Tag: video games

Kentucky AG sues Roblox after Charlie Kirk ‘assassination simulators’ found on platform

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman has filed a lawsuit against Roblox, alleging the company failed to protect minors from sexual predators and explicit material, including violent simulations depicting the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Filed on Monday, the suit accuses the California gaming platform of operating as a “playground for pedophiles” by neglecting to implement any meaningful age verification, moderation, or parental safeguards. Roblox, which reports more than 111 million active monthly users, is used by roughly two-thirds of American children aged 9 to 12.

According to the complaint, predators frequently create fake accounts posing as children to contact and groom minors. “Roblox is designed to allow predators easy access to children,” prosecutors wrote, alleging that the company’s inaction has resulted in “harassment, kidnapping, trafficking, violence, and sexual assault.”

The lawsuit also highlights the appearance of “Charlie Kirk assassination simulators” following the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination at Utah Valley University last month. Prosecutors said the user-created games allowed children “as young as five” to view animated depictions of the September 10 shooting.

At a press conference, Coleman called on Roblox to implement stronger parental controls, improved content filters, and more stringent verification procedures. Kentucky mother of three Courtney Norris joined him, saying she had once considered Roblox a safe option for her children. “I came to realize, later than I would like to admit, that it actually is the ‘Wild West’ of the internet, targeted at children,” she said, according to the New York Post.

Kentucky’s legal action follows similar cases in Louisiana, Iowa, and North Carolina, where parents allege their children were exploited through the platform. In one instance, a 13-year-old girl was reportedly trafficked across several states and raped after meeting a predator on Roblox.

In a statement, Roblox said it maintains “rigorous safety measures” including artificial intelligence monitoring, 24/7 moderation, and age-estimation technology. “No system is perfect, and our work on safety is never done,” the company said.

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PURE EVIL: Leftists on Roblox Are Uploading Sick Games for Children to Relive Charlie Kirk Shooting

We are truly up against evil.

Roblox announced on Thursday that the company had taken down more than 100 experiences referencing Charlie Kirk and his assassination on their platform.

According to its app, Roblox is the ultimate virtual universe that lets you create, share experiences with friends, and be anything you can imagine. The game is very popular with children.

Over half of the users on Roblox are under the age of 16.

Rep. Paulina Luna was first to expose that Roblox had a game on their platform referencing Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

The radical left is desperate to promote their evil to the hearts and minds of innocent children.
These are also the same people who laughed at Charlie’s death.

They really don’t care about life and they must be defeated.

Steve Bannon and Rasmussen Reports’ COO Mark Mitchell discussed this on the War Room on Saturday morning.
Via Karli Bonne.

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MSNBC guest blames COVID lockdowns and video games for latest trans shooting

Leftists are twisting themselves into knots trying to explain away the cause for a mass shooting in Minnesota as anything but another transgender who acted out murderously against innocent children.

In the aftermath of the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, MSNBC featured a guest who suggested that Robin Westman – formerly Robert Westman – may have been influenced to open fire on kids in a religious setting by bad parenting, playing video games and the COVID lockdowns.

During Wednesday’s edition of “Chris Jansing Reports,” national security analyst Christopher O’Leary speculated about the possible motivations of the alleged shooter who had posted disturbing video online along with a manifesto that was quickly removed after the incident that left two kids dead. The MSNBC expert also pointed to online radicalization in forums on Reddit during the conversation.

“So when you talk about radicalization, you talk about writings that reference suicide, extremely violent thoughts and ideas, and those multiple videos that are posted online. What do these groups do when you say they radicalize?” Jansing asked.

“So, you know, whether it’s a terrorist organization or, you know, the variety of ideologies that different people follow, they’re following them because they have susceptibility,” O’Leary responded. “There’s various push-pull factors. Maybe it’s some kind of mental break. Maybe it’s their life has, you know, gone down the toilet and they have no hope.”

“Maybe they have bad parenting, a variety of things,” he continued. “The effects of COVID and the isolation and what’s called the gamification influence, where young men are growing up, you know, being raised by video games, all of those things are involved in really people mobilizing towards violence more routinely in these things.”

“But you will also see people get radicalized solely on these video games through headsets. They may never go on the Internet otherwise. So there’s a variety of things that, you know, threat professionals look at now and trends. But we’re seeing this repeated,” O’Leary said.

