For better and, often, worse, traditional video games have calcified. If you check Steam’s top ten most-played games on any given day, you’ll likely find a lineup of the usual suspects: PUBG, DOTA, Counter-Strike, Grand Theft Auto, and the odd recent breakout hit (with a major license attached) like Marvel Rivals. Across the way, on their own clients, you’ll find mirror realm versions of the aforementioned games like Fortnite, Valorant, and League of Legends. But then, in another universe, there’s Roblox, which plays by its own, different set of rules. This week, its latest crop to yield viral fruit, Grow A Garden, made headlines by outpacing anything on Steam. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we discuss how it and other games of its ilk offer young people something that more traditional games don’t.
This time around we’re joined by Aftermath’s newest regular contributor, former Polygon senior reporter Nicole Carpenter to discuss her tenure at the freshly gutted games media institution, as well as how she got into journalism in the first place. She also tells us about the time she got to speak to the voice of Barbie for a story, and she started speaking in character without even being asked. You love to hear it.
Then we delve into the news of the week: First, the community around Google Maps-based location guessing game GeoGuessr protested the game’s inclusion in the Saudi-backed Esports World Cup by blacking out most of the game’s most popular maps… and it worked? Despite the prevailing mentality that corporate interests and oil money will overcome all, GeoGuessr’s developers relented and pulled out of the event. We talk about the ways in which this situation was unique, but conclude that it can still serve as an inspiration to other gaming communities unnerved by the sudden presence of a sportswashing festival on their annual calendars.
After that, we move on to Grow A Garden, a Roblox game Nicole wrote about that has more concurrent players than anything on Steam. Why is it so popular? And what is Roblox offering young people that more traditional games don’t? Lastly, we accept an offer from the King Of All Cosmos and transform Aftermath into a giant ball company.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can roll up the first giant ball with a second, giant-er ball.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nicole: It really is just… you grow a garden. It has the typical Roblox look: It kinda looks like Legos. You’re buying seeds and planting the seeds. You’re waiting a little bit for the seeds to grow; you don’t actually have to wait very long. And then you’re selling those so you can go buy more seeds and then plant them in your garden and sell them. You do that over and over and over and over.
The thing that I think draws people to it is that there’s an RNG element. Your crops can mutate. They can become really rare, so you can get a lot of money. But basically, at its core, it’s watching a number go up, which, you know, universal game activity that draws people back.
There is a social aspect to it: You can have five people per server, all in what is not dissimilar to a community garden. You each have your own plots, and you’re hanging out. There’s events that happen there. The developer has his global commands; he can make stuff happen in the game. They do dance parties. They’re doing one this weekend: the Monster Mash. And they do lightning bolts, mutate your crops – special stuff like that.
When I first started playing it for this story, I was baffled. It’s so simple. It’s so heavily monetized. You can play it without buying anything, but if you want to steal from another person, you have to pay. It’s less than a dollar, which I think can be pretty insidious. That’s a Roblox thing in general: Everything is so cheap that you don’t really realize how it adds up. But as I kept playing, I was like “Is this good?” It’s really satisfying and built around viral moments on short-form platforms like YouTube Shorts or TikTok. There are older people, like people my age, playing it, but it’s a lot of gen alpha.
Nathan: What about it lends itself especially well to viral moments? When somebody goes viral playing this game, what is happening?
Nicole: What I’ve seen is people stealing from each other. If you’ve been playing this a lot, you can get really rare stuff – stuff that for me as a beginner player is totally not accessible. So stealing it, you’re literally picking their plant or whatever and selling it for your own money. There are ways to protect yourself, but it’s funny when someone accidentally forgets to protect that thing, and they get their prize crop stolen. And these videos also have a lot of screaming. Typical TikTok things. That’s largely where I’m seeing the viral moments.
When I interviewed the dev, he was saying that all those five million people aren’t necessarily playing the game; they’re joining this low-stakes thing for these events to be part of the thing. It’s so easy to plant a few crops. It’s so low stakes and low investment that it’s easy for people to be like “I’m gonna try that out” or “I’ll play it” or “This will become my new social space.”
Nathan: Luke, you were talking about this on Bluesky.
Luke: Yeah, it’s funny watching this game blow up, because they’re all largely the same thing. If you’re not familiar with Roblox – and I’m assuming that’s most of you, and you’re better for it – my son spends all of his time on Roblox, so I’ve developed an unnatural understanding of how it all works and operates and what the appeal is. Like Nicole was saying, these are barely games. What’s important to understand here is, they are social experiences that these large groups of similar-aged kids log onto, and they’re kinda doing it in the background, and a number’s going up, and something is happening that’s making them feel good, but at the same time, nine of their friends from school are in chat, and it’s a space where they’re hanging out.
The game is happening, but there’s actually not much game. It’s like guys watching football. The game’s on, but there’s really seven people having a beer and catching up. It’s that, but for 12 year-olds – with some deeply problematic structures built into the platform. Although I guess sports have that too with sports gambling and alcoholism. [Roblox] has crippling monetization and the normalization of gambling and stuff built into it.
But yeah, it’s been funny watching people grapple with this game’s popularity, because it shows that they don’t deal with Roblox on a daily basis. This game blew up, but it kinda only blew up a little more than any other game that is blowing up on a given day in Roblox. Next week, Grow A Garden might have disappeared completely and be replaced with Weightlifting Guy Simulator or–
Nathan: Sisyphus Simulator 4.
Luke: It’s just so funny watching people [try to figure out why these games get big]. And I’m guilty of this myself; I used to write about Roblox at Kotaku, and I used to grossly misrepresent it because honestly, it was very difficult to understand as a normal adult who didn’t have to experience it on a regular basis. But now that I’ve had to spend time with it, it’s so funny watching people grapple with it, because it’s so foreign to how so many of us understand how video games operate – how we operate within them and what we get out of them. Roblox is just on such a completely different level.
“Why are they playing this terrible game?” Dude, they’re barely playing it. Stop thinking of this as a video game. It’s social lubricant. My 12-year-old son… the pandemic fucked my kids up badly, because they had to spend two or three years doing school work from home on and off and having all their social events curtailed and missing important events. Those were formative years of their life, and so suddenly kids of that age – I’ve got a 14 year-old and a 12 year-old – have just learned to be online during some of their most formative social years in ways that go well beyond what any of us would associate with that. They’ll have friends that live in this suburb that they could go and visit, and they don’t. They sit on Roblox or Snapchat with them, because that’s been normalized to them.
While there are deeply problematic aspects to Roblox, we let him keep playing because a) we control the spend, and b) he’s getting a lot out of it. It’s not a bad video game for him. It’s just the place where he hangs out with his friends. I think that’s way better than him just sort of lying in his room watching TV or whatever. He’s always actively talking to them and communicating, and they’re always plotting strategies and doing stuff we would associate with gaming; you’d do that playing Halo on a couch or playing FIFA. But they’re all doing it every day in ways that are really healthy.
