Like a house on fire
“We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.” At first, this sounds like a generic BS business line. But this is Roblox’s CEO, answering a loaded question: “How do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?”
The question is a strong opener from New York Times’ Casey Newton.
But that’s fair : a journalist’s role is to get clear answers. And the interviewee’s role is to avoid doing what Baszucki did: ignoring the gravity of the subject and sliding back into safe corporate lingo.
Roblox’s CEO made several mistakes.
The first mistake was tactical. Baszucki did not seem to realise that this was not a PR exercise or an investor presentation. It was an interview in the middle of a crisis about Roblox’s incapacity to tackle the issue of children being targeted by pedophiles on their platform.
Many people have questions for Roblox.
Many people are angry at Roblox, and at the video game industry, for its handling of child safety and a broader set of ethical and societal issues.
And we are no longer in a time when interviewers throw softballs at the leaders of “the biggest cultural industry in the world”.
The second mistake, the main one, is moral.
Throughout the podcast, David Baszucki’s answers lack empathy. He’s in automatic business talk and gives the impression that his media training fell short. But who can blame him? He’s on top of the world, why would he be challenged ?
This attitude is not unique. Many prominent figures in the industry go out in public, all guns blazing, sounding confident, unbothered and sometimes even callous. Despite layoffs, controversies, ethical questions and doubts about the industry’s impact on society. It often looks like a variant of the “cool kid” syndrome: “It’s video games, baby! People love us, we entertain almost half of the planet, and we make billions doing it.”
And one of the clearest symptoms of this illness are two words that always appear when the industry talks to policymakers and in public forums: self‑regulation.
“Oh, we do not need more scrutiny from regulators, you know ! We self‑regulate. We already have age ratings, parental guides, CSR, partnerships with international organisations and a strong moral compass. Please go look at social media instead, they are the baddies, dear legislator.”
But when Roblox’s CEO talks about a “great opportunity”, the public and the authorities (and a big part of the Industry) see something very different.
They see a house on fire.
They see an industry reacting clearly too late to problems that have been ignored or minimised for years.
They see tools that are just about developed enough to offer plausible deniability and AI systems that can be tricked by kids and adults alike.
For external observers and public authorities the industry seems to say it is ready to act… only if the measures do not require too much work and are not too disruptive for their bottom line.
And it is hard to deny.
It doesn’t come from malice : there is on our side lots of fear of missing out on growth, fear of upsetting investors, fear that true self-regulation may stun creativity and turn our traditional creative and production process into a nightmarish bureaucracy.
But experience shows that the fire fighting strategy – rushing in to put out the latest fire – can only take you so far. Especially when governments and stakeholders begin to question our methods and are no longer swayed by the rhetoric of the ‘world’s leading cultural industry’.
Still, in the video games’ industry, our crises are still often seen as someone else’s problem and thus swept under the carpet collectively.
We, as companies and as an industry, need to change our mindset
- We no longer can operate in emergency mode only
- We have to admit that our current accountability standards as an industry are not good enough and that it goes further than a few black sheep, often more because of bad habits than of will
- We have to really questions the industry’s core values and what our plan is to resonate with players and convince our critics that we are self aware enough to show real integrity.
It is a need that comes from within because we are now a mature industry.
And it is a need that comes from outside… Because patience is wearing thin at regulatory and political levels as too many recent exchanges with public authorities have demonstrated.
So it’s high time to pick up the glove.
My job is being the proverbial “Canary in the Coal Mine” for the Game Industry.But I’m a canary that pecks back by identifying political, regulatory and ethical threats to VideoGames, analysing and designing solutions that satisfy Public Authorities without harming what you have built up until now.
This article was first published on Linkedin, you can read it and comment here: https://tinyurl.com/3rd9bnnu