“It’s such a vital space because we see ourselves as second people in the metaverse,” says gamer Alex Farrugia in Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed. “This is our second home. This is where we go to escape the horrible reality that is [real life], especially during COVID. The fact that that’s at risk is a big concern.”
Alex is one of a three young gamers in Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed fighting for this online sanctuary. The documentary directed by Ann Shin (A.rtifical I.mmortality) goes inside the world of Roblox, a hugely popular online gaming platform. Alex, along with gamers Janae and Katie, shares how Roblox offers a second world for where people can find communities online.
However, Roblox, which resembles a world constructed with LEGO-like blocks and offers many games within the game, also serves as a breeding ground for another kind of play: online predators. The film unpacks a multiverse that was designed for kids, yet gets exploited by adults with bad intentions. That’s dangerous territory when Roblox attracts a reported 85 million users daily with approximately 40 percent of them being 13 years old or younger. The platform itself serves as a breeding ground for child labour, although savvy gamers like Alex can learn how to turn a profit.
Shin, speaking with POV and Alex over Zoom, says that she and producer Erica Leendertse took an interest in the story when lawsuits against Roblox made the news. The director says that Leendertse’s kids were on the platform, while her niece and nephew were as well. “We tried to fool around on the platform ourselves, but we found ourselves in a sex den—like an S&M sex den experience—within three minutes of logging into the game,” says Shin. “We thought, ‘Wow, this is really disturbing. Something needs to be done about this.’”
The director says that further digging led her to TanookiAlex, Farrugia’s avatar in the Roblox world. Shin adds that the Toronto-based gamer’s activism and efforts to document and out online predators offered an inspiring hook. Dangerous Games gives credit to gamers like Alex, especially young women gamers, who join forces to take back the virtual space and make it safe again.
“They’re the real experts, and they’re the true underdogs in our society,” adds Shin. “And I love to tell the underdog story and to get it out there.”
As Alex, Janae, and Katie work together online and IRL to ferret out bad actors, the film illustrates how the game world offers an outlet for introverts, neurodiverse people, or anyone who has trouble fitting in with mainstream society. “Gaming has amazing communities,” says Alex. “There are some amazing places online. There’s LGBTQ+ forums. Janae started Black Minecraft. There’s places where people who might feel [like an] outcast can fit in, and there’s friends and so much more online, but these bad actors and predators really ruin it.”
Dangerous Games weaves through the dense layers of games and rooms—fairly difficult stuff to navigate for a luddite—to show how pervasively these bad actors co-opt seemingly safe spaces. The doc captures Nazi meetings along with misogynistic, homophobic, and racist rhetoric, while Janae shares how quickly Black folks die in the gaming world compared to white avatars. Meanwhile, sex acts happen in open spaces with avatars approaching players and rubbing themselves on them, like simulated rape.
The doc zeroes in on the case of a user who goes under the avatar DoctorRofatnik. Dangerous Games tells how “Doc,” as users call him, enjoyed a heightened status in the Roblox world. But his success, massive following, and influence speak to the dangers in which Roblox remains a “wild west” of the gaming world. Alex’s investigation into Doc uncovers all sorts of vitriolic and predatory language. However, the film notes that many of the conversations between adult users like Doc and underage players spill out into social networks like Discord. This makes policing the bad actors incredibly difficult, as Roblox, Discord, et al simply bass the accountability buck on to other platforms.
The case in Dangerous Games takes a jaw-dropper of a twist, however, when the young sleuths learn Doc’s real name, Arnold Castillo, and discover that his grooming efforts with young women escalated to the point where he hired an Uber to drive a 15-year-old girl from Indiana to New Jersey.
“It was a dovetailing of unfolding true crime with the activist work that Alex and Janae had been doing,” says Shin. “That happened to serendipitously time together. Part of what helped that timing come together was our research into the bad actors on the platform and who Alex and Janae were investigating, and also finding out about Katie [who was targeted by Doc] and how she was starting to publicize Arnold Castillo’s activities online. The research helped us to find a story that would most likely come to fruition in terms of a conviction and charge.”
