For generations, play has been one of the most fundamental parts of childhood. Today, much of that play has moved online.
Children build worlds, compete with friends, create communities, and interact with others through gaming platforms that increasingly blur the line between entertainment product and social environment. Nearly nine in ten children in middle- and upper-income countries play online games, part of a global gaming ecosystem involving more than 3.42 billion players. (UNICEF, Protecting Children in Online Gaming: Mitigating Risks from Organized Violence, October 2025).
These environments offer extraordinary opportunities for creativity, connection, learning, and community. But an alarming reality is developing alongside those benefits.
Children no longer need to leave their homes to encounter people who may seek to manipulate, threaten, groom, exploit, or recruit them. Danger has crossed the screen. It can appear as a conversation, a virtual community, another player—or simply as a game.
And when that happens, the right to play is not the only right at stake.
Children’s privacy, dignity, physical and psychological integrity, development, and right to be protected from violence and exploitation can all become implicated in digital environments that children may not yet have the capacity to fully understand or safely navigate.
Gaming Is Not the Problem. Its Exploitation Is.
The starting point matters: online gaming is not inherently harmful.
UNICEF expressly cautions against treating gaming itself as a cause of violence. Multiplayer games can create meaningful opportunities for social connection, creativity, community-building, and play. The concern lies elsewhere: the same social and technical infrastructure that enables those benefits can also be exploited by malicious actors seeking access to young people. (UNICEF, Protecting Children in Online Gaming: Mitigating Risks from Organized Violence, October 2025).
Modern gaming increasingly involves far more than playing a game. Players may enter public servers, communicate through voice or text chat, interact with strangers, build persistent virtual identities, participate in user-generated worlds, and move between gaming and other communication platforms.
That interconnectedness matters.
UNICEF has documented how violent actors and organizations exploit gaming spaces and their communication features to propagandize, socialize, groom, coerce, and recruit young people. Its research identifies similarities between grooming for child sexual exploitation and recruitment into organized violence: both can exploit social vulnerabilities and low-moderation environments and may progress from trust-building to isolation and eventually to coercion or control. (UNICEF, Protecting Children in Online Gaming: Mitigating Risks from Organized Violence, October 2025).
The danger, therefore, is not necessarily hidden inside the content of the game itself.
Sometimes, the game is the point of access.
Technology Can Transform How Harm Reaches a Child
Sexual exploitation provides another illustration of how technology can alter the pathways through which children experience harm.
Thorn’s 2025 research on sexual extortion found that among surveyed respondents who had experienced sexual extortion as minors and received threats through technology, 13% identified gaming apps among the technologies used to communicate those threats. Among respondents aged 12 and younger, the figure was 22%. (Thorn, Sexual Extortion & Young People: Navigating Threats in Digital Environments, June 2025).
Those numbers should not be read to suggest that gaming is the principal cause or location of sexual extortion. They demonstrate something different and important: gaming technologies can become part of the infrastructure through which threats reach young people.
Thorn’s findings also challenge one of the most persistent assumptions in conversations about online safety: that protecting children primarily means teaching them to avoid strangers online.
Some perpetrators are strangers. Others are not.
Thorn emphasizes that a significant share of sexual extortion experiences originate within young people’s offline communities—including former romantic partners, friends, relatives, or neighbors. Technology may then facilitate the threats and exploitation. Effective prevention must therefore look beyond “stranger danger” and recognize technology as a tool that can amplify the reach and power of perpetrators both online and offline. (Thorn, Sexual Extortion & Young People: Navigating Threats in Digital Environments, June 2025).
This distinction is critical. Children today face risks that do not fit neatly into the categories on which earlier prevention models were built. Online and offline relationships overlap. Gaming, messaging, social media, and other technologies converge. Conversations can migrate rapidly between platforms.
Our approaches to protection must evolve just as quickly.
California: When the Risk Becomes a Legal Question
In February 2026, these concerns reached a California courtroom when the People of the State of California brought an action against Roblox Corporation.
Roblox is not simply another technology company in this context. According to the complaint, the company deliberately positioned its platform toward children and has acknowledged its significant population of users aged 13 and under. The State alleges that Roblox cultivated an image of a safe environment for young players while making design and safety choices that foreseeably exposed minors to harm. (People of the State of California v. Roblox Corporation, Complaint, Los Angeles County, February 2026).
