The Scandals, Chaos, & Next-Gen Soap Operas of Roblox-Hollywood
Inside the high-stim world of Roblox "TV."
welcome to strong feelings! Essays by writers we love, in which they share their most impassioned opinions on a given subject. In today’s strong feelings, writer and editor Kieran Press-Reynolds explores the high-stim world of Roblox “TV:” the multi-million viewed long-form videos using the aesthetics and engines of the video game.
Lia hits rock bottom — first she’s forced to use all her family’s money on her stroke-stricken mother’s hospital bills, then she loses her coffee shop job and can no longer pay for high school. Destitute, the 17-year-old works as live-in maid for master of the manor Zane, who also goes to her former school. But as if in some rags-to-riches fairytale, Zane falls for the lowly but lovely Lia and ditches his upper-class fiancée Lexi.
This isn’t a Parasite sequel or the subplot of a Jane Austen-era teen drama. It’s a two-part YouTube series by user “Sweet Berry” called “I Became The Maid Of The Most Handsome Guy In School,” which was posted two months ago and has already accrued over 1.3M views. It’s one of hundreds of dizzyingly elaborate soap operas staged in the sandbox universe Roblox, where avatars look like LEGO characters and kids roleplay as everything imaginable. Spoiler alert: In 22 minutes, Lia escapes from armed goons; Lexi gets jilted at the altar; characters abuse each other to tears; Lia gets struck by a car after pushing Zane out of the way.
These Roblox videos, which take the form of 20-30-minute episodic releases or “movies” that can stretch beyond two hours, have devoured a specific corner of the internet while remaining completely unknown and impenetrable to anyone outside the scene. It makes twisted sense that a generation breastfed on the game, (39% of Roblox users are 13 and under), who spends nearly every waking hour simulating physical-world experiences on Roblox roleplay (RP) servers, would prefer seeing movies and TV shows set in this pixelated patina to flesh and dirt. This is a game where people form church groups with weekly Sunday Services, meet best friends and, at the most despicable, engage in sex rituals and join “Spawnism” cults that coax users into self-harm. “Bacon hair” and gawky walk animations are what they know, so Roblox romance feels realer than reality.
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Roblox isn’t the first game to spawn a parallel media industry. “Machinima,” or machine cinema built using a video game’s aesthetic or engine, has existed for over a decade. Minecraft has its own Mollywood: “Parkour Civilization,” a startlingly poignant film-length analogy for class consciousness, has over 45 million views on YouTube and an 8.4 on IMDb after 894 ratings. Grand Theft Hamlet, a fully machinima work about the process of staging the Shakespeare play in GTA Online, won the Grand Jury Award at SXSW Film Festival in 2024.
But Rollywood is different partly because of how both mundane and unhinged this scene can get. The most straightforward might be the sitcom-style RP TV shows, which often follow a fictional family’s hi-jinks. Riley, a 20-year-old from upstate New York who posts under the handle Elyxia, has made hundreds of RP videos centered around a single family. She plays the mother, her little brother voices the toddler Hunter; her sister acts as the grandma, and a network of friends she met through Roblox plays relatives and tertiary cast members.
Her clips range from humdrum day-in-the-lives to one-off weirdness like the family braving a tornado and an episode where a character named Finley’s secret dad kidnaps him. Riley describes an uber-competitive scene where oversaturation drives creative innovation. “You can do a basic morning routine, night routine, afterschool video, or even holiday specials — like Christmas, Thanksgiving. But you have to think of the viewer having multiple roleplay channel options to watch, and they don’t wanna watch the same five-six Christmas specials or school routines. You have to throw something in there that makes it pop out… The kidnapping videos, those were quite fun. Or, like, jail videos. It’s honestly the drama that [fans] love the most.”
Riley began making roleplay TV videos toward the end of 2019, and says the genre reached its apex during peak pandemic in 2020 and the following years. 2022 was the “summer of civil wars,” she reflects with a mix of nostalgia and anguish, where creators were constantly being called out for copying each other’s videos and viciously vying to seize the crown of top creator. She worries that “brainrot” videos are now killing the genre and overtaking the RP scene.
Back in the early days, a video didn’t need much to blow up: minimal editing and the thumbnail could be a screenshot of the game. Fast forward to now, and the genre’s become ground zero for the vanguard of clickbait tactics, a mad lab that convulses with the newest innovations guided by platform accumulation logic. Videos shimmer with ALL-CAPS titles and stimboard thumbnails that fuse MrBeast’s high-stakes adventure tourism with Piper Rockelle’s cutesy adolescent glitter. Some videos puke out constant flash forwards, where creators tease dramatic future scenes in the same video to boost retention, all the while blitzing you with sound effects every second and wobbling VTuber-style graphics of the characters.