Castillo doesn’t appear in the documentary, but his presence looms large as an avatar, but also through the harm he causes. The film tells how Roblox ultimately locked him out—not for his predatory behaviour, but for violating copyright with his use of Sonic the Hedgehog—but that he kept finding ways back into the platform.
“For me personally, I would’ve wanted to ask, when did he start interacting with people online like this?” Shin says. “How many people did you interact with this? Why did you think that this was okay, that this was not harming people?” Shin says she also would have liked to ask him about the impunity with which he groomed people and how the anonymity of the platform facilitated his behaviour.
Alex adds that while she and Castillo knew of each other prior to the documentary’s release, news of Dangerous Games has escalated hostilities towards her for speaking out. “We’ve been doxed,” she says, referring to the practice where bad actors target individuals online by posting personal information, such as addresses and phone numbers. “It really affected my mental health when this film was going on. There were actually multiple people who contacted Fathom [Shin’s production company] directly to say that they didn’t want this film being made because it would expose who they were as people, which was predators. But obviously there was some backlash to this. But the positive response way outweighs the negative backlash. It’s knowing that I’m helping real people through this documentary and that it’s real work that motivates me to keep going.”
While Dangerous Games salutes the young women who fight to keep the gaming space safe for users, the film illustrates how law enforcement and legislators simply can’t keep up with ways to police online predatory behaviour in spaces they don’t understand. The film shows how that responsibility largely falls to young users and their parents. But the film makes a case that more education is key so that parents and users know the risks associated with each platform.
“Roblox has already made great progress with parental controls, but I think parents need to know what they’re getting into,” says Alex. “There should literally be an article on Roblox that’s like, ‘What is Roblox?’ They never explain that Roblox is a game with games on it, and a lot of parents don’t even know that basic facts. There needs to be basic internet safety and gaming education in schools and accessible places. It’s about making internet learning accessible, and I think our doc truly does that here.”
Shin adds that the laws that aim to deal with gaming face concerns of censorship, as gamers do use aspects of the game for freedom of expression. But policing hate speech and virtual Nazi meetings shouldn’t be a huge roadblock for efforts to protect minors. “The online Harm Safety Act in Canada and the Kids Online Safety Act in America were tabled in the House and haven’t passed in the Senate because of issues around censorship and how censorship could become politically motivated in association with these child safety acts,” explains Shin. The director notes that the European Union’s Digital Market Act offers some protections for consumers, but that laws remain slow to protect more than users’ dollars.
“These platforms are global, and so they’re not beholden to any one government, but governments can have an impact on these platforms,” Shin says regarding the E.U.’s efforts. “If Canada comes forward with a strong online harm safety act, or if the Kid’s Online Safety Act in the U.S. comes out, it’ll force platforms to apply those regulatory features into their platforms for the globe.”
“I hope that the message that we get from this story is that while we can’t keep kids away from the digital playground, we can make it safer and bring more awareness,” agrees Alex. “I tried to set an example here by being that young person. I want it to be the change, and I hope it inspires other people to be that change when it comes to their favourite online spaces too.”
Dangerous Games underscores the reality that actions in the virtual space have repercussions in life offline. It’s a principle that Shin recently considered in the virtual reality project My Enemy, My Brother, which let users experience the crucial decisions made in her short and feature of the same name. “For people who spend most of their waking hours online, their online avatars and their online identities really are how they see themselves,” observes Shin. “With My Enemy, My Brother, I was exploring how ethical quandaries in the gaming space can help you face those same moral dilemmas that you would face in the real world and perhaps experience some of the repercussions that you might if you made certain decisions in the real world.”
Shin says that project emerged when VR enjoyed a new status as the “empathy machine,” as interactive experiences could let people discover and encounter new perspectives. She and Alex see the metaverse and the gaming space in a similar fashion: online behaviour has real world implications.
“We think of these platforms as gaming platforms—what kids or young people do in their spare time, but it’s increasingly part of our lives,” says Shin. “The illegal activities that are happening on there now are a canary in the coal mine. It’s a signal for us to get our lawmakers to catch up because we’re all going to be part of these platforms.”
