14 January 2022 The Guardian Weekly43
PREVIOUS PAGE ROBLOX; THIS PAGE JEFF GILBERT/ALAMY
are focused on how to make better games, not on the interpersonal
challenges required to manage a successful creative team. So, while
the early success experienced by Anna in Roblox is unusual, stories
of exploitation on the platform are rife.SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD REGAN GREEN, FROM ONTARIO,
Canada, joined Roblox when he was six. In 2017, he fell in with the
creator of Sonic Eclipse Online , a pastiche of Sega’s seminal Sonic the
Hedgehog series. Like many 12 -year-olds, Green loved the character
of Sonic, so when the game’s creator, Jadon Shedletsky, known on
the platform by the handle DoctorRofatnik , off ered him the chance
to work on the game as its programmer, Green eagerly signed up.
Shedletsky, who was 24 at the time, proved to be a demanding
leader. Green claims that he was encouraged to work long hours to
improve the game or be replaced. “It began to have a negative eff ect
on my mental health,” Green, who now makes games outside the
Roblox ecosystem, told me. “I was constantly trying to fi nd ways to
improve the project, but [Shedletsky] always wanted more out of me
and I became incredibly burned out.” Green worked on Sonic Eclipse
Online constantly between the age of 12 and 14. “The pressure caused
me to break,” he said. Shedletsky denies that he threatened collabora-
tors with replacement if they did not produce enough work. “We have
no such thing as hours because we’re not professionals,” he told me.
“I didn’t reach out to Roblox themselves about it, because even
then I knew about how unhelpful they were for their developers,”
he said. “Things like developer credit and fair pay just aren’t their
problems to deal with, I guess.”
As well as game-making tools, Roblox includes communication
features that enable teams to organise their work. Messages sent
this way are subject to Roblox’s code of conduct and are moderatedby proprietary software that checks for abusive
language. Sonic Eclipse Online’s development
team ignored Roblox’s chat facilities in favour of
the popular third-party chatroom, Discord , where
more advanced functionality made it easier to
communicate and allowed freer use of language.
Rachel*, like Green, started playing Roblox
when she was six, drawn to the range of games on
off er and the community of children with similar
interests. She became involved in Sonic Eclipse
Online when she was 12 and joined the game’s Dis-
cord chat forum. The forum was run by Shedletsky
as a place to discuss development of the project,
but also as a typical internet hang out, character-
ised by meme-sharing and ironic in-jokes. It was,
she says, “an absolute cesspool of toxicity”.
Shedletsky started a private chat with Rachel
soon after she joined the server. He began sending
her private updates on the progress of the game.
He interspersed these messages with innuendo
and sexual jokes. “I liked the attention and, very
early on, started developing feelings for him,” she
told me. “I was a child who just wanted love and
attention she couldn’t get elsewhere.”
Shedletsky soon changed his tone. In messages
seen by the Observer, he made repeated jokes about raping Rachel
and sent her sexually explicit images. Shedletsky, who was 24 at the
time, was aware of Rachel’s age. “It’s fi ne, you’re 12, I expect you to be
a little slow, but soon I’ll corrupt you beyond your wildest dreams,”
he messaged her in September 2017. “Sexualising other women in the
server, underage or not, was already a huge thing but was most com-
mon with me,” she recalled. Other members of the team were aware of
the charged dynamic, jokingly referred to her as Shed letsky’s “under-
age sex doll” in the main chatroom. If she challenged his messages,
he told her it was all said in jest and to not take herself so seriously.
Shedletsky gave Rachel free Robux to spend on Roblox. “He used the
fact that I cared about him a lot to his advantage,” she said. “He was
very manipulative, right up until the day I left.”
Sonic Eclipse Online launched on Roblox in late 2018. Users could
buy access for 400 Robux – $4.99 – for which they would receive a
Sonic costume for their avatar. Rachel became a moderator of the
game’s community on Roblox. By now, she had a boyfriend and was
increasingly uncomfortable with the behaviour she witnessed. She
says she saw Shedletsky’s talent for manipulation in the way he treated
Green, constantly demanding more work, while oscillating between
criticism and praise. As a co-member of the team, she felt culpable.
“He should not have been in this environment, period.”
Rachel left the development team in early 2020 and later that year,
at the urging of other friends she made on the platform, began to speak
publicly about the abuse she endured. Her friends created a Google
document composed of dozens of screenshots of Shedletsky’s mes-
sages sent to Rachel and others during a two-year period. Shedletsky
posted a response video in which he claimed the messages he sent
had been jokes and that Rachel had only come forward for attention.
After she saw the video, Rachel began to self-harm. Shedletsky has
since deleted it , but recently told me that he stands by most of what
he said. “[These] were jokes made in poor taste that could be mis-
interpreted at face value as something more serious,” he said. “I do
not stand by the comment I made about Rachel coming out to seek
attention. I made a judgment without the appropriate information.”
Friends Rachel had made on Roblox rallied. “KK”, a 19-year-old
Japanese game developer, wrote to Roblox asking the platform
to ban Shedletsky’s account and remove his game so that he
could no longer profi t from the project. KK, who joined Roblox‘If you’re making or
doing anything for kids,
you have to have more
safety, more care
for your audience’