Episode themes have gone full Euphoria, littered with family members dying, teen pregnancy scares, childbirth, alien invasions. You almost wish they went even further: RPs of mutants raving in the forest or obsessive sociopathic hoarders. One of Riley’s strats for increasing relevancy is integrating real-world events; she made a reference to the US government shutdown in a video and did a segment where the mother fell in love with a character inspired by Luigi Mangione. She feels it could offer some educational value. “Maybe a younger kid, they’re like, what even is that? So they research it and figure out what’s going on the world.”
For many, the allure of this content is the simplicity and the stimuli, SpongeBob rewired for a generation microwaving their minds in the endless scroll. “It’s more accessible than cable was when we were kids,” Riley reasons. “YouTube’s free, so it’s easy for kids to just hop on their iPad or their computer and see a new video.” It tracks that in an era of withering attention spans, kids would be willing to spend hours watching media that resembles their favorite online platform — it’s a frictionless, mind-numbing extension of the gaming experience.
And for the creators, beyond the financial and clout incentive, it’s a way to practice editing, make friends, and process things going on in their lives. Riley got into Roblox when she was a lonely teen, right around the time her parents separated: “I was going through a lot, so it was a light for me.” In her series, there’s been cheating scandals and divorce custody litigation. There’s also references poking fun at the romantic victories and failures of her and her collaborators. In one video, her friend named a rat character “Jeffrey,” an allusion to one of Riley’s ex-situationships.
While many of the most popular Roblox TV shows will seem grating or banal to anyone who’s not a 13-year-old dreaming of their first kiss with Timothée Chalamet, there are some gems. Riley’s Crush Island offers a cyborgian parody of Love Island, replete with “golden retriever” boys, a bisexual, a woman from Astoria with trust issues, and maximum narcissism and blush. “She has heels higher than half of the boys’ emotional maturity,” the host quips at one point.
These roleplays and TV shows are the easiest to make because they’re often shot in first-person, using sets and basic animations inherent to the game. But it’s not just retention-maxxed melodramas: Plenty of these predominantly teen video makers are like amateur Kubricks, painstakingly sculpting out facial expressions, establishing shots, and rule-of-thirds angles with perfectionist precision. Annabelle, the 22-year-old Ro-teur known as Robuilds, tells me she enlisted over 100 people — Roblox player volunteers, internet-turned-IRL pals, her own family members — and used up 2TB of hard drive space to produce Susan, a 78-minute YouTube film about a furniture store owner who discovers a magic power.
For more involved productions, directors spend hours and days designing full maps (the 3D layout of an in-game world) and quirky avatars, poring over all the appearance options like “Black Layered Wolf Cut” and the millions of accessories. They use the Roblox Studio and the Moon Animator plugin, which lets the committed Roblox artists program animation frames for every character — down to the specific elements that make up their blocky avatar model, like torso and arms — and add a specific camera rig to control shots and field of view.
For complex sequences like fights, Jay, the director of the Roblox film Bullet War, has directly simulated scenes from movies like Boy Kills World. The 17-year-old from Brunei got into the scene when he was nine after watching the pioneer ObliviousHD’s “The Last Guest,” which might be the most popular Roblox film of all time, with over 95 million views on YouTube. “I was mind-blown by the visuals and quality,” he tells me excitedly over Discord. “That really changed my entire goal for the future — I realized I wanted to be like him.” He began making “concept videos” that broke apart bits from ObliviousHD’s movies, eventually creating his own films. “I constantly practiced every single day in order to make a watchable film,” Jay says. “Before that I was a nobody.” Now he’s friends with his idol.
After the tedious work of animating, then begins the hellscape of editing, which closely mirrors real post-production. Editors drop footage in Sony Vegas Pro or Premiere Pro and go psycho with foley: fabric scratches, door creaks. Annabelle has all her voice actor volunteers send two-to-three takes of every line so she can decide which packs the most tonal punch. Jay sometimes hunts for voice actors like a genuine scout on the Casting Call website. Imaginative sound design can elevate a Rollywood work from second-screen slop to something like an emotional whirlwind. After that, directors design promo posters, trailers, and age ratings imitating the MPA classification system, all leading up to a release night where it unfurls live on YouTube. Annabelle also throws in-game premieres, where she invites her cast and crew to a specific theater map with a red carpet.
It’s weird that all this is happening in Roblox, which is owned by a mammoth tech company that reaps billions by incentivizing users to create mechanisms to hook kids on their phones and iPads. Every micro-element of Roblox — the avatars, the graphics, the logo, the code — is the company’s Intellectual Property, which would suggest that these directors lose the right to ownership as soon as they open the platform. But like pretty much every video game in history, fanmade Roblox clips never get struck down online, because why would they? UGC functions as an ad for the game, and it’s also a legal gray zone because this content could qualify for fair use as transformative videos. The ever-enterprising company is clearly looking for ways to capitalize on multimedia expansion. Roblox’s Grow a Garden, a Farmville-style server that became the most popular game in industry history with a peak of over 22 million active users, is set to become a movie. Another Roblox game, Jailbreak, also has a movie in the works.
There’s also Roblox’s perennial pedophile problem and frequent scandals. In many unsavory ways, Rollywood is not too dissimilar from the actