The Future of Kid-Friendly Online Spaces

By Bee Wertheimer | October 13, 2025 | 2:30pm

Video Games Features Roblox

The Future of Kid-Friendly Online Spaces

Back in the olden days of the early 2000s, the Internet enjoyed a golden age of free MMORPGs targeted toward children. Club Penguin, Wizard101, ToonTown, Webkinz, and Poptropica were all featured in the little password notebook I kept on my desk when I was eight (and had a better understanding of online safety). There were a wide variety of free online spaces to choose from, whether you wanted to be a fairy in Pixie Hollow, a horse girl in Bella Sara, or a dragonkeeper in JumpStart, each with their own flavor of gameplay.

Like many others, I spent my adolescence bouncing between sites, sampling their various assortments of minigames. I loved these games simply because they were the only ones I had access to. When I reached a paywall, I shrugged and skipped on to another site. If I got really invested in a certain title—Free Realms in particular captivated me because it was edgy—I’d beg my dad for a $10 gift card at the convenience store.

My fond memories of these games are tinted with rosy nostalgia and propped up by their stimulation of my own active imagination; I would be lying if I said they were remarkably designed, or even provided a great place for children to exist online. The minigames were often generic. The best content was barred behind microtransactions and paid memberships aggressively marketed toward the most vulnerable demographic (my Twilight-loving self couldn’t resist the siren call of the Free Realms wolf mount sold for $5.49). And, despite the limited communication features, I had my fair share of unpleasant encounters with other players.

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Almost all of these sites have since shuttered, but one game has outlived its compatriots. When it comes to current kid-friendly MMORPGs, it’s no secret that Roblox has a monopoly. In August, Roblox broke Steam’s record for most concurrent users on a platform, with 47.3 million people playing at the same time. It is the tenth-largest video game company in the world by revenue.

Unlike the other popular free games of the early 2000s, Roblox is designed to rely solely on user-generated content created with the gamemaking tools the program provides. Players are encouraged to develop Roblox games in the hopes of profiting from them; in addition to a paid membership, Roblox contains its own economy, granting players the ability to sell and purchase items. This allows creators to earn revenue from their work, and also means the game has a built-in stock exchange, as well as a number of black markets.

But Roblox isn’t the only game encouraging children to trade stocks, and modern free-to-play games have adopted new predatory tactics like gacha to manipulate kids into spending a whole lot more money than the fixed monthly memberships from the days of yore, because these industries are financially propped up by outlier “whale” players who rack up insanely large purchases.

Furthermore, despite being designed for children, free-to-play multiplayer games refuse to implement meaningful safeguards in their communication features to prevent predatory behavior, instead opting to integrate AI facial recognition for surveillance under the guise of age verification. As the Internet continues to mature, it becomes increasingly hostile toward everyone, and, most pressingly, for children.

I invested so much of my childhood into free multiplayer games because I grew up with busy parents in the American suburbs. Suburban infrastructure isolates families, and isolation is justified by the conviction that other people are dangerous; none of my school friends lived within walking distance of my house, and my parents wouldn’t let me walk to the library by myself for fear I would be kidnapped off the sidewalk. My only option then was to turn to the Internet, where I could interact with others from the safety of my home—and, unbeknownst to my parents, I met a lot of dangerous people.

So what does the ideal online space for children look like? Perhaps a virtual library would be a good start—a government-funded site designed with the intention of free education and socialization, with robust safety features embedded in its communication system. But the issue of children’s safety online cannot be addressed without acknowledging the material conditions that lead them to the Internet in the first place; humans are social creatures who need real-life social interaction to survive, and online communication is not a viable alternative. This isn’t to say kids should never go on the Internet, or shouldn’t have access to an online space earnestly designed for their safety. But the necessity of the Internet as a social crutch for children due to lack of physical autonomy is itself a pressing issue, and it won’t be solved by half-hearted safety features or thinly-veiled mass surveillance.

Bee Wertheimer writes about and makes games in New York City. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their site beewertheimer.com.