As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to ensure that we have accurately formulated the age restriction questionnaire for each of our games. The platform presents each question accompanied by a topic and a description; however, the difficulty arises during the interpretation of these guidelines, which can vary significantly among developers. Consequently, it may be impossible for developers to ascertain what Roblox classifies as a game featuring realistic versus non-realistic blood, or to differentiate between severe and moderate violence. The information provided to us consists primarily of brief textual descriptions, which may not be sufficient for clarity. Therefore, I propose the implementation of visual aids, such as images or videos, that comprehensively represent each category and section of the questionnaire. This would provide a clear visual understanding of the concepts previously conveyed through text.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because this improvement would not only provide me with a deeper understanding and greater ease in completing these questionnaires, but it would also facilitate compliance with the platform’s regulations and help prevent potential misunderstandings in the future.
Hi there, thank you for your feedback! We are aware of this issue, and are looking into how we can better clarify the requirements because we definitely want our creators to rate their experiences accurately.
Just to confirm, are the images around the new Fear guidelines what you’re referring to? What is helpful or unhelpful about this? Would links to experiences that fall under each category be helpful?
And to help us prioritize, which categories are most confusing for you?
I’m mostly referring to the full set of questionnaires in general. It’s true that the new Fear guidelines will require it quite a bit, but it’s also something that all categories should have. What I mean is that the way of visual interpretation should not only be examples like A or B, but also convey in a visual way the previously mentioned description, such as different degrees of blood, from the most pixelated and discolored to the most realistic, as well as clips of gameplay considered to have moderate and frequent violence. These images and clips could be collected from the different games already implemented in Roblox that correctly follow the guidelines that Roblox expects. Finally, I think that currently the category that could be most confused is the fear category since fear can be interpreted in many ways depending on each person’s experience, whether it be the psychological fear more focused on elements of childhood, the bloody physical fear focused on organs and elements that give creeps, and finally phobias such as arachnophobia, trypophobia, etc., which are considered another type of fear.
Personally, I’ve always interpreted the fear guidelines as “is it (intended to be) scary”/“would it scare a young player”
For example, visible internal organs aren’t necessarily scary. They’d be common on a surgery simulation game. Similar deal for spiders, you can very easily depict those as cute and cuddly fluffballs.
Or, on the other end, you can make anything scary with the right context and atmosphere behind it (five nights at freddys being about some goofy robots, sonic.exe being a creepypasta about a famous game mascot, that kinda thing)
When you’re completing the questionnaire, it’s specifically asking about these three things first and foremost, keyword being “elements that may trigger fear” (to the average person):
Adding extra phobia warnings if there are scary scenes that specifically include/revolve around common phobias is on the developer to include somewhere, this is mostly just asking if it will scare little Timmy hopping on Roblox after school
(Don’t get me wrong though, I do agree that we need clarification on if specifically playing into phobias is worth a higher/stricter rating)
