Roblox Is Grooming Our Kids to Gamble — and We're Letting It Happen

In this first-person LinkedIn essay, Michael Carr-Gregg argues that many top Roblox games use loot boxes, near-miss animations, and countdown timers that he likens to gambling mechanics, citing University of Sydney researcher Marcus Carter's finding that 14 of the platform's top 15 games use what Carter calls deceptive monetisation techniques. Carr-Gregg contends that because Roblox's in-game currency cannot be cashed out, it falls outside gambling regulation despite what he describes as a similar psychological reward pattern for players, and says he sees children and parents in his own clinical practice dealing with escalating in-app spending and associated distress. He calls for regulatory scrutiny and calls on parents and schools to treat the issue as a consumer-protection and digital-literacy concern. TechKids Foundation cites this as Carr-Gregg's own recent public argument connecting a specific, named platform's design choices to gambling-like engagement patterns in children.

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH THIS ENTRY