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“Breeding Ground For Sex Predators”: Louisiana Sues Roblox Months After Hindenburg Alleged “Pedophile Hellscape”

Roblox, the $27 billion online gaming platform pitched as a safe creative playground for kids, is now facing serious legal firepower from Louisiana’s top law enforcement officer. On Thursday, Attorney General Liz Murrill sued Roblox Corp. in state court, accusing the California-based company of enabling predators to target children and “facilitate the distribution of child sexual abuse material” on its platform.

“Today I’m suing Roblox — the #1 gaming site for children and teens – and a breeding ground for sex predators,” Murrill said in a statement announcing the suit. “Due to Roblox’s lack of safety protocols, it endangers the safety of the children of Louisiana. Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety. Every parent should be aware of the clear and present danger poised to their children by Roblox so they can prevent the unthinkable from ever happening in their own home.”

The lawsuit alleges Roblox “knowingly and intentionally fails to implement basic safety controls to protect child users from predators” and fails to adequately warn parents about the dangers on its platform. It cites years of alleged failures, pointing to games that have appeared on Roblox such as Escape to Epstein Island, Diddy Party, and Public Bathroom Simulator Vibe, which the AG’s office says have included simulated sexual activity, including “child gang rape.”

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Steam Purges Games Under Pressure from Visa and Mastercard’s Unseen Censorship

Somewhere between your mouse click and a purchase, a private boardroom full of executives quietly decided what you’re allowed to see, support, or sell. They don’t run your favorite website. They’re not elected lawmakers. But if Visa or Mastercard doesn’t like the look of a transaction, that transaction ceases to exist. That piece of content, that creator, that platform: gone.

There are a lot of complaints in tech circles about who’s getting deplatformed by YouTube this week. Meanwhile, the most consequential censorship in the digital economy has nothing to do with social media and everything to do with whether a little plastic rectangle will greenlight your purchase. And there’s no appeals process. No trial. Just a silent ax falling from a credit card duopoly that nobody elected and nobody seems able to challenge.

Take the recent purge of over 50 adult-themed games from Steam, the dominant digital PC game store. No new law had passed. It was a threat from Visa and Mastercard, quietly relayed like an old-school mafia warning. Valve, Steam’s parent company, made it clear: “We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks.”

In other words: “We’d like to keep making money.”

Valve didn’t wake up with a sudden newfound sense of moral hygiene. It was the payment processors. They pulled the fire alarm, and Steam complied like any rational hostage trying to keep the electricity on.

That’s what happens when the pipes of global commerce are guarded by a pair of unaccountable financial institutions that somehow got into the censorship business without anyone noticing.

Visa and Mastercard are no longer just companies. They’re gatekeepers of moral acceptability.

One day your art is fine, the next it’s too spicy for the algorithms; or worse, for the boardroom optics team. And if they decide your platform has crossed some invisible line? That’s it. No explanation required. No appeals offered. The economic oxygen gets cut off and there’s no recourse.

It’s one thing to be beholden to government regulations. It’s another when your business is held hostage by a pair of logos with an embossed hologram.

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Call to charge gamers who carry out virtual rapes in online metaverse as real-life sex attackers

Gamers who carry out virtual rapes in the ‘metaverse‘ should be charged as real-life sex attackers, a legal expert insists.

Assaults are rife on the digital ‘avatars’ used by women and children in the online world, which, it is claimed, can leave them with trauma similar to real ordeals.

Players wearing virtual reality headsets often use interactive gloves and bodysuits to experience physical touch in the 3D games, meaning they will feel an assault on their avatar.

Professor Clare McGlynn, a law expert at Durham University, branded the metaverse a ‘ticking time bomb’ and warned that the number of sex attacks is set to ‘explode’ in the next few years.

Her paper, published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, found that a rising toll of ‘meta-rapes’ are going unpunished in the unregulated digital spaces. 

It cites a police investigation after a teenager was ‘gang-raped’, with officers concluding that she suffered the same psychological trauma as a real-life victim.

The case last year, revealed by the Mail, was thought to have been the first time in the UK that police had investigated a virtual sex offence.

Professor McGlynn’s study, with Carlotta Rigotti of Leiden University in the Netherlands, proposes that existing laws should be applied to ‘appropriate cases of meta-rape’.

