“Black Cat” is (is becoming, will be) a short story about how participatory online games in the Roblox mold condition their users, mostly children, to act in line with a capitalist logic of status competition and resource accumulation. The mechanics of these games tend to reinforce habits of constant consumption, the instrumental optimization of time, and blatantly exclusionary hierarchies. There is no room here for mutual aid or cooperation. There are no help systems, no real notion of community. I take that as a warning sign, and that’s why I decided to spend time writing a story about it.

Roblox has become hugely important in kids’ lives, especially since the pandemic. When they couldn’t interact in person, they replaced the playground with virtual worlds. Back then, it was chilling to hear my son’s friends laughing through a speaker. At first I questioned his games. Six years later, it’s harder to do: unlike adults, kids today find a kind of humanity in these environments that we didn’t find when we played alone in front of a screen, plugged into single-player entertainment systems. Restricting technology means restricting what they’ll remember as their childhood. But at what cost? To what extent are these environments designed to capture their attention and, above all (and here I return to my point), to train them in consumer logics I’m fundamentally opposed to? In Roblox, everything has a price, and depending on the game you choose within the platform, you can even steal. Steal! But of course: when accumulation and display are rewarded, these incentive systems incubate delinquent roles and abusive practices that players eventually come to normalize.

All of this connects to Ian Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric, laid out brilliantly in Persuasive Games. But maybe I’ll talk about that another time. Today I want to share two anecdotes that pushed me to write the plot of “Black Cat.”

Pencils as currency

My son is eleven. During the school year, he and his classmates started a healthy exchange of things they made themselves: cartoons, crafts, early attempts at comics, even songs. In those months, a miniature Renaissance took place in the classroom, and it delighted me just to hear about it.

Then someone put a price on a drawing. One of the kids, who suddenly needed that drawing, decided to buy it from its creator with the money he’d set aside for candy. Needless to say, that day the little collector didn’t taste anything sweet. Up to that point, it was just a curious story. But things escalated, and the kids began asking their parents for more money to sustain their appetite for their friends’ art and, at the same time, not go hungry during school hours. They also started buying sweets for themselves and their friends, and more than once a child came home with a stomachache. That’s when someone brought it up in the parents’ WhatsApp group, and we realized we were all dealing with the same situation. The kids were generating a surplus that turned into an informal market with no clear rules. It was chaos: there was no control over how much money could circulate in the classroom, and some kids (unconsciously, I hope) started setting opportunistic prices and charging far more for their work. Someone was even accused of deliberately giving less change to a child who had paid the exact amount. In other words, the kids were displaying the dynamics of a capitalism without brakes, where the logic of profit outweighed affection.

As a group, the parents decided to stop giving them extra money. You’d think that would end the problem. And yet…

One day my son came home from school and pulled a handful of red pencil shavings from his pencil case.

- What’s that? I asked.

- Those are our new coins. The red ones are worth one, and the blue ones are worth half. Five greens make a blue, and five yellows make a green.

The kids had created their own currency, based on a scarce and finite good (you can’t sharpen a pencil forever). With that, they solved the problem of how to keep things running when official money disappears. Without realizing it, they opened the door to a microeconomy with internal rules, which in turn would produce a new set of social distortions at a very small scale.

What I never asked him was why it hadn’t occurred to them to exchange work from the start, or to collaborate on a single project that could encompass the talent of the whole class. Why everything had to pass through substitutes for money, instead of other forms of organization, like a time bank, where value is measured in hours of work rather than cash.

But I didn’t ask, because I didn’t need to. I realized these kids already live inside capitalist logic, thanks to games like Roblox, which assign a value to almost everything within reach of the eye. As far as I know, there isn’t an experiment (at least not one this popular) in which virtual environments like this train their users in non-monetary economies.

What if someone decided to build it? That’s how the first question was born.

Roblox and the processing of grief

The second question was born from something sad in our family: how do you process loss using virtual environments? Is there such a thing as grief 2.0?

Last year we had to let our dog, Watson, go. I loved him, and he knows how much. But living together became impossible, and his instincts started to turn into a constant threat that, despite my efforts, I couldn’t tame. So we found him a new home with a specialist. If you’re wondering, he’s doing very well today.

We were the ones who weren’t. Telling my son that our dog would no longer spend his days with us was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as a father. Making someone you love cry over a decision you made yourself, a decision you then have to force yourself to carry through, is an intense, transformative feeling.

The initial shock passed, and we separated from Watson for good. After that, each member of the family carried the grief of the separation in their own way, and we began to accept that our lives had changed.

Then one day I saw Watson in Roblox, standing next to my son’s avatar. I forced myself to act natural.

- And who’s that?

- It’s Watson. I bought him, and now he lives here.

Beyond the initial impact (and the knot in my throat), it made me think about how technology has reshaped the way we deal with distance, absence, and even death. When someone dies, their wall fills with farewell messages: “We’ll miss you,” and the like. Social networks become a postmodern tool for speaking to the digital remains of a loved one or a public figure. A digital funeral, if you like.

In that way, physical and digital identities begin to blur, and more and more ghosts start populating virtual spaces.

This reflection was reinforced by a video lecture by Davide Sisto, author of Digital Porcupines: Living and Never Dying Online, which I’d read a few months earlier and which, for obvious reasons, returned to my mind after what happened with Watson and his mirror-self.

It’s strange to notice how what happens to us ends up connecting, forming thematic patterns. If they’re stimulating enough, they turn into stories. The beautiful thing about this part of the process is that, at this point, you’re still not in control. All you can do is sit back and watch.

