This piece is part of a collection of works commissioned by WeProtect Global Alliance to amplify youth voices at their 2024 global summit.

Gaming is a hobby that’s enjoyed by all age demographics ranging from adults to children. Online games, however, prove to be a major issue when it comes to child safety on the internet. They can be finicky to place safeguards in due to the anonymous nature of most games. This can especially become a problem when children are engaging with these games unsupervised. Here are the issues at hand and some of the ways I believe they can be remedied for a safer future. 

The voice chat feature in most online games is one that many players appreciate as it allows teammates in a game to communicate openly. I personally use it quite often when playing with my friends. However, it can be used in much more sinister and unintended ways. Teenagers can spend hours talking to adults who are much, much older than them in a voice chat completely unsupervised which is definitely not appropriate and would likely not be allowed by their guardian if they knew what was going on. The anonymous nature of the profiles on these games allows predators to easily infiltrate them posing as a friendly and helpful figure looking to help younger and inexperienced players out. This allows them to build a rapport with the community and regular players and use that reputation to exploit younger players. 

Another issue that’s prevalent in games that are popular for teens that world leaders may not know about is the concept of ‘E-dating’ and online dating servers. These are usually custom worlds or servers in games widely played by children made with the sole intent of matching two players together to enter an online relationship. Due to these lobbies usually being unmoderated and unofficial, the issue of age verification shows up again – especially since these servers exist in games that have an ‘E for everyone’ or teen ratings. 18+ servers exist – but because of how easy it is to lie about your age on the internet, most children can bypass that with a simple fake birthday input. This leads to many uncomfortable situations where actual adults are mixed with children in dating servers which is unacceptable and a situation that no child should ever be in at that age. This issue isn’t just exclusive to 18+ servers as well, there are many servers that just include teens and all ages above which I think goes without explanation as to how that’s an enormous issue. 

The ways to combat these problems are difficult, as there’s no clear-cut solution to fixing them. Games can’t just completely remove robust features like voice chat and custom games as they are used by many players with no evil intent and are the basis of making a social experience in an online game. I believe the biggest issue lies in the lack of supervision of the children playing these games. Most parents will take a quick glance at the age rating of a game and perhaps they’ll see a colorful game and assume it’s innocent but will fail to realise what kinds of people their children could be interacting with in these ‘kids’ games. There should be a greater push to educate parents about these online games and how easily their children can be exploited by predators. These games are meant to be played for hours on end, so parents of course can’t spend all their time watching their kids play, but they can monitor them frequently and pay attention to when their children start speaking to other people with a microphone.

We can also push for the implementation of more parental controls and additional monitoring features in these online games. While developers can’t outright remove social features in these games, more robust parental controls would allow the parents to disable them on their end to prevent their children from talking to strangers while playing games. However, some kids would definitely want to talk to their friends – so game developers should implement a feature for parents to remove restrictions with specific individuals to approve social features with certain players only. Videogame companies can also hire more community managers specifically to moderate these servers to crack down on any inappropriate servers and ban anyone who shows signs of being a predator, as these servers are so numerous that it becomes difficult to automate these processes as players find loopholes around them.

As it stands, online games are not fully safe for children to explore unsupervised at all. We have to place a greater emphasis on educating parents to monitor their children when using the internet – not just when playing video games. But of course, it shouldn’t all fall to the parents which is why I think it is crucial to advocate for more features to be added to these games that allow parents to restrict and/or monitor their children’s activity.