Playing Along

Lately, my youngest daughter and I have been playing a fair amount of Roblox. Our go-to game is Animal Hospital, which is both exactly what it sounds like and also pretty bizarre.

Basically, you run around checking various animals into the clinic and treating them with sundry medicines. But some patients are actually creepy mutants. Exposure to these and other strange critters causes you to lose sanity. Yes, there’s actually a sanity meter. Hilariously, one way to restore it is by drinking coffee, which seems legit.

One reason I wanted to check it out was because my daughter kept talking about anomalies and saying things like, “Oh no, I’m losing sanity.” Right off the bat, I was like, OK, this is some kind of Play-Skool Lovecraft situation. Of course this is what my kid gravitates toward. The eldritch apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

I’m a Gen X video-game skeptic at heart. As a kid, I mostly resented arcade machines for eating quarters I could have spent on Fangoria or Stephen King books. I married into a household where this stuff is taken more seriously. My wife is an accomplished gamer, mostly of the big fantasy variety, and the whole family plays Stardew Valley, sometimes together. Amusingly, it’s one of the only games I’ve ever completed.

My other recurring exception has been Grand Theft Auto, which arrives approximately once per decade. Though I may skip the next one. Professional exposure to actual human suffering has somewhat reduced the entertainment value of simulated hyperviolence.

Our older daughter played Roblox extensively during the pandemic, when it served an obvious social function. Kids physically couldn’t be together, but this gave them someplace to meet. Of course, we made sure she was only interacting with sanctioned friends. Nevertheless, while I did tons of other stuff with her—art, music, reading—this wasn’t a world I entered.

This time I’m on the inside.

Much of what I see is transparently engineered to keep players glued to the screen. Beyond the gameplay are rewards, currencies, upgrades, collectibles and other enticements. I spend a lot of time observing how my own attention gets pulled around, so naturally I’m interested in how these environments are conditioning younger users.

First off, there’s a kind of digital materialism that’s hard for oldsters like me to fathom. Some of it is understandable enough. Avatars, for example, offer kids an early form of self-styling and presentation. And yet the endless cycles of reward and acquisition are hard to overlook.

I’m also amazed by what these kids are staring at. Roblox is brimming with weird game scenarios, uncanny faces and all manner of meme horror. A good bit of it seems deliberately disturbing. I’m bemused by Animal Hospital’s Lovecraftian dimension, but I do wonder what effect this collision of cute, absurd and unsettling is having on young minds.

Learning the aesthetic vocabulary of somebody else’s childhood from a middle-aged vantage point is undeniably awkward. Then again, I was reading adult horror novels when I was seven, so I’m not exactly in a position to get sanctimonious about it. I’m mostly glad I was allowed.

More importantly, my daughter loves having me there. She has a small, select group of peers she plays with, but she really enjoys doing this with Dad. We have shared jokes and little objectives. We establish divisions of labor and discover things together. When there’s an update, I’m usually the first to hear about it.

So it’s not just what Roblox is doing to her attention. I get to see what she’s doing with Roblox. Would it be nice if we went back to her kicking my ass at chess every day? Maybe. But for now, this seems developmentally appropriate and, inconveniently for my skepticism, pretty fun.

Roblox may be engineered for attention capture or worse, but it doesn’t prevent the kid and me from laughing at hideous mutant veterinary patients.

I’m learning that my discomfort is better addressed by entering these environments rather than issuing judgments from outside them. Being involved lets me see what delights her, what she thinks is bullshit, and what she’s excited to show me.

I’m still skeptical. But I’m probably going to play Animal Hospital again tomorrow.