Can’t both be true? It can be true that Roblox keeps kids hooked through shady practices but if not them, kids would have sought other places. Club Penguin, RuneScape, WOW, Xbox Live, all served similar functions for myself growing up, I don’t find it hard to believe I would have ended up on Roblox

None of those platforms are for gambling.

I would agree it's both. Ideally we would make many games restricted access and most games games less addictive. At this stage the only viable plan I can think of is for parents to join a cult or cult like group where the parents are dedicated to restricted screen time and enforcing outdoor play. One parent alone can't make it happen. Maybe the quakers were onto something. :)

this feels wrong to me. when i watch my 7yo cousin play, he is talking to his friends in a virtual space and playing volleyball or racing cars or playing golf or doing a fashion show.

the cosmetics are stupid, but thats not the main thrust.

the real world can't compete because its expensive and devoid of children.

> and devoid of children

YES! This is a big piece of it. Fewer kids + more of them wanting to be inside / parents wanting them to be inside = less kids to play with = even less likelihood of them wanting to play outside.

This is like social media in reverse: nobody wants to be inside, but some people are only inside, so everybody is inside.

My father might've been onto something in my childhood then. He'd specifically kick me out of the house if he knew it was day I'd be inside playing videogames. Rainy day, snow day, school holiday, missed the bus, whatever the reason. He did this the first time when I was ten and then again when I was fourteen, which were two periods where I struggled with making friends because we had moved.

I compare this to my neighbour's daughter who is now about the same age I was when my dad would kick me out of the house, and said neighbour's daughter never goes anywhere without her parents. She's somewhat socially maladjusted and doesn't know how to get along with other kids her age outside of sports, and I believe this is because she's not around other kids outside of school except for basketball practice or matches she's in. She wasn't like this a few years ago. It's alarming how such an athletic child can spend so much time inside the house doing... Whatever sedentary activities.

Last bit is not quite right: a lot of people want to be inside. That contributes strongly to the feedback loop you rightly identify.

(WHY they want to stay inside is another matter, but I suspect a large part is the stereotypical answer: unending seas of digital content highly optimised to hack the consumer's brain.)

It's a parental thing.

I have children, they have friends. None of them have asked for Robux as a gift.

They play the free games together, chatting after school (and homework!) and stop if they hit a payment limit.

Kids can't be trapped by "dark patterns" into paying, they don't have credit cards or money to spend. It's always the parents who give in.

It's both disappearing opportunities for physical play AND addictive platforms

And one feeds the other, in that it's hard to raise a kid who can play constructively outdoors if all of his friends are hooked on Roblox.

As if arcade games weren’t money hungry and painfully punishing purely to get more quarters out of children.

Arcades got you out of the house, they had a communal aspect to them, you played games together. Those quarters were well spent!

I couldn't get a quarter out of my dad as a kid. Who's fault is the parents?

If I mowed 2 acres of lawn dad would give me a stack of quarters. It didn’t take me long to realize that a fraction of that mowing time spent playing Defender would consume those quarters. I still loved playing it, but valuable perspective.