Or maybe I can, a little bit. But it’s just not the same.
My life is a busy one. During the week, I find myself constantly rushing between classes and work, filling my downtime with studying and internship applications. While I still get to enjoy quality time with friends and the numbing anesthesia of Instagram Reels, I always find myself exhausted at the end of the day.
I do enjoy this busy existence, but I get the impression that human beings were not meant to live this way. As such, over the weekends and the breaks and the odd days off, I revert to a state of hibernation as much as I possibly can. I can fill my time with more relaxing activities like heading to the gym, making a favorite recipe or playing a favorite video game. As a nostalgic person, these tend to be games that I have enjoyed for a very long time.
My childhood was dominated by sandbox games; I spent most of my time jumping between the holy trinity of Roblox, Minecraft and Terraria. Consequently, these are the games I always find myself returning to. While two have retained their magic, one just isn’t the same.
When I boot up a new world in Minecraft, I can immediately start punching the nearest tree just as I did years ago. The process of building a house and exploring the world feels the same as it always has, even as Minecraft itself has changed. I can hop on Hypixel — still one of the game’s biggest servers — and enjoy Bed Wars (a capture-the-flag-esque game) the same way I always did, even if the meta strategies have changed completely. Likewise, I can get just as much enjoyment from starting a new game in Terraria, building houses for the game’s various non-player characters and defeating various eldritch horrors.
Roblox is different.
The title of this article is somewhat of a lie. I do indeed boot up Roblox from time to time and will likely keep doing so in the future. But I can never go back to my Roblox — the one I grew up on.
The feeling starts exactly where the game does: on Roblox’s home page. At the top of my screen rests the “friends” tab, now labeled “connections” in a bit of a LinkedIn-esque rebrand. Whatever they are, I have a little more than 100. Some I faintly remember, but most are people who I must have met once in a random lobby when I was 10 and never interacted with again. Even if I had any desire to do so (and I doubt I ever will), none of them are ever active.
I scroll down. The layout has changed and I’m not used to it. There are two tabs of recommended games, one featuring popular content and another algorithmically tailored to my “interests.” It doesn’t do a very good job, though, given that it’s pulling on the gaming preferences of a far younger version of me. Finally arrives the continue playing tab, a perfectly fossilized record of the games I used to enjoy.
And whatever happened to those games? Some are alive and well; Natural Disaster Survival is the same as it ever was. Others, like Doomspire BrickBattle have shrunk substantially in popularity, but still possess a large enough player base that I can revisit from time to time. Many other games were not so fortunate. Innovation Labs is dead, never to have its nuclear core blow up the entire map ever again. It lives on in several successor games, but these all have fallen far from the heights of popularity the original enjoyed in its prime.
Of course, I didn’t solely enjoy big games that witnessed millions of players over their lifetimes. Equally as nostalgic for me are a series of tycoon, combat and parkour games that did not feature large player bases, but had spirit. The roleplaying genre was hit particularly hard: All the old games where I once pretended to be a superhero, a traveling wizard or a cool Jedi are now all dead. But what would I even do if they still had active player bases? Spamming “*summons invincible force field*” in chat ceases to provide much enjoyment once your prefrontal cortex hits a certain level of development. One time over the summer, I revived a long-familiar wizard character to wander the map of Kingdom Life II just to look at the old pixelated scenery. It was a nice trip down memory lane, but there is nothing left for me to return to now.
There are new games in Roblox of course, and some look quite good. I am consistently impressed by how players manage to do everything but Build a Boat for Treasure in the game of the same name. The rest, however, seem hollowed out. The landscape of creativity on the site is a pale, over-monetized shadow of what once existed — or at least that’s the impression that sticks out like a sore thumb.
This trickles down to the variety of games that exist just to be shitposts, as I found out alongside my sister when we decided to check some of them out one random evening. The first game we played was a parkour course themed around the most illustrious and respectable pillars of modern brain rot, such as Artificial Intelligence baby. The game was simple, just jumping up an increasingly steep hill, and also impossible to complete without spending money on in-game items. We did not feel like doing this, and as such, switched to another game after about five minutes.
Our next choice was equally stupid — a “my wife left me” tycoon —, but it was at least slightly more fun to play. There was a basic gameplay loop of gathering stuff from your house and selling it — nothing particularly interesting, but at least it took more than thirty seconds to set up. It also had a pop-up notification that appeared every 90 seconds or so, encouraging you to buy in-game cash with your real-world money, of course. We messed around in that game for a while longer, but quit it all the same.
We did not continue exploring brain rot games anymore after that.
It’s not that I expected those brain rot games to be good — just stating the very idea makes it sound absurd. However, I did expect to be able to play them without being spammed with pop-ups urging me to make microtransactions. I expected creators to put some sort of creative spirit, humor or mere interest into the concepts of their games. I did not find it. I don’t doubt that it exists in Roblox somewhere, but the platform is transforming into a reservoir of slop, and it seems to have been doing so for a while.
It’s tempting to say I don’t like Roblox anymore simply because I grew out of it, but I don’t think that’s the whole truth. Minecraft and Terraria are both still enjoyable to me, as are non-sandbox childhood favorites like Super Smash Bros and Knights of the Old Republic. Perhaps, then, Roblox was always a little bit terrible, simply as a function of how the game itself was put together. But this also doesn’t make sense. It’s theoretically infinitely customizable — more of a game hosting platform with its own physics engine than a traditional game — so it should be able to accommodate an unlimited amount of creativity and passion. I believe that the quality of the old games, even the bad ones, reflect that it once did.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the game itself has gotten worse. The company and many of its individual game creators are now more motivated by profit than passion. Roblox now stands among the many old bastions of the internet becoming increasingly enshittified and unsatisfying to use. Perhaps the game was too busy getting sued by individuals and state governments for its repeated failure to address the presence of child sex offenders on the website. Though, if they didn’t care about that, I don’t see why they would care about their platform turning to slop.
Daily Arts Writer Glenn Hedin can be reached at heglenn@umich.edu.
