Ben O’Shea: There’s a sinister side to kids’ ‘sedate’ online gardening game

If you pay even casual attention to what your children do on their devices, you may have heard the name Grow a Garden mentioned recently.

It’s the latest in a long line of hit games hosted on the Roblox platform, and looks harmless enough.

Compared to other games on the platform, Grow a Garden is positively sedate verging on boring, and revolves around users purchasing seeds, planting those seeds and then waiting for various plants to sprout on their own little patch of land.

A parent looking over their child’s shoulders to see what they were up to on their device would take one look at Grow a Garden’s gameplay and quickly decide that watching grass grow would be more riveting.

Despite this, the game is immensely popular around the world, with an estimated nine billion visits since it launched in March.

It’s free to play, but in-game purchases enhance the experience and status of users, so there’s an incentive to exchange actual money for Robux, the platform’s official currency.

And don’t be fooled by the laidback gameplay — users are fiercely competitive when it comes to obtaining the rarest seeds, which have the most prestige.

The game offers regular “updates”, where limited edition seed types are released, thereby generating obsessive behaviour from users looking to separate their gardens from the rest.

Roblox is a US-based platform, so these updates usually fall at heinous times for West Aussie users, who would predominantly be under 15.

But late nights and addiction aren’t the only perils facing kids who play this “harmless” gardening game.

An American forensic financial research company last year described Roblox as a “X-rated pedophile hellscape”, after repeated allegations of child grooming and inappropriate content on the platform.

Belatedly, Roblox tightened up parental controls late last year, but, crucially, these controls rely on parents setting up their own Roblox accounts to link to the accounts of their kids.

How many parents reading this have a Roblox account and have followed these protocols? Not many, would be the correct answer.

If your child also has a phone and a Snapchat account then there is considerable potential for harm.

The gameplay of Grow a Garden encourages users to share seeds with each other, and it’s not uncommon for a complete random to do so.

And the game then asks users if they’d like to add this random to their list of Roblox friends, giving them access to private chat features.

Given how highly prized some of these seeds are — your child might literally kill to get their mitts on the rarest Burning Bud — it’s not hard to see how this makes them vulnerable to those with harmful intent.

While the in-game chat function prohibits the sharing of contact details, its filter isn’t sophisticated enough to realise “$n4p garden52” is code for “My Snapchat username is @garden52”.

With WA kids likely to be spending even more time than usual playing Grow a Garden during the school holidays, maybe it would pay to see exactly how their garden grows.