Experience Guidelines: Age Recommendations & Parental Controls

[LateNightDiner]

Hi developers,

As the number and diversity of experiences available on Roblox grow, we want to help users make more informed decisions about the content they interact with.

Today, we are launching Experience Guidelines, which are designed to provide upfront information about what an experience contains and which age group an experience is recommended to. These recommendations are helpful for everyone on Roblox, including developers who want to build experiences with a specific audience in mind. These will eventually allow us to safely support content that is suitable for all ages alongside content that was created for a more mature audience.

Each Experience Guideline has two components:

• Age Recommendation - This indicates which age group an experience is suitable for: “All Ages”, “Ages 9+”, or “Ages 13+. The recommendation is based on child development research and industry standards.

• Descriptors - There is also a list of descriptors which provide users with more detailed information about the content within an experience, so they can decide if an experience is suitable for them.

We are also upgrading our parental controls so parents can use Experience Guidelines to customize which experiences their child can join.

Generating Guidelines for your Experiences

Experience Guidelines are generated based on the answers you provide when you fill out the Experience Questionnaire. These responses give the system an understanding of the content within your experience and ensure that your experience is available to the largest audience possible.

In addition to the improved parental controls, we will also be adjusting our Discovery system’s content recommendations to protect younger users on Roblox. Starting in January, experiences without Guidelines will no longer be recommended to younger users.

We strongly recommend that you fill out the questionnaire before December so that you don’t lose access to some users. If you fill out the questionnaire and you believe that the rating does not match your intended audience, you can review the content in your experience to see if there are adjustments you can make so that your experience is appropriate for your target audience.

The Experience Questionnaire can be found under the “Questionnaire” tab for each experience in the Creator Dashboard, and should only take a few minutes to complete. You can also learn more about it in our previous announcement.

Experience Guidelines help users of all ages find content they will enjoy. Your participation not only helps make Roblox safer for everyone but also lays a strong foundation to enable you to build more ambitious and mature content on the platform.

Thank you

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[Update] Sept 28, 2022

@LateNightDiner

We’d like to share a quick reminder and some additional information around moderating Experience Guidelines.

It’s very important that you accurately fill out the Questionnaire because we rely on the information you provide us to generate accurate Guidelines. As we expand this feature across the platform, we want to make sure that your experience is shared with users who will enjoy it and that it will be available to the largest audience possible.

We will occasionally review the generated Guidelines of an experience to ensure their accuracy. If we discover a discrepancy between your submission and the content in your experience, we will notify you and remove the Guidelines from the experience. Experiences without Guidelines are treated as having the highest Age Recommendation “Ages 13+”.

Here’s an example of what you would see if your Guidelines do not match the content of your experience:

Please review your experience and retake the questionnaire as soon as possible. Our goal is to work with you through this to make sure that the generated Guidelines match the content within your experience, but note that intentionally misrepresenting your experience may lead to moderation consequences.

If the generated age recommendation does not match your intended audience, you can adjust the content in your experience so it is appropriate for your target audience. For example, you could make use of our Policy APIs to dynamically tailor the content within your experience.

Your participation not only helps make Roblox safer for everyone but also lays a strong foundation to enable you to build more ambitious and mature content on the platform.

[benpinpop (Ben)]

Firstly, this is a major step in player safety, and letting developers have a bit more freedom when it comes to gore, or other PG topics, instead of restricting them and removing from the platform outright.

I’m also, glad and worried that we get to pick our age ratings. I feel as though this might be slightly abused, though I’m sure it’ll be perfectly fine for most popular games.

This is definitely the right step for expanding roblox player safety, and everyone has been wanting this for a good while.

Anywho, very nice.

thank you!

[BandaidKidd (choppppppppppppppppp)]

The thing is that if you’ve previously wrongfully set your Date of Birth, it’ll permanently remain on your account forever. Now this isn’t a bold claim as you can always contact Roblox Support, but it’s a 20% chance they’ll actually update your age.

I’ve personally encountered this problem with my main account as I’ve put all my work onto that one account, this update will make me loose hours of progress just for something I mistakenly did 6 years ago when creating my account. I’ve repeatedly tried contacting roblox support with the same response which is “Misrepresenting information.”

This isn’t a cry for help but I want to get this out here that a lot of people will wrongfully loose access to a lot of games, the positive side of this this though is that a lot of players will less likely get exposed to any bad things, which is a big step for roblox!

Just plz fix moderation

[LifeDigger (Life)]

This is a good update due to it allowing parents to control there children on Roblox and what games they can play however I feel this will reduce the amount of players we get on our game.

I personally think it would have been great as a recommendation rather then parents get to choose what they can play due to this reducing the amounts of players who will join your Roblox game. I do understand however why they have done this and it makes sense.

[Sheverstin]

This is awesome! THANK YOU ROBLOX!

