I remember the first time I was told a video game could make someone dangerous.
It was the late 90s. The graphics were blocky, the blood was pixelated, and the panic was very real. Adults spoke in hushed urgency about what these games were doing to young minds. They said games were rewiring them, desensitizing them, turning play into something darker.
I was already in my thirties.
Old enough to know the difference between fiction and reality. Old enough to see that what people feared was not the game itself, but what they did not understand about it. Being an active gamer during this time, I was watching an entire generation be judged for something that looked unfamiliar to the people in charge.
And even then, the verdict felt prewritten.
Games were the problem.
Decades later, the story has not changed. Only the names have.
This time, it is Roblox, pulled into the spotlight after a group of teenagers in the Philippines were reported to have plotted a school attack. Almost instantly, the narrative hardened into something familiar. Kids. Online. A game. Influence. The conclusion feels inevitable, as if we have all read this script before.
Because we have.
Every generation finds its scapegoat. Once, it was comic books. Then rock music. Then television. Then Dungeons & Dragons.Then video games. The pattern is as predictable as it is persistent. Something new captures the attention of the young, something terrible happens, and suddenly the two are fused together in the public imagination.
It is comforting, in a way. It gives fear a shape. A name. Something you can point to and say, there, that is what caused it.
But comfort and truth are rarely the same thing.
Because the truth is far less convenient.
What happened in the Philippines did not begin with a game. It did not emerge from a level, or a quest, or a virtual world gone too far. It unfolded in quieter, less visible corners of the internet. It grew in chat room conversations, in exchanges, in the slow and subtle ways influence takes root. The game may have been the meeting place, but it was never the architect.
Blaming the game is like blaming the room where a conversation happened, rather than the words that were spoken inside it.
And yet, we keep doing it.
For over 30 years, video games have carried this accusation. Somewhere between the pixels and the play, they are said to plant the seeds of real world violence. It is a claim that has been studied, debated, and revisited across decades. Still, no clear causal link has held up under scrutiny. If games truly turned players into perpetrators, the world would look very different by now.
Gaming is no longer a niche hobby. It is global, woven into the everyday lives of millions, even billions. If exposure alone were enough, we would not be talking about isolated incidents. We would be facing an epidemic.
We are not.
What we are facing is something far more complex, and far more difficult to confront.
Young people today do not just log on to play. They log on to connect. To talk. To belong. And in those spaces, open and fluid and often poorly understood by the adults tasked with regulating them, there are vulnerabilities. Not because of the games themselves, but because of the people who move within them.
Influence no longer arrives in obvious forms. It does not announce itself with a headline or a warning. It builds slowly, through familiarity. Through trust. Through repetition. A conversation here. A suggestion there. An idea introduced, then reinforced, then normalized.
This is not something you can ban with a platform.
Because it does not live in the platform.
It lives in the spaces between people.
And that is what makes the current reaction so troubling.
The call to restrict or suspend access to Roblox may feel decisive, even necessary. It signals action. It reassures the public that something is being done. But if the goal is to prevent the next incident, we have to ask an uncomfortable question.
Are we solving the problem, or are we just removing its most visible surface?
Because when we focus on the game, we risk ignoring the system that allowed something far more dangerous to unfold. The gaps in moderation. The migration of conversations into private channels. The lack of digital literacy that leaves young users unequipped to recognize when they are being manipulated.
These are not easy problems to fix. They do not lend themselves to quick headlines or clean solutions. But they are the problems that matter.
Fear, especially when it involves children, demands immediacy. It pushes us toward action, even if that action is incomplete. But history has shown what happens when we act on fear without fully understanding its cause.
We end up fighting the wrong enemy.
And the real one adapts.
It moves. It evolves. It finds new spaces, new platforms, new ways in. Because the issue was never the game to begin with.
It was always the people behind the screen.
I think back to that moment in the 90s, watching the panic unfold from a distance, already old enough to question it. The language has changed. The platforms have changed. But the instinct to blame what we do not understand remains exactly the same.
Video games were never the threat.
And they still are not.
But misunderstanding them might be.