She said the law covers touching with any part of the body, ‘with anything else and through anything’, adding that it could be interpreted to include touching through an avatar.

‘The metaverse is growing rapidly and we see abuse, sexual violence and hate speech,’ she added. 

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Gay Dragons And Black Samurai: Woke Game Companies In Crisis As Consumers Walk Away

The entertainment sector has been at the core of the woke movement over the course of the last ten years, integrating Critical Race Theory, feminism, gay and trans propaganda, climate change hysteria, anti-gun rights messaging and pro-socialist rhetoric into their content at breakneck speed.  There has always been progressive politics in movies and TV, but this new social justice takeover was a highly coordinated tidal wave; a Blitzkrieg of hard-left ideology into every possible media space.

One group of consumers noticed the threat very early on – Gamers picked up on the leftist subversion of their hobby almost immediately in 2013.  They would go on to launch “Gamergate” in 2014, a movement to expose the feminist hijacking of games journalism and the hobby at large.  They were punished for their foresight, accused of “misogyny”, “bigotry”, “racism” and even terrorism, but they were correct.  There was indeed a far-left agenda to dominate the gaming world and extort companies into adopting social justice propaganda. 

The plan succeeded spectacularly.  Most corporations eventually folded and instituted DEI programs outright.  Gaming developers were some of the worst perpetrators and their products quickly became replete with woke indoctrination.  The one thing they didn’t count on, though, was a consumer revolt. 

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New study shows violent video games do not make teens more aggressive

A pair of researchers with the University of Oxford and Cardiff University has conducted a study aimed at determining whether playing violent games cause young people to become more aggressive. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein describe their study that involved surveying approximately 1,000 teens and their parents in Great Britain and what they learned from them.

As video games have become more life-like and violent, people are questioning whether teenagers playing such games might become more aggressive. Some studies have been conducted, but thus far, but results to date are inconclusive. The researchers with this new effort suggest past efforts to study the impact of video games on teams excluded a critical factor—the opinions of the parents. To overcome that problem, the researchers surveyed approximately 1000 14- and 15-year-old adolescents of both genders and their parents.

The teens were asked questions surrounding video game play, such as how much they played, what kinds of games were involved, and the ratings of the games. They were also asked if they thought games made them more aggressive, particularly immediately after playing. The parents were asked similar questions regarding video game play by their child and perceived aggressive tendencies.

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Mandatory Inclusion in Video Games: A Threat to the Essence of Entertainment?

In the last decade, video games have gone from being simple entertainment tools to becoming a powerful cultural platform capable of influencing millions of people around the world. However, this evolution has also turned the industry into an ideological battlefield, where the focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) generates debates about its impact on the quality and essence of games.

Is inclusion a tool for cultural enrichment or an imposition that compromises the player experience?

The rise of DEI ideology in video games is no coincidence. According to a report by the Entertainment Software Association, more than 71% of Americans play video games, and half spend more than eight hours a week on this activity. With such a wide audience, video games have become an ideal medium for spreading political and social ideas.

Recent titles such as God of War: Ragnarök have reimagined characters based on Norse mythologies, such as Angrboda, depicting her as a black woman.

While proponents argue that these changes promote inclusivity, detractors criticize the lack of respect for the cultural traditions that inspired the game. In a similar case, Spider-Man 2 received praise for “its relentless promotion of queerness,” which created polarization among gamers.

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Pokémon Go Player Data Being Used to Train AI & Construct ‘Large Geospatial Model’

Millions of users’ location and imaging data is being compiled to construct a global virtual model of the real world, ostensibly to build new augmented reality experiences, the company behind the popular mobile game Pokémon Go has revealed.

In a blog update Tuesday, Niantic explained they’ve been enlisting Pokémon Go players to participate in efforts to construct a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), which the company says “could guide users through the world, answer questions, provide personalized recommendations, help with navigation, and enhance real-world interactions.”

The company says the LGM constructs a comprehensive AI world model by leveraging its Visual Positioning System (VPS), which was “built from user scans, taken from different perspectives and at various times of day, at many times during the years, and with positioning information attached, creating a highly detailed understanding of the world. This data is unique because it is taken from a pedestrian perspective and includes places inaccessible to cars.”

“The LGM will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems,” Niantic said. “As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System, which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” the company wrote.

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