For as long as I have known my step daughter, she has been playing Roblox. Having only just barely scraped into the craze that was Minecraft years ago, this game passed me by and I had assumed it was some cheap knock off for kids to play. After spending some time watching my step daughter play I began to realise that it was something else entirely.
And so my interest in the game and online community began. When thinking of a topic of research for ethnography I could think of nothing more foreign to me than this strange online world where almost anything seemed possible.
I was even more intrigued when I learned that Roblox was far from a single game rather, it is an entire platform dedicated to creating and sharing experiences with one another. The games that are available to be played with one another range from bodybuilding simulators to shooting games and cover almost every imagined subject I could think of. In fact, in trying to search for existing research I kept stumbling into simulated study and research themed games and experiences hosted through the Roblox platform.
Roblox officially launched on the first of September 2006 after a lengthy beta period and over the course of the thirteen years of its existence has gathered a massive community of creators and players. According to the web article 40 Interesting Roblox Statistics and Facts Roblox had over one hundred million users in August 2019 and over a billion hours of engagement recorded for the month. In fact, reading these statistics it surprised me that such a massive platform had gone unnoticed by me for so long.
I think it would be really interesting to not only get my step-daughter’s view on such a massive platform but to speak with other members of the community too, perhaps I may even be lucky enough to find someone that has played since the beta stage of the game. I am interested to see who makes up this community, what they get out of the platform and why they continue to play. I am also keen to see the level of social interaction that takes place on the platform itself and am curious about the long term friendships formed in this virtual space.
My hope is that my findings will be useful to the Roblox community as well as for the families of those that interact on Roblox. I want to go into this project with a very limited understanding of the platform and surrounding community so that I do not bring any biases to my research. That said however, I do hope that my research does promote that positive, long lasting relationships can be formed online through these virtual environments.
In my next blog post I will be discussing how I will carry out this research and my plan for presenting my findings.
References
Smith, C. (2019). 40 Interesting Roblox Statistics and Facts. [online] Video Game Stats. Available at: https://videogamesstats.com/roblox-statistics-facts/ [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].
According to Jason 
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