As you may know, yesterday, a student at the high school attached to Ateneo de Zamboanga University walked armed into a classroom, fired at a teacher and missed, moved to a second room, and shot and killed a fellow student. He then went up to the fifth floor and killed himself. Two others were wounded. The whole thing was livestreamed, filmed in first-person with a body camera like something ripped straight out of a shooter game.
The Interior Secretary of the Philippines stood up at a press briefing today and said he’s confident, pending a forensic review of the kid’s devices, that the shooter was influenced by Roblox. Not the game itself, he clarified, but the chat groups embedded inside it, which is where he says the radicalization happens.
Witnesses reportedly saw the shooter playing it. The Secretary also connected this to an earlier, less publicized case this year, a foiled plot by seven teenagers to attack a school in the Calabarzon region, which also had a Roblox thread running through it.
For anyone who doesn’t have a kid glued to a tablet, Roblox is a platform where users build and play games created by other users inside Roblox itself. It’s a game containing thousands of smaller games, some of which make real money for their creators. It sits alongside Minecraft and Fortnite as one of the biggest things in gaming for kids right now.
On paper, it’s a genuinely impressive creative sandbox that teaches actual design and coding skills. In practice, like every open platform ever built, it’s also become a place where the worst impulses of its userbase find room to grow, and Roblox’s own app store description proudly advertises “hardcore tactical shooters” right alongside the racing games, so let’s not pretend the company doesn’t know exactly what’s on its platform.
Now, I want to head off the inevitable eye roll before it happens, because I know how this sounds. I’ve been a gamer for fifty years, going back to the Atari VCS my dad got us for Christmas before it was even called the 2600.
I’m not some out-of-touch parent who just discovered video games exist and decided they’re the devil. I’ve watched every wave of gaming moral panic come and go, and I’ve mocked plenty of them myself. So when I tell you this isn’t that, I need you to actually believe me, because Roblox has a well-documented predator problem that long predates any of this, with adults using its chat and roleplay features to groom kids the old-fashioned way.
On top of that, it’s become a known gathering spot for the so-called True Crime Community, or TCC, a subculture I’ve written about before that treats mass shooters, especially the Columbine killers, not as monsters but as icons. It recruits lonely kids, bullied kids, and kids desperate for somewhere to belong, and it gives them a mythology to plug themselves into.
I’ve also written before about the school shooting simulators that keep surfacing on Roblox itself. User-made recreations of Columbine, Parkland, and Uvalde, complete with child NPCs who hide under desks and play dead when the shooting starts.
Roblox takes them down when they’re reported, and new ones pop up under new names within days, because moderating a platform this size is whack-a-mole with a toy hammer.
The TCC treats these simulators as another form of tribute, something to play, discuss, and rank against each other, the same way they rank the real attacks. A kid who wanders into the wrong Roblox server isn’t just risking exposure to a predator anymore. They’re risking exposure to an entire ecosystem built around glorifying exactly the kind of attack that just happened in Zamboanga.
So let’s put it together. A first-person, body-camera livestream styled like a video game. An interior secretary publicly naming Roblox and its chat groups as the likely radicalization point after the platform surfaced in a separate foiled plot in the same country. A subculture that treats both the real killers and the fictional recreations of them as content to worship.
None of that proves anything on its own, and I’ll keep saying that until there’s an actual report to point to. But it lines up awfully well with the theory I laid out after Zamboanga first happened, that this looks less like a copycat chasing headlines and more like another shooting with the TCC’s fingerprints on it.
It lines up with something bigger too, that this ugly, homegrown American export of ours, the idolization of school shooters, has apparently found its way onto a platform every kid in the world has already installed, and it’s now showing up in classrooms on the other side of the planet.
U-S-A!
U-S-A!
U-S-A!
(Source)
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