“It’s almost like Club Penguin … like an online social hangout. The roleplay genre is where all the players are,” says Kieft. You get to dress your character up, nurse babies and look after pets hatched from giant eggs. The most successful game of all time on Roblox is called Adopt Me!, an impossibly happy world of bright colours, cute animals and tinkling tunes. “If a game doesn’t do well, you’ve spent three, four, or five months working on this thing and essentially nothing. “If a game does well, then there’s potential to earn a lot,” he says. Kieft says it takes months of full-time work to make a decent Roblox game. Like film directors, they stick at a single idea for months or years at a stretch, chipping away at problems and paying attention to detail. Successful game makers are pretty much the opposite of impulsive. I learn how to print “Hello World!” and my entrepreneurial ardour cools. Before reading the first paragraph I contemplate chucking in my job and becoming a Roblox developer. I look it up, and download the PDF manual. Roblox games are written in the Lua programming language. I am just so familiar with the platform that it would be silly to try something else.” I have been playing from 2009 and I’ve been developing from 2014. To be precise, he makes Roblox games, and only Roblox games. Kieft is 23, lives in Wellington in a share house with two other guys, and makes games. A few of the user-made characters on the Roblox platform (Image: Roblox/supplied) “Why do you think that is?” he asks me, turning the tables in the first interview he’s ever done. My theory is that Roblox looks crap on purpose. I explain that at JB, the hand-written prices and shops with crap all over the place are part of the magic formula. I make the comparison to Kieft and with what seems to be typical curiosity, he wants to know more. Roblox is the JB-HiFi of the gaming world. We are talking about what makes a good game in Roblox and why the whole thing is so popular. This is a universe with no barriers to entry, and like all such universes, it’s messy as hell. Anyone with access to a computer or a smartphone can play Roblox.
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