The avatar of an ICE agent surrounds a man with a Mexican hat. They upload it to a black truck with the acronym of the Immigration and Customs Control Service. Four characters escort him. Two carry long weapons. It is not a real raid, it is Roblox. And it is also the new scenario of a protest against the immigration policies of the Donald Trump administration, against deportations and against fear.
Roblox It is presented as a collaborative and educational platform designed for active learning and creative exploration. , encourages “responsible digital citizenship” and claims to work with security experts to protect its youngest users. But what began as an environment to build worlds and live adventures has been resignified by their younger players – many of them Latinos and children of immigrants – as a trench of resistance.
In this pixelated universe, avatars raise: “WE ARE NOT ILLEGAL”, “STOP ICE”, “KEEP FAMILIES TOGETHER”, “ICE Out of California” y “BROWN AND PROUD”. Some users play migratory agents, others face them. The confrontations are recorded, edited and climb to Tiktok, where millions of reactions accumulate. A phrase is repeated strongly in subtitles and comments: “Even in Roblox you’re not safe from the cops”.
Digital protests are not new. During the Covid-19 crisis, video games such as Roblox, Minecraft y Animal Crossing They became spaces of political expression for young people marching virtually against, Russian invasion in Ukraine, Violence in Gaza or femicides in Latin America. Whole communities found not only an escape in video games, but a tool to tell stories, claim justice and express solidarity. But this time there is something different: the protagonists are Latin children, many children children, who are organizing to report a real threat that they know closely.
. It is filtered into daily conversations, publications in Tiktok and even in the classrooms. “How do we get to this?” Asks a user in a video. One possible response is another user, in a clip that has been shared hundreds of times: “What we do as adults affects our children 100%. Hate is taught. For something some play like ICE … and others, organize protests.”
In Riverdale, California, an English teacher began the classes of her summer school with a usual dynamic: ask their students to write about their vacations. He also asked them: “What are you afraid of?” I expected common answers: to darkness, to insects, to the heights. But this time, most wrote phrases such as: “I am afraid to take my dad,”. He has been teaching for 19 years and had never read something like that. “My heart broke,” he said in a video. “But at the same time, knowing that there are children protesting in Roblox… that gave me hope. ”
This type of expressions has marked a change in the way minors participate in political conversations. If they wrote letters to newspapers or called radio programs, today a mobile phone is enough to broadcast an opinion and share it with the world.
When the game becomes protest
To understand what this form of child protest means – which occurs in the game – the country spoke with Kishonna L. Gray, a researcher of digital culture and author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. For Gray, these platforms not only allow to imagine alternative futures, but also channel complex emotions such as fear, rage or anguish. “The game has always been a tool to process trauma,” he explains. “What we are seeing in Roblox It is a deeply emotional and political response from children to a system that has made them feel vulnerable. ”
According to the academic, many adults underestimate. “We have treated children as if they were not able to understand what is happening. But due to the convergence of technologies in their lives, they are exposed to a large amount of content, from good to the bad, going through everything intermediate and beyond, and we have not provided them with the right tools to understand it.”
This creation occurs in digital worlds where they not only play, but also investigate, discuss, build narratives and express what they cannot say at home or at school. “Children are using the tools at their disposal: Tiktok, consoles, avatars. They use them because they have no other spaces to express themselves. And if adults do not want to hear them in the real world, they will know how to raise their voice in the virtual.”
What should be a fantasy space thus becomes a digital replica of uprooting and the fear of losing a loved one without prior notice. “Roblox It is your scenario, your communication channel and refuge. But also, today is his battlefield. ”
