If all players are invested, we can build a better Bloxburg

If you’re not a gamer, perhaps someone has tried to get you into gaming. And if the exercise failed to pique your interest, you will know that peculiar feeling of playing a game that you’re simply not invested in.

I had his experience recently, when my lovely seven-year-old daughter tried to teach me how to play on Roblox, the online gaming platform she is gradually becoming consumed by. I say gaming platform, because from what I can tell, it’s not just a game, it is an ecosystem of games within games!

It’s a fascinating concept, and it was certainly interested in the idea. Sadly, Roblox simply did not grab me in practice. This is possibly due to my pathetically short attention span, but more likely age. The last time I committed myself to a video game, it was a workplace addiction about a decade ago, and more closely aligned to Tetris than any virtual-world approach.

The Roblox game I found myself playing was indeed set in a virtual world – the principality of Bloxburg. The tragedy, of course, was that I simply didn’t care. I had created a character out of some random options, and I was steering it around the environment, but I simply did not give a hoot whether I lived or died. I had no interest in augmenting my environment, or furnishing it with further adornments, let alone spending money on such trinkets.

This of course, is where essentially all of my daughter’s pocket money goes these days – virtual clothing, accessories and capabilities for her avatar. She spends my money on things that do not physically exist.

I have no problem with this – children have been spending their parents’ money on things beyond the physical world ever since music and movies became a thing. But what did strike me was the metaphor of my Bloxburg Apathy.

As I steered my hapless character over a balcony to his doom, doing all I could to hasten my own death to get my game over with, I realised that this was a similar attitude many people have to the physical world, to this place we call society.

As a privileged, middle-class person, I am invested in this world. I care. I care whether I live or die, and I certainly also care for my daughter’s future in it. I want this country, this world, to continue and even to thrive and evolve.

I am plugged into an economy that provides me with a livelihood, my child attends an excellent school, I live in a pleasant flat and I have enough disposable income to keep myself entertained. I have mobility, even now.

However, most of our people do not. In a world as unequal as South Africa, the major proportion of our people do not have as big a material stake in the game as I do. Of course, they love their people and they want the best for them. But are they invested in the current social dispensation as a way to deliver a better life for themselves and their families?

This system, whatever it is, our capitalist, developmental state, that so badly fails to share its resources? Do most of our people believe in it? Do they particularly care any more about playing the game through to its conclusion? Do they have any realistic hope of winning at this game?

Or would they just as easily crash the game and restart? Burn it all down? Even deactivate their profile; create a new account and start from scratch. When you hardly have any Robux, it doesn’t make much difference.

This is what came to me, as I allowed my character to die in the plush ballroom world my daughter had so painstaking steered me into. She watched, aghast as I squandered my Roblox life before her eyes, until she could take it no more, and she jumped into the driver’s seat and took over my character.

I instantly regretted being so flippant with my life. I must get back into Roblox. Perhaps my daughter and I can team up in future. Things can be better when we’re both actually invested, when we both have something to gain.

Perhaps we can share my next investment of Robux, do up the place and make it nice for both of us.

Maybe together, we can build a better Bloxburg.

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