The allegations are significant and remain allegations being litigated.
According to the complaint, Roblox created an environment in which adults and children could interact with insufficient functional oversight and where aspects of account creation and user interaction allegedly created pathways through which adults could locate and contact minors. The State contends that adults could masquerade as children, establish repeated contact, build trust, and ultimately place themselves in positions of influence over young users. (People of the State of California v. Roblox Corporation, Complaint, Los Angeles County, February 2026).
The complaint points to alleged deficiencies involving age verification, default restrictions on communications, parental controls, reporting mechanisms, and systems for escalating dangerous interactions. It further alleges that these safety failures existed alongside a business model built around maximizing engagement and transactions within Roblox’s virtual economy. (People of the State of California v. Roblox Corporation, Complaint, Los Angeles County, February 2026).
Whether those allegations ultimately result in liability is a question for the legal process.
But the lawsuit raises a broader question that extends far beyond Roblox:
When a company creates and controls a digital environment used extensively by children, what responsibility does it have to anticipate and mitigate the ways that environment can be exploited to harm them?
The Answer Cannot Be to Take Children Offline
There is a temptation, when confronted with emerging technological harms, to frame the solution as restriction: less gaming, less technology, fewer online interactions.
That framing misses the point.
Children have a right to play. Digital environments are now part of how many children exercise that right, connect with peers, develop skills, and participate in communities. Protecting children should not require eliminating those opportunities.
The challenge is to preserve the benefits of gaming without allowing those benefits to become pathways to foreseeable harm.
UNICEF’s recommendations provide one possible framework. Gaming companies can incorporate child-rights-based safety-by-design principles into the development of multiplayer environments; strengthen proportionate age-assurance measures and usable parental controls; establish clearer restrictions on contact from strangers; create child-friendly reporting mechanisms; proactively detect organized misuse; train moderators; and publish meaningful child-safety transparency information. (UNICEF, Protecting Children in Online Gaming: Mitigating Risks from Organized Violence, October 2025).
These measures reflect a broader principle: the burden of navigating complex digital risks cannot rest entirely on children.
Parents have an important role. Education is essential. Children should be given tools to recognize danger and seek help.
But parental supervision and child awareness operate only after a platform has made fundamental choices about how its environment works—who can create an account, who can contact whom, what settings exist by default, how suspicious behavior is detected, how reports are handled, and what incentives shape the platform’s design.
Prevention therefore has to begin earlier.
From Parental Controls to Safety by Design
The rapid evolution of gaming technology makes that need increasingly urgent.
Gaming environments are incorporating new forms of social connectivity, artificial intelligence, immersive technologies, user-generated content, and increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences. These developments can generate enormous benefits. They can also create new opportunities for exploitation that existing safeguards were never designed to address. (UNICEF, Protecting Children in Online Gaming: Mitigating Risks from Organized Violence, October 2025).
The question facing policymakers, technology companies, lawyers, parents, and child-protection professionals is therefore not whether children should be allowed to participate in digital life.
They already do.
The question is whether the systems surrounding them are evolving quickly enough to protect them.
Effective protection requires an integrated approach: prevention, education, meaningful regulation, safety-conscious product design, effective detection and reporting systems, transparency, and accountability when safeguards fail.
Most importantly, it requires recognizing children not merely as users, players, or consumers, but as children whose rights do not disappear when they enter a virtual world.
The Digital Playground Must Still Be Safe
Technology has transformed childhood, and gaming will continue to be part of that transformation.
That is not something to fear. But it is something we must understand.
The emerging evidence demonstrates that the social and technical infrastructure surrounding online gaming can be exploited in ways that expose children to forms of manipulation, coercion, sexual exploitation, organized violence, and other harms. (UNICEF, Protecting Children in Online Gaming: Mitigating Risks from Organized Violence, October 2025; Thorn, Sexual Extortion & Young People: Navigating Threats in Digital Environments, June 2025).
California’s litigation against Roblox places another dimension of that problem before the courts: whether the companies designing these environments are doing enough to address foreseeable risks to the children who inhabit them. (People of the State of California v. Roblox Corporation, Complaint, Los Angeles County, February 2026).
The solution is not to choose between technology and childhood.
Nor should children have to choose between their right to play and their right to be protected.
The goal should be to build a digital world in which both can coexist.
