I never expected myself to work in the gaming industry and handle community management.
Even though I am a journalist at the end of it all, I was never one to stand in front of the camera or be in the centre. I focused on myself as a digital editor, researcher, producer, and social media specialist.
Those roles all included a lot of interactions on social media with media consumers. From the angry ones and the spammers to the ones that always were nice and the ones that just wanted to share their stories.
These were adults and one thing I learned there is that being an adult on the internet is not an automatic success for behaving nicely.
When I started working in the gaming community, the community were mostly young adults who were passionate about games. They were the happy ones, the angry ones, the sad ones and the lonely ones. Just like the adults but the main difference was that this crowd also felt a bit like the underdogs. Gaming was, and is, after all, a hobby that is often looked down upon.
Overall, this crowd was a bunch of happy nerds with lots of passion, opinions and more importantly, happy to chat and hang out with other gamers.
Then, I started to work with the Roblox community.
Holy damn, that has been a ride! I was a complete novice in Roblox games and had no idea about the crowd.
Nor was I fully aware of how big Roblox is among kids and that everyone plays.
The Roblox community are WAY younger than any community I´ve managed before.
And they are absolute chaos on Discord where the focus is less on hanging out with other gamers but on getting the most items to min-max their gaming.
For me that comes from a world of console gaming and PC, I´ve never felt so old and behind my time. I got a very healthy wake-up call in realizing that this is most likely how my parents felt when I started with video games....)
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| NGL, this is 100% me some days at work. |
The road of learning about Roblox and its community has been a wild ride and in this time, I am so happy to have taken this journey. The Roblox community are a chaotic one but they are also so damn passionate, happy, wonderful and creative. They love to talk, to be informed and to give input on the games we make.
And I never felt so down with the kids when I talked to the kids in the park on the daily dog walk and answered their questions on what I do for work: "Well, I work with Roblox games."
Because everybody plays and their enthusiasm to discuss and talk about their favourite games makes my day.
This is the new generation of gamers but I feel that we, the adults, are making the same mistake with the Roblox generation that our own parents once did with us Pc-, and console gamers.
We do not take their Roblox gaming seriously (perhaps because it is not real games, what do I know?) and we do not listen to them.
I feel that I have repeated the same advice for parents for 20 years now:
"Talk to your kids and teenagers about their gaming, show an interest."
That is still true and parents should take a bigger interest in their kid's gaming.
But in addition, all of us ( the older gaming generation) perhaps need to take a step down from our high horse and look at what the kids are playing these days, exchange top games to play and learn from that.
The gaming community is wonderful and vast and there is room for all kinds of games, from PC to mobile.
So let´s listen to the new generation of gamers and not only get them to play our games but ask what they and their friends are playing in school.
And then, we join and learn from them