[Daw588]

I am very thankful that this is finally a feature. Thank you to whoever worked on this feature

[Iralyst]

@BandaidKidd

permanently remain on your account forever

Wrong, you can change your account age once you are over 13.

Anyways, this is a good update and is a step toward making Roblox rival other gaming platforms.

[Sheverstin]

Pro: We have tons of time to get kids to actually get it on their account yay! Con: I thought they were trying to bring us together to play with other people and not to separate us by age limit!
Pro: Now little kids will not be playing with Way older kids and having issues cause of people tricking kids to press Alt-F4

[BandaidKidd (choppppppppppppppppp)]

What I meant by my post is that if you’ve wrongfully put your DoB to <13 upon account creation, it’ll really stick with you until your account is over 13. For my case my account was made in 2016, but older me didn’t know what to put that area:

So mistakenly put it to 10/31/2016 and now roblox thinks I’m 6 years old, when I’m definitely not and not under 13 either.

[PierceMikyoto]

Nice update, already filled the questionnaire for my game.

Quick question: When will adult games be allowed? Just curious since I know there were plans for that.

Keep up the good work!

Edit: By adult content I mean nudity or intense violence/gore.

Also, is swearing allowed in 13+ games? If my game were 13+, could I have a character swear in a voice line? And would there be any limits to that (e.g. they can’t drop an F-bomb)? Just asking cause I’m not sure if it’d be allowed.

I will assume adult games will allow any sort of swearing, though.

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

I feel incredibly respected for Roblox to have tackled age recommendations as early as this as well as to acknowledge two very important tenets for the platform’s continued growth that:

1. The playerbase is growing up both in terms of veteran and new users. There are a high number of older audiences coming to Roblox for play, necessitating a divide between experiences appropriate for both cohorts.

2. Developers may approach more heavy themes with more leniency that are not outright adult content (and it should stay this way, to never go past the endgame 17+ threshold). This will allow a greater range of experiences to appear on the platform and cater differently. I don’t develop experiences suitable for younger audiences and instead for young adults.

I am a developer who frequently engages in more maturely themed experiences for older audiences (blood content, serious science fiction and deep emotions are three examples) and out of these experiences I develop there are times where I don’t feel comfortable showing them to younger audiences. Being able to scope my audience helps me for future discovery opportunities where I’m not competing with experiences outside my intended age audience. This has always been my number one gripe about Roblox discovery, competing against out-of-scope metrics for a simple chance.

Looking forward to the expansion towards the 17+ age rating. I do wish that age recommendations launched with that unless there was a change of plans in that rating or there are still more kinks to sort out before that can debut such as moderation policies.

[Abcreator]

@PierceMikyoto

Also, is swearing allowed in 13+ games? If my game were 13+, could I have a character swear in a voice line? And would there be any limits to that (e.g. they can’t drop an F-bomb)? Just asking cause I’m not sure if it’d be allowed.

Nope, nothing in ToS has changed because of this update, no restrictions have been decreased,

[Sheverstin]

Example of one of these games: TosBlocks - Roblox

[JuanGamerPlayz_RBLX (Juan)]

This is a great way for audiences of specific ages to play games at Roblox without being scared, and feel comfortable and safe!

However, if soon the feature adds an option for 18+ as the highest age to choose, I can tell that it won’t be good for those children that created an account with the wrong/false birthdate, getting access to experiences that show explicit content that can make parents unhappy and feel unsafe to kids to continue being in the platform. Furthermore, it also breaks the Community Standards > SAFETY > Article. 05:

[focasds]

I am kinda confused with the first question in the questionnaire. Will a game that contains damaging animals and players be considered violence? (Is a survival game)

You just click the tool and then it does damage to the player/animal until it dies and drops meat. It doesn’t have any sort of graphic that makes it look like torture though.

I answered NO for the first question, but I want to know what a staff member thinks about it.

[AborayStudios]

This is a great idea and definitely a step ahead for Roblox, however, 1 in 100 parents actually configure parental controls, and you could expect people to bypass the parental controls.

[knightmb1 (KnightMB)]

We all knew the lawyers would step in one day as Roblox grows, it will just happen sooner than you think. Nothing wrong with that, but we all knew the day was coming.

[Coldshot_Dev (Coldshot)]

Is there any updates regarding 17+ games(and what will be allowed with them)?

[ChiaSeedFan (CSF)]

Are there any plans to add this feature request? The recent addition of Age Recommendations should be grounded in PolicyService

I feel like restricting experiences entirely because of certain content is overkill, especially when developers can easily censor/remove them if given the tools to do so (as we can already do with paid random items)

Also, will games that are NOT suitable to everyone be more heavily recommended/promoted to older audiences than games that are suitable to everyone? I feel like this would help mitigate player/revenue losses whilst also improving discovery for players

Overall I believe this update is a step in the right direction for the platform but I hope there can be more communication on the things I mentioned above