Talk:Future Audiences/Roblox game

Why Roblox?

How does a game on a proprietary platform help build a collection of knowledge? At least use a free alternative such as Scratch. Kinopiko (talk) 05:44, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the question! The Future Audiences team is a small, experimental team, and to see what could work with the resources we have, we want to see if it'd be successful where the audiences we want to find their way to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement are. While you can create games in both Scratch and Roblox, they're not really the same thing. Scratch is, at the core, a way to teach programming. Roblox is a gaming platform, and while penetration varies across the world, half of US kids under the age of 16 are active users (per w:en:Roblox#Community and culture), for example.

I tend to think of what we build more like experiments, research projects, than products. If they're successful, we'll recommend someone else (within the Wikimedia Foundation, or the movement in general) to keep developing it. I wrote this text last year, and I think the Roblox/Scratch question is in a way similar to the Chrome/Firefox question then: Roblox makes it far easier to reach the potential audience, and answer "if we manage to build this, will people actually be interested in it?".

The general goal it to try to experiment around ways to engage audiences which are, to a lesser degree than previous generations, finding their way to Wikipedia, and who have a more negative view of the encyclopedia than older age groups, to ensure we can continue to engage new people in the movement. Johan (WMF) (talk) 17:41, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

This probably isn't going to work

The concept of turning Wikipedia into a space you can travel around is cool and all, but I don't know if it's going to work on Roblox. It would be a programming nightmare turning the links between articles into a maze since the paths could end up intersecting themselves. Roblox itself has some limitations, as we need to make sure whatever articles you find will be appropriate for kids and I'm not even sure if you can access the Wikipedia API using Roblox scripts. RteeeeKed (talk) 19:03, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

not to mention the people who will try the absolute hardest to get it banned and just trolls in general.

also, if you give access to the Wikipedia from Roblox, wouldn't that also let kids unknowingly edit them? Gonna eatpizza (talk) 14:14, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Completely understand the concern--we definitely want to make sure that our game is age-appropriate and safe. We also want to ensure that Wikipedia is properly safeguarded from bad actors.

On the first point, we've tackled this by curating the articles that players would navigate and filtering for safe content. The starting and target articles have been specifically set up by our team.

On the second point, playing on our Roblox game will not edit Wikipedia articles!

And this is definitely possible--check out our prototype game here! Very early and experimental, as well as in progress, but wanted to give you a look at what we've been working on.

It sounds like you might have experience with Roblox! Are there any games that you think would be good examples or inspiration for us to take a look at? DLin-WMF (talk) 16:43, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I stand corrected.

Anyways, the closest game to this I can think of is DOORS, but that's only because of the general concept of going from room to room to reach an exit. Most of its gameplay comes from avoiding the monsters, but I don't think that's what we're going for here.

To make the concept more interesting, I think you could add obstacles in each room or something. Also, maybe add a "compass" of sorts that can guide players to the end room but requires you to be lost for a good while in case players get stuck.

One last word of advice: Stick to R6 characters. R15 is comically buggy. Trust me, allowing for somewhat higher character customization options doesn't make up for people being able to clip through basically any wall in the game. RteeeeKed (talk) 03:33, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

That's a good reference! We were/are considering adding monsters as additional obstacles--could make things a bit more interesting, but I wasn't sure if they'd be distracting instead. That being said, an obby-type set of obstacles could also be fun! The compass would also be a good addition. I'll take these down for possible avenues for a round 2 of iterations. Since this is an experiment, we're trying to keep it lightweight.

Good note on the R6 vs R15 characters! I've also taken that down to discuss with Engineering. Appreciate the callout! DLin-WMF (talk) 12:46, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

id think of the monsters as vandals trying to remove links and make your "Speedrun" or race longer Gonna eatpizza (talk) 15:09, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

also, do you grab Wikipedia Articles directly or do you have to manually add them? Gonna eatpizza (talk) 15:20, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

found a bug in the game that softlocks you if you reset in the lobby Gonna eatpizza (talk) 15:44, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

@Gonna eatpizza: thanks for the feedback! we've pushed some fixes based on it. we're still iterating on this a little more. DErenrich-WMF (talk) 23:25, 18 April 2025 (UTC)

Source code of the game

Hi, I think this is an interesting project that might bring more younger people to Wikipedia.

I was wondering whether the source code of the game is available publicly? I think it would be beneficial for the project if people could contribute, just like they can on MediaWiki and other WMF projects. SomeRandomDeveloper (talk) 13:48, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

@SomeRandomDeveloper: Hey. I'm one of the developers of the game. All the code is already open source. You can see it at https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/future-audiences/roblox We're close to wrapping this particular effort and it's unclear how much more we'll push in this direction. But you should be able to run it locally if you want. We definitely encourage the community to take a look at the code and build games of their own. There's a lot of potential here. DErenrich-WMF (talk) 14:07, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

roblox? really?

the aggressively monetized, abusive pedophile hub, that created hyper-competitive digital sweatshops? i can't think of a worse platform. ltbdl (talk) 10:36, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

Roblox certainly has problems. This is a time-limited experiment, rather than a long-term investment – we're not trying to build something separate and then entice people to come there. The main factor here was "where can we reach this audience?". We're very happy to listen to better suggestions! Johan (WMF) (talk) 03:19, 30 May 2025 (UTC)

For a longer reply, see Talk:Future Audiences/Roblox game#Why Roblox? above. Johan (WMF) (talk) 03:19, 30 May 2025 (UTC)