Tumbler Ridge Shooter Created Mall Shooting Simulator in Roblox
Jesse Van Rootselaar, the 18-year-old suspected of killing eight people and injuring 25 in a mass shooting in a secondary school in Canada, created a Roblox game that allowed players to simulate a mass shooting in a level that looks like a shopping mall, Roblox has confirmed.
“We have removed the user account connected to this horrifying incident as well as any content associated with the suspect,” Roblox told 404 Media in an email. “We are committed to fully supporting law enforcement in their investigation.”
Van Rootselaar’s account and Roblox game were initially discovered by users in the online forum Kiwi Farms. Videos of the Roblox game or “experience,” as they’re called on the platform, show a Roblox character picking up various weapons and shooting other Roblox characters in a shopping mall, made their way to X before Roblox removed the game.
Roblox said Van Rootselaar’s account and any content they created was removed from Roblox yesterday. The shooting Van Rootselaar is accused of committing took place at a school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia on February 10. Roblox added that the “Mall experience” could only be accessed through Roblox Studio, a separate app that developers use to design games. Because of this, Roblox said, the experience had only seven visits.
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There’s a long history of mass shooters and their experience with video games, which are often used as scapegoats for mass shootings as opposed to gun manufacturers or weak gun control laws. Columbine Shooter Eric Harris had designed custom levels for Doom. During his first administration, Trump suggested video games lay at the root of mass shootings. Repeated studies of the subject have shown there’s no link.
As we recently discussed on the podcast, Roblox is nearly ubiquitous among young people and is more like a social platform than other, traditional online games. Roblox allows players to create nearly anything they can imagine, but crudely. Much like every other Roblox experience, videos of Van Rootselaar’s mall game features blocky, cartoonish characters, and is in no way photorealistic or very graphic.
Roblox told us it uses a combination of AI and a team of “safety specialists” to review everything uploaded to the platform before it is ever shown to another user. It also said that while no system is perfect, it’s committed to safety and will continue to strengthen its protections.
Lawsuit Alleges Roblox Hosted Digital 'Diddy Freak-Off' Themed Games
The games were mentioned in a 2024 report and are now part of a new lawsuit in which a 11 year old girl was allegedly groomed and sexually assaulted after meeting a stranger on Roblox.Matthew Gault (404 Media)
The Screen Time Panic Sets Parents Up to Fail
I listened to hours of podcasts about how screen time affects kids of all ages and how parents should manage screen time but I still felt completely unprepared for this challenge when I had a kid.I think the reason for that is that there’s a lot of reporting about how screens are impacting kids, and a lot of reporting about the research into this subject, but rarely did I encounter a conversation between parents that talks about how any of that information can be realistically applied in the real world.
This week on the podcast we’re joined by Patrick Klepek in order to have the kind of conversation I wish I heard before I became a parent, but I think there’s something here for everyone. Patrick is the cofounder of Remap, a website and one of my favorite podcasts about video games, and the writer behind Crossplay, a newsletter about the intersection of parenting and games. Patrick is also my former colleague at Vice, back when I worked at Motherboard and he at Waypoint. Patrick has been reporting about video games for most of his life, is a wonderful writer, and a parent. I find his perspective on many of these issues—screen time, parental controls, YouTube, Roblox—extremely useful and interesting, and I hope you do as well.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
