Future Audiences/Roblox game

Future Audiences is exploring strategies to expand beyond our existing audiences of readers and contributors so we can truly reach everyone in the world as the “essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge.” This includes investigating new gamified ways of delivering free knowledge.

Why are we building a game? Why Roblox?

Gen Z and Alpha have developed new forms of interacting and socializing. In order to effectively capture these generations’ attention, we need to act on their current habits–one major avenue of that is gaming. Not only does 90% of Gen Z play video games, but 73% of Gen Z has a video game console, 7% up from millennials. In fact, each new generation only plays games more: 94% of Gen Alpha plays video games. This means that an investment into gaming will enjoy longevity in relevance.

Roblox is a platform of user-created games that boasts 380M monthly active users (MAUs) as of 2024, up 19% from the previous year. Of this user base, 42% are under 13 years old. As a platform with a user base that mirrors our target audience, Roblox presents a suitable playground for us to learn how we can create a space for Wikipedia in gaming.

What are we trying to learn by building a Roblox game?

Our goal is to create a game that:

1. Captures the attention of Gen Z/Alpha players on Roblox,
2. Introduces these players to Wikipedia, and
3. Teaches us which interactive features are most effective in engaging with our target audience.

These learnings will help us:

1. Determine to what extent (if at all) gaming is a viable path for Wikipedia to attract audiences that otherwise wouldn’t necessarily be on Wikipedia,
2. Better tailor our experiments to our target audience of Gen Z and Alpha, and
3. Provide more informative learnings and make more viable recommendations to other Foundation members.

MVP functionality

As a user, I can:

1. Enter the Future Audiences Roblox game with my own credentials,
2. Start from a starting article and end my round by traveling to the target article,
3. Travel between different rooms that are linked together by article relations,
4. Influence the content of the map through my in-game travel,
5. Play multiple rounds with different starting/target articles, and
6. Enjoy custom-made music and art assets as I play.

How to stay updated on insights from this experiment

As usual, we will be sharing updates on this and other Future Audiences experiments during our monthly open community calls. Please sign up here if you’d like to be notified for upcoming calls.

If you have any further questions/inputs please get in touch on the talk page!