draconian rules, slavery, and anti-Semitism—and tested how far “just a game” can go.
wired.com
6:56 AM · Jun 10, 2021

https://www.wired.com/story/roblox-online-games-irl-fascism-roman-empire/


Ferguson, a middle schooler in Ontario, Canada, had been tapping out the same four-letter sequence on his keyboard for hours.

W, A, S, D.

W, A, S, D.

He was steering his digital avatar, a Lego-man-like military grunt, in laps around a futuristic airfield. Although his fingers ached, he would gladly have gone on for hours more. Every keystroke brought the 11-year-old closer to his goal: scaling the ranks of a group in the video game Roblox.

The group had rules. Strict rules. Players dressed as pilots and marines went around barking out orders in little speech bubbles. When Ferguson wasn’t running laps, he was doing drills or scaling walls—boot camp stuff. The only three words he could say during training were “YES,” “NO,” and “SIR.” And “SIR” generally applied to one person, Malcolm, the domineering adolescent who ruled the group. “His thing was the winky face,” Ferguson says. “He was charming. He was funny. He always had a response; it was instant. He was a dick.”

At the time, in 2009, Roblox was just over two years old, but several million people—most of them kids and teens—were already playing it. The game isn’t really a game; it is a hub of interconnected virtual worlds, more like a sprawling mall video arcade than a stand-alone Street Fighter II machine. Roblox gives players a simple set of tools to create any environment they want, from Naruto’s anime village to a high school for mermaids to Somewhere, Wales. Players have built games about beekeeping, managing a theme park, flipping pizzas, shoveling snow, using a public bathroom, and flinging themselves down staircases. They have also built spaces to hang out and role-play different characters and scenarios—rushing a sorority, policing Washington, DC.

*snip*

[CrackityJones75]

1. My kid plays Roblox.

He has fun. He will not grow up to be a fascist.

I love the video game blame game.

[Nevilledog]

2. Did you read the article?

[CrackityJones75]

3. Yep.

Just getting it in before the convo starts.

[Nevilledog]

4. It's not a game bashing article.

[CrackityJones75]

5. I know.