SWISS Psychologist Jean Piaget once said that “Play Is The Work of Childhood”, but nowadays, we see the first spark of the stale, capitalist dystopian world we once feared, aflame in the eyes of the generation ahead of us. Going back to the foundations of most of this generation’s childhood, Roblox had been the staple of our generation’s growth; it is what made our societies connect with one another despite the distance across countries that birthed open perspectives despite the differences. Quite a lot of people nod towards the role of rules and imitation as an effective learning tool for children to bridge together play and technology as it grows with its generation. 

 While games back then remained simple and primitive in contrast to the style and quality of games that could be compared in the late present, the simplicity held its own distinctive ground to guide children to problem-solving, strategy, teamwork, and communication, which are also tied to the role of imitation play. 

“Work at a Pizza Place” mirrored the daffy want to role-play working at the fast food industry, arguing whoever gets employee of the week,  “Roblox Highschool 2” had us play along the lives of switching across rooms attending class and parties even though that’s not quite what high school offered us, but acting still remained gratifying, “Epic Minigames” mimicked the game shows we see in television, where we could find our places in them, minigames played that were often our childhood play with friends at school, avoid lava, obstacle courses – things that, didn’t really ask of us much other than the fruit of imagination and community, things that didn’t really need the require the use of actual money unless one would like appealing avatars, which wasn’t the pressure back then. 

Again, primitive as they were, they were inaugural for their time. Where the front page was diverse with countless experiences it has to offer, where you could play the role of a CEO of a buzzling tycoon, or simply wash yourself down in the summer in waterpark experiences; wherein player count became purely of interest and exploration from when children would come home from school, where the heart of it would fall under chatting with an online friend if they’d like to deliver pizzas with you. 

Our generation became as curious and explorative as they are now from how they were raised through play, how we turn to accept others, opening empathy even to those we’ve never met eye-to-eye, testing hypotheses with a low-stakes failure, internalizing the societal roles we’ll eventually come to see around as we grow. 

As of late, when we go back to what rooted the individuals we have become now, we find ourselves scrolling endlessly, reaching out for that novelty we once indulged in; however, when we see others ahead of our generation finding themselves at the heart of what made us who we are now, for a thought, it was sweet, momentarily seeing our childhood in the present, then we look over to see the staleness of what they deemed play, characters standing idle, letting the screen run for itself, flashy cosmetics – then we turn to the reality that had dawned upon the platform.

We wonder why it is that we find ourselves inviting one another to play, but spending more time trying to look for a game rather than playing itself, that we eventually run out of time, and we’re once again sent back to the reality of work and academia – When we look at the state of Roblox’s front page, one could see several iterations of the same concept of a game.

First, take RNG (Random Number Generation) games for example; there’s roughly a hundred games with the same concept of waiting for a chance to win one in a billion chances of getting a luxury item you can wear on your character for that specific game only, and that’s the entire point of the game itself. This concept has been reused across hundreds of other games with five to 35 thousand players in a day. 

Second are Battlegrounds-type experiences, where players get to wear their favourite fictional character, be given a specific skill set to fight against each other with flashy Visual Effects, and this concept would be copied across 50 other games, with a peak of roughly ten to 100 and 40 thousand players.

Third would be a blatant, direct copy of other existing games published by Indie game developers who take a few bucks or a few hundred pesos for supporting their passion projects,  only to be implemented in Roblox riddled with gamepasses that cost three to five hundred pesos for a quick win, it’s easy money for them when they can take ideas to put in the game, but unfair to those developers that are not often backed up by Copyright Infringement. 

Consequently, creators use a variety of strategies that are catered to the game’s main audience – Statista confirms that the age group of the game’s audience had raised up from what is known to be ages of five to thirteen, to ages seventeen (17)  to twenty-four years (24) making up 25% of the playerbase, that is to say, that we still take into account those ages under nine (9) to twelve (12) accumulating a total of 40% of the playerbase. The pandemic and the contemporary world have crafted the masses’ attention spans to become accustomed to short-paced forms of media with continuous exposure to a digitalized environment – all this boils down to a singular focal point of interest by the market: attention. This allows creators to curate diverse tactics to keep that variable as their main source of revenue. 

With the world turning towards the appeal to a quick dopamine hit, it had begun to majorly utilize the concept of RNG (Random Number Generator), we see this towards the pop of blind boxes during the mid-to-late stages of the pandemic when it had been popularized by various influencers, the same is utilized by game companies, of course; this is what makes up the majority of Roblox’s mechanics in user experiences, with nearly every game either has the main concept revolving around waiting until you get a rare item in order to progress the game or get cosmetics. 

The hit of getting a novelty item with a rare chance of being obtained can be consuming, especially to games where its mechanics revolve around it, getting leverage and honing unhealthy practices of gambling towards younger audiences, especially noting the fact that they do not quite grasp the concept of the role money plays– it can be compelling to keep on spending virtual money for it that could eventually turn into a small-scale spending into a full blown debt. 

Another tactic utilized is time blocking limited drops to a certain hour, creating a sense of urgency to log in to the game in inconvenient hours late at night, in the middle of work, in the middle of an assignment – becoming enslaved to allocating that attention like prayer. 

In light of this, we ought to mention the persisting existence of original games with quality, those that never get the attention they need when the front page’s algorithm prioritizes charts of profit and player retention that are already manipulated by the enslavement of attention. Passion projects become shelved in preference for catching a dopamine hit through the chance of obtaining a flashy VFX that your character gets to wear for that game only out of doing absolutely nothing but waiting. 

At the end, everything that the playerbase consumes becomes effortless; winning and experience are played off by being idle, with the game spoonfeeding the masses a quick win through consumption. The unartistic direction of experiences that don’t require one to put effort to putting one’s cognitive abilities to use becomes detrimental to the next generation’s capacity to solve problems and interact with others, where ambition and empathy becomes caged in individualism, when it revolves around having the best, flashiest object in experiences, where everything becomes competition with the lack of strategy; and those young audiences, which the game specifically caters to, can be easily manipulated by the short-term gratification attained from it, and is easily manipulated with it.

 Children learn from play, from interaction, from work, and taking away the work in an already digitalized space further influences the mental recession crafted by it. What is there to learn when you don’t have to think? When everything can be attained through waiting and spending? 

With games that are constantly being mass-produced weekly, all with the same kind of content in different skins, different themes, it becomes the blood that turns the wheel of the world of revenue, with the blood of attention, in a turn spun by retention. In a society where investment thrives above quality, artistic direction is spurned, especially in a society where attention, shortened and curated by media, is weaponized by those who value capital over experience.