The ‘Nazi gas chambers’ in metaverse game played by children as young as seven
AN ONLINE gaming platform popular with primary school children around the world hosted sick ‘Nazi experiences’ featuring gas chambers and dead bodies.
Roblox, which is rated as suitable for children as young as seven, hit the headlines last week for allowing virtual sex parties with bondage acts and strippers.
Now the Mail on Sunday can reveal that it also offered a vile ‘experience’ called Camp Concentration – including a room in which players could click ‘execute’ to release deadly gas from showerheads.
The horrific virtual concentration camp, discovered by one of our reporters, also included a blazing funeral pyre of dead avatars – the on-screen characters that represent those playing the game.
German flags and the German cross flew outside Lego-style watch towers alongside rows of avatars dressed in Nazi uniform, statues of soldiers with guns, prisoners and a crematorium oven. Players could even watch and comment on avatars’ deaths.
An avatar created by the Mail on Sunday reporter who investigated the game was able to access cell blocks and lock itself in to ‘experience’ the plight of prisoners in the Second World War camps.
Outside the camp’s wall was a section of railway that appeared to represent the death trains used to transport millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust.
Last night, Tanya Carter, of the
Safe Schools Alliance campaign group, said: ‘We are horrified to hear of Nazi rooms featuring dead bodies and gas chambers.
‘This is particularly disturbing in a climate of rising antisemitism.
‘There are serious safeguarding issues with the trauma this could cause to children. Parents must be aware of what their children are up to online and talk to them about pitfalls, schools must educate children about online harms and the Government must take action against those that host unsuitable platforms and the predatory adults that frequent them.’
Roblox is an online platform that lets users design and build computer games which others can then play. It was designed by engineers
David Baszucki and Erik Cassel and was intended to be educational. In March 2021, it listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with chief executive Mr Baszucki owning shares worth £3.4billion.
There are more than 40million games to choose from, including ones in which players adopt a virtual pet, live in a fantasy castle or take part in shoot-’em-up challenges and obstacle courses. The sprawling universe of games and digital spaces that users can explore within the platform is considered to be an early version of the ‘metaverse’ – an online world in which people are one day predicted to do most of their socialising and working. The game world is moderated, but it is so large that monitors have trouble policing it all.
Last week, Roblox was criticised for hosting games called ‘condos’ in
‘Disturbing in a climate of rising antisemitism’
which avatars simulate sex. There were nearly 50million daily players in 180 countries on Roblox last year. A report by the children’s charity 5Rights estimated that half of British children aged between six and nine play on the platform at least once a week.
Last night, Roblox said: ‘We have zero tolerance for content or behaviours that promote or glorify extremism, including antisemitism. We have removed the experiences in question and banned the individuals who created them. We work tirelessly to maintain a platform that is safe, civil and inclusive, and use manual and automated detection tools to swiftly remove experiences that do not comply with our community standards.’