Opinion: The ‘paedophile problem’ in kids’ video games

When my husband bought the then-5-year-old a Nintendo Switch, I made a list articulating all my reservations about my child having a gaming console so young. I worried about the dopamine of it all, about my son becoming accustomed to getting the immediate gratification that comes from a game and how it would impact his development as a human being. I worried about how it would affect his ability to meet people in real life.

“Too much, too quick?”; “brain development?”; and “anti-social?” dominated the list I wrote in my planner, where all the pro-and-con lists live. The bottom of the negatives column featured one word underlined three times. “Strangers?”

My husband reassured me that the kid would be safe. He planned to supervise our son and promised to set timers and boundaries. In his dad-logic, it was important for the boy to be conversant in the technology of the day.

“Video games exist. It’s better if he plays games here, under supervision, than if he goes and does it somewhere else.”

The paedophile problem

To me, the biggest problem with video games is not the games themselves. It’s that video games these days are social. Gone are the days of playing Dr. Mario by myself until 3am. Now, kids want to play cooperatively across the Internet and chat with other kids as they play – but most companies are not screening their users. Bad adult people have access to impressionable young ones.

A recent deep-dive by Bloomberg Businessweek into the kids’ gaming company Roblox revealed what the writer called “Roblox’s Paedophile Problem.” The exact measures used to maintain the privacy of children – no real names or age verification – created a safe space for truly horrible monsters to interact with very young users.

And while, yes, the article was absolutely terrifying, it also unearthed something I think worth considering: why do we let children play with video games without supervision?

“Most parents just want their kids to leave them alone, so they hand them a video game – on their phone or on a tablet or a console,” a mother from Polish Hill told me. “You’re not really supervising your kid if you’re trying to do something else.”

She looked at me with a very serious stare. “Would you know, would you really know, if your son or daughter was talking to an adult instead of another child?”

A 30-year-old teen boy

Her preteen daughter, she told me, had fallen for a “teen boy” she met on a popular gaming platform (the mom is considering a lawsuit, so she asked me to not use her name or the name of the company). When the man, in his late 20s, started sending her 11-year-old food through delivery services, mainly local ice cream deliveries and late-night snacks, she disconnected her daughter’s tablet from the Internet.

“I looked up the name on the order, and it was some dude who was almost 30,” she continued. “Why is this adult stranger sending an 11-year-old anything at all? And why is he trying to meet a girl on (this gaming platform), when everyone knows that only kids use it?”

“In a world where I’m not paying attention,” she said almost in tears, “what could have happened?”

In the Bloomberg Businessweek story, a 15-year-old girl was abducted by a man in New Jersey, after he sent an Uber to pick her up in Indiana. He met her on Roblox and also started showering her with gifts purchased online.

If, after she found herself in a one-mattress hovel under this man’s control, the teenager hadn’t logged into her social media accounts, she might not have been found as quickly as she was. Even then, what she endured is every parent’s nightmare.

Not every gaming system is designed to be exploited this way. The Nintendo Switch has settings to protect underaged users. No one under 13 can engage in conversation with strangers. In our home, we’ve specifically downloaded games that do not have a chat function, and now that he’s getting pretty good at playing his Mario games, we encourage our son to play with his dad, as it’s more fun.

But for parents who want all the fun and none of the danger, it’s important to look at the social settings and parental controls. Roblox, which is designed for children, has no such restrictions unless a parent seeks them out. The default settings, until very recently, were designed to encourage interaction, and parents found themselves rolling the dice on anyone’s intentions.

A benefit and problem

“Strangers are the benefit and the problem,” a psychology instructor at Duquesne told me. “Video games can be very good. They encourage cooperation, patience. The social aspects are great. It’s good for a kid to have friends around the world, it’s good for them to learn to work together, often to help or solve a problem. Video games are great.”

The problem, as she sees it, are adults. Her family set up a private server for her son to play Minecraft, something my husband often talks about doing when and if the kids get into it.

“We control who he sees and talks to,” the psychologist said. “And we often play together as a family. It’s the best form of supervision.”

“We get all the benefits of video games, and none of the paedophiles.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Tribune News Service