Should Drawing Games Be Allowed?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

DISCLAIMER:
I mean no offense to any developer or group that currently owns or is working on a drawing game, this thread is for discussion and discussion only.

Hello fellow developers,

Roblox Studio has so many features now, we can literally create anything we want. Why not just recreate Microsoft Paint or something? Sure—but, there is a DRAWback (haha). In all seriousness though, there is a huge, unintended flaw associated with every drawing game.

Main Reason — No Filtering

If users have the freedom to literally draw anything and the drawing game reaches a certain popularity level, there is bound to be horrible people who want to ruin other’s gaming experience by drawing inappropriate pictures. And that’s where we hit the barrier: unlike text, AI is currently not that advanced enough to moderate and filter images (especially ones just drawn in-game out of a bunch of cloned objects). Literally if a developer makes an awesome drawing game with these fancy brushes and whatnot, it only takes a couple of inappropriate drawings to get that entire game taken down. It’s not fair to the developer at all; they didn’t anticipate it initially.

Now you may be thinking, why not having a “REPORT DRAWING” button? I would say, it’s not that simple fellow developer. Sure the nasty drawing gets flagged and hidden (maybe the consequences reach all the way to the user’s account), but the drawing was drawn in the first place. Everyone saw it before it got flagged. It’s like a user swears in the chat (assuming that there is no filter) and there is a report button for swearing. Every single player saw the swear word, so there really isn’t any point of the report button anymore except to punish the user. It is not effective whatsoever.

An example of such a game is Draw It! where a chosen user is given a word to draw out and everyone else has to guess the word from the picture. Simple enough right? Except the fact that you are given a canvas with various brushes and an eraser, and anything you will draw will be shown to everyone in the server. Worst of all, it updates in real time!

Now I am not saying that this game is bad in any way, in fact, it’s a very nice and original game. I’m only here to discuss one potential issue that can erupt from this.

Wrap Up

Now here is the overarching question:

Should Roblox even allow these types of games (where users are given the tools to draw anything they want) to be created?

Please provide us your view of this topic:

  • Yes, they should be allowed
  • No, they should NOT be allowed

0 voters

Also, a topic already discusses a previous incident regarding drawing games.

Thank your for your time and feedback,
And as always, feel free to state anything else by replying!

18 Likes
Are Drawing/Building games allowed?
#2

Unless you can make a system that can predict inappropriate drawings with 100% accuracy I don’t think it should be allowed

Roblox games are for all ages, and no matter where you go there will be people who want to break the rules, and with drawing games it’s really easy

If Roblox allows drawing games, and in those drawing games a child is exposed to something inappropriate, the parent won’t blame the developer, they’d blame Roblox

13 Likes
#3

This is erroneous thinking. Literally any game that involves user-created content cannot be 100% accurately filtered. It’s physically impossible. Even Roblox’s swear filter is filled with flaws.

You can make inappropriate things in Roblox Studio. Heck, in any Roblox game with building, you can make inappropriate content. By your logic this entire platform basically shouldn’t exist for safety reasons.

We shouldn’t arbitrarily decide what UGC is allowed and what isn’t. Roblox is about expressing yourself and letting your imagination run wild, whether that be through drawing or other means.

It’s all or nothing.

63 Likes
#4

Somehow too much freedom is a negative thing through aspects of exploitation. Although the drawing game concept is allowed, there are people who literally cross the boundaries and draw inappropriate depictions. Maybe, a manual moderation of the game is required but that sounds like a hassel, and the consequences on how the player should be “moderated” from the game should also be considered.

Automation at such level is difficult to create, because how complex drawings are. There are both false positives and evasion of detection by extremely distort and use “creative” inappropriate drawings.

Manual moderation, in conclusion, might be the right decision to choose after setting up a manual report or kick button. Also do not disclose the moderators of the game, to make it difficult to detect.

6 Likes
#5

I was wrong on the 100% accuracy statement

If you bypass the roblox filter, you can be reported and have moderation action taken on your account so that will stop a lot of players from doing so, as there is a risk of being banned (the roblox moderation system isn’t all that great though)

There isn’t anything stopping a player from drawing anything inappropriate, manual moderation will help, but if they get banned for that most player’s wouldn’t even care because it’s just some drawing game

I could see it being allowed if there was a warning that inappropriate content may appear, and having some sort of auto detection, and manual moderation too

If you don’t do anything to try and stop or reduce any inappropriate content, then I still believe it shouldn’t be allowed

2 Likes
#6

If we got rid of drawing + building games, we would be literally catering to 4-5 year olds and that’s the opposite of what the community wants right now.

3 Likes
#7

It should be allowed.
It’s important that a kick system is added, and have in-game moderators.
The kick system will be provided to each every player, and when needed they can use this feature. Having a system that needs at least 3-5 votes to kick would be needed to help prevent abuse.
In-game moderators could potentially help to help ensure that drawings aren’t inappropriate or off-topic.
That being said, I think that drawing games should be allowed if proper precautions are taken to ensure that the community is safe.
Of course systems may not be 100% correct it’s the best way to help.

5 Likes
#8

God forbid somebody draws something inappropriate when literally everyone is stuck in their house because of coronavirus. We don’t need to protect kids from harmless drawings when there are wayyyyy more important things to worry about.

This exactly, we can’t expect every game to be catered to LeapPad users. If kids that are young enough are playing drawing games then its their parents responsibility to stop them just as it is for shooter games or horror games if their parents deem them bad.

15 Likes
#9

They should be allowed for the same reason that building games are allowed.

