A new report has exposed a “true crime” community of Roblox players who reenact real-life murders. A part of this group is reportedly dedicated to digitally recreating and playing through famous school shootings within the extremely popular free-to-play game.
On April 21, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism published a new report that goes in-depth on these digital school shooting games. The games, like nearly everything in Roblox, are created by users and shared online using Roblox’s in-game tools and browser. Many of the most popular school shooting simulators are created by a group known as Active Shooter Studios or A.S.S.
A.S.S has reportedly created Roblox maps and online games based on mass shootings like those that have happened at Uvalde, Parkland, and Columbine. One of the studio’s most popular maps is “Carbine,” a Roblox recreation of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre which took the lives of a dozen students and one teacher while injuring many more. In “Carbine” players can take on the role of the shooters themselves and recreate the deadly shooting.
As reported by the ADL, these maps aren’t just simple pieces of geometry that mimic a real world location. Instead they are highly detailed and contain disturbing features. The report says that one Roblox experience created by A.S.S. which recreates the 2022 Uvalde shooting features NPCs that resemble children who will hide under desks and play dead when they hear gunfire.
Most of the experiences created by the studio reportedly end when the police arrive. Players can then fight to the death or commit suicide.
Roblox removes content, but it keeps coming back
A.S.S. has struggled to keep their maps available in Roblox as the company removes them quickly when they are reported or get flagged by internal moderation tools. The studio, which boasts a Discord server containing over 500 members, has resorted to using private Roblox servers to host their games behind a paywall. The idea is that this makes it harder for Roblox Studio to find and remove the games, all of which reportedly break many of Roblox’s community guidelines and rules.
Bloomberg reports that Roblox has removed one of A.S.S’s groups which contained over 800 players after it was contacted by the ADL. The outlet reports that one of the games it witnessed featured a mob of players in front of Columbine yelling the white supremacist phrase “You will not replace us.” White supremacy plays a large part in the school shooting community on Roblox.
As an example of how tricky it is to contain these types of disturbing games, Bloomberg reports that after Roblox removed the Columbine experience, a new mass shooting game from A.S.S appeared online. It reportedly quickly received over 1,00o visits before it was also removed.
“Because such games recreate extremist-related mass shootings—such as the 2022 Buffalo shooting, in which the perpetrator deliberately targeted and killed Black people—they may also serve as a gateway to extremist content,” warns the ADL in its report. “Players might be prompted to seek out more information about these violent events, which can lead them to manifestos or videos created by the attackers. In some cases, they may also encounter content produced by accelerationist white supremacists, which glorifies these killers and aims to radicalize others to follow in their footsteps.”
Roblox, Discord, and TikTok each told Bloomberg that they actively remove content focused on or glorifying extremists or violent crimes. Despite that, Kotaku was able to find numerous videos about “Carbine” and other digital recreations of school shootings on these platforms. YouTube and Reddit, where some of this content can be found as well, declined to provide a comment to the outlet.
Roblox has over 80 million active users logging on every day. Many are kids or teens. The company has received criticism in the past for failing to keep the platform safe as it grows bigger and bigger. It has also come under fire for allegedly exploiting the children who make most of the game’s content. Roblox turns 20 years old next September.
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