“Black Cat” is (is becoming, will be) a short story about how participatory online games in the Roblox mold condition their users, mostly children, to act in line with a capitalist logic of status competition and resource accumulation. The mechanics of these games tend to reinforce habits of constant consumption, the instrumental optimization of time, and blatantly exclusionary hierarchies. There is no room here for mutual aid or cooperation. There are no help systems, no real notion of community. I take that as a warning sign, and that’s why I decided to spend time writing a story about it.

Roblox has become hugely important in kids’ lives, especially since the pandemic. When they couldn’t interact in person, they replaced the playground with virtual worlds. Back then, it was chilling to hear my son’s friends laughing through a speaker. At first I questioned his games. Six years later, it’s harder to do: unlike adults, kids today find a kind of humanity in these environments that we didn’t find when we played alone in front of a screen, plugged into single-player entertainment systems. Restricting technology means restricting what they’ll remember as their childhood. But at what cost? To what extent are these environments designed to capture their attention and, above all (and here I return to my point), to train them in consumer logics I’m fundamentally opposed to? In Roblox, everything has a price, and depending on the game you choose within the platform, you can even steal. Steal! But of course: when accumulation and display are rewarded, these incentive systems incubate delinquent roles and abusive practices that players eventually come to normalize.

All of this connects to Ian Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric, laid out brilliantly in Persuasive Games. But maybe I’ll talk about that another time. Today I want to share two anecdotes that pushed me to write the plot of “Black Cat.”

Pencils as currency

My son is eleven. During the school year, he and his classmates started a healthy exchange of things they made themselves: cartoons, crafts, early attempts at comics, even songs. In those months, a miniature Renaissance took place in the classroom, and it delighted me just to hear about it.

Then someone put a price on a drawing. One of the kids, who suddenly needed that drawing, decided to buy it from its creator with the money he’d set aside for candy. Needless to say, that day the little collector didn’t taste anything sweet. Up to that point, it was just a curious story. But things escalated, and the kids began asking their parents for more money to sustain their appetite for their friends’ art and, at the same time, not go hungry during school hours. They also started buying sweets for themselves and their friends, and more than once a child came home with a stomachache. That’s when someone brought it up in the parents’ WhatsApp group, and we realized we were all dealing with the same situation. The kids were generating a surplus that turned into an informal market with no clear rules. It was chaos: there was no control over how much money could circulate in the classroom, and some kids (unconsciously, I hope) started setting opportunistic prices and charging far more for their work. Someone was even accused of deliberately giving less change to a child who had paid the exact amount. In other words, the kids were displaying the dynamics of a capitalism without brakes, where the logic of profit outweighed affection.

As a group, the parents decided to stop giving them extra money. You’d think that would end the problem. And yet…

One day my son came home from school and pulled a handful of red pencil shavings from his pencil case.

- What’s that? I asked.

- Those are our new coins. The red ones are worth one, and the blue ones are worth half. Five greens make a blue, and five yellows make a green.

The kids had created their own currency, based on a scarce and finite good (you can’t sharpen a pencil forever). With that, they solved the problem of how to keep things running when official money disappears. Without realizing it, they opened the door to a microeconomy with internal rules, which in turn would produce a new set of social distortions at a very small scale.

What I never asked him was why it hadn’t occurred to them to exchange work from the start, or to collaborate on a single project that could encompass the talent of the whole class. Why everything had to pass through substitutes for money, instead of other forms of organization, like a time bank, where value is measured in hours of work rather than cash.

But I didn’t ask, because I didn’t need to. I realized these kids already live inside capitalist logic, thanks to games like Roblox, which assign a value to almost everything within reach of the eye. As far as I know, there isn’t an experiment (at least not one this popular) in which virtual environments like this train their users in non-monetary economies.

What if someone decided to build it? That’s how the first question was born.

Roblox and the processing of grief

The second question was born from something sad in our family: how do you process loss using virtual environments? Is there such a thing as grief 2.0?

Last year we had to let our dog, Watson, go. I loved him, and he knows how much. But living together became impossible, and his instincts started to turn into a constant threat that, despite my efforts, I couldn’t tame. So we found him a new home with a specialist. If you’re wondering, he’s doing very well today.

We were the ones who weren’t. Telling my son that our dog would no longer spend his days with us was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as a father. Making someone you love cry over a decision you made yourself, a decision you then have to force yourself to carry through, is an intense, transformative feeling.

The initial shock passed, and we separated from Watson for good. After that, each member of the family carried the grief of the separation in their own way, and we began to accept that our lives had changed.

Then one day I saw Watson in Roblox, standing next to my son’s avatar. I forced myself to act natural.

- And who’s that?

- It’s Watson. I bought him, and now he lives here.

Beyond the initial impact (and the knot in my throat), it made me think about how technology has reshaped the way we deal with distance, absence, and even death. When someone dies, their wall fills with farewell messages: “We’ll miss you,” and the like. Social networks become a postmodern tool for speaking to the digital remains of a loved one or a public figure. A digital funeral, if you like.

In that way, physical and digital identities begin to blur, and more and more ghosts start populating virtual spaces.

This reflection was reinforced by a video lecture by Davide Sisto, author of Digital Porcupines: Living and Never Dying Online, which I’d read a few months earlier and which, for obvious reasons, returned to my mind after what happened with Watson and his mirror-self.

It’s strange to notice how what happens to us ends up connecting, forming thematic patterns. If they’re stimulating enough, they turn into stories. The beautiful thing about this part of the process is that, at this point, you’re still not in control. All you can do is sit back and watch.