Roblox itself was once upon a time a building game, and have since produced other building games of their own (WTRB, anyone?). They have the same moderation issue but Roblox seems to be fine with them.

23 Likes
#10

Why are you wasting your time with this? Elttob is right, Roblox is a game platform (thanks Elliot) about expressing your creativity, and there’s no reason you should suppress (oppress?) that.

6 Likes
#11

I once built a deep learning program and trained it on close to a million images of simple black and white drawings taken the database provided by the game “Quick, Draw!” It was only trained to classify drawings among three different choices and even then, the program wasn’t able to reach 100% accuracy. It was in the 99% range but that wouldn’t be accurate enough given the amount of servers a Roblox game can spiral into.

So let’s say it does end up being about 99% accuracy and assume the game gets one million visits and each player stays to view two drawings. That’s already 20,000 instances of incorrectly classified drawings.

1 Like
#12

That’s interesting. You may be able to improve on that by treating false negatives and false positives separately rather than trying to jam it into one accuracy value. If you prioritize minimizing false positives over false negatives (i.e. you use a weaker model that does not flag any false positives but only flags, say, half of the bad stuff), it could still make for a better experience for younger users, over doing nothing at all moderation-wise (you’re still taking half of the bad stuff away).

4 Likes
#13

As long as players can interact with the game in any way at all, they will be able to abuse it. Take something as simple as players having the freedom to move their characters around ingame; If a group of malicious players want to, they can arrange their characters in such a way that when viewed from above, they spell out inappropriate words, or form certain banned symbols. Does the possibility of that happening mean that players should not be allowed to walk around in-game?

Of course not, because while such a thing might happen, we can not sacrifice playability for security. A (relaxed) chat filter is good, a report button is good, a votekick system is good, because these features introduce security while minimally affecting playability. But, actions like introducing an overtly strict chat filter or banning an entire game genre, are all bad and should be seen as such by all reasonable people, because they push security to the point of general unplayability and unenjoyability. It seems that many people forget why (mostly) children log onto Roblox; it’s to have fun.
And where’s the fun in banning entire game genres?; and, even if it gets banned, malicious players will still find other ways to do what they want, so should we let them ruin the game for everyone?

Thanks for reading.

3 Likes
#14

That’s not actually true:

Fan fact; it’s actually far far easier to automatically moderate images than it is text. You can train an AI with a huge set of images (or array of pixel positions, this can be applied to roblox) and you’ll get a fairly accurate AI!

However, it’s stupidly, enormously difficult to moderate text - there’s far too much variation. Think about all the little ways you can slightly alter a message to bypass the filter; new methods of doing this come out every day.

5 Likes
#16

At the end of the day all an image is is an array of pixels. You can apply a lot of optimisation tricks to make image analysis take just milliseconds.

Yes, it’s called OCR. I recommend you read up on it - very interesting!

2 Likes
#17

Do you as a human physically capture each individual of those million pixels to be able to recognise what the image is conveying? :stuck_out_tongue:

AI uses dimensionality reduction and other clever tricks to reduce the size of the problem significantly.

3 Likes
#19

Just to add, (in mostly opinion), even roblox itself has filtering issues and some users can swear outside of the filters, upload inappropropriate content, and even make very and highly inappropriate games. Moderation of user-created / user-generated content is up to the combined tasks of in-game / content moderators as well as users who report the events themselves for moderator review.

Banning drawing games, to me, is as reasonable as banning catalog item wearing games (or even the catalog itself), building games, music composition games, hell even VR games or the chat system. Online interaction isn’t even rated by the ESRB for a reason. While something like a “nsfw detector” that filters all inappropriate content would be awesome, it is not really feasible and humans continue to be more accurate at deducing and reporting bad behavior.

If you see something inappropriate, feel free to do something about it, but this doesn’t mean that just because the internet exists, no one should be allowed to use it because trolls also coexist. Best you can and should be able to do is be a minature content cop or help handle cases yourself by being a volunteer or paid moderator for whatever games you work on, own, or are hired for.

Unfortunately, playing any online game means you automatically sign up to potentially see bad, crude, and disgusting things and behavior, either visually, audibly, or what have you (unless it is the most filtered game in the universe). This is just human nature but thankfully this does not exist everywhere and modern culture is already used to it and also enforces heavy moderation.

5 Likes
#20

I understand where people come by of saying they DO NOT agree with drawing games.
It could have an affect on people live streaming for a younger audience, and could ruin a players experience with that game if people do not try their suggested drawing.

There are many solutions to fixing that issue by simply kicking that drawer from drawing based on votes from the players trying to guess it.

  • A developer could make a report option if the player has drawn a profound image that players do not want to see. This can be very helpful into stopping people.
  • A developer can make a report channel on their discord or media page to report users that have drawn a disgusting image as well to make it easier.
1 Like
#21

Let’s say there is a bad actor who is in a drawing game just to draw NSFW images, or write NSFW things. There are two possibilities for each player.

A: They are too young and/or too innocent to understand what it is, and therefore it may confuse them, and they will either ignore it, or ask their parents about it. Their parents will then take the action they deem responsible whether that being tell the kid they can’t play the game anymore, or something else.

B: The kid knows what the drawing is, and is therefore mature enough to make their own decision whether that is laugh at it, ignore it, leave the game, etc.

I don’t think any harm is really done in either scenario, other than perhaps a developer losing players. All drawing games should just have a vote kick function so that bad actors can be gotten rid of without outside interception.

5 Likes
#22

They already use bots to moderate items so it shouldn’t be to much difficulty to adapt the bot to work with drawings.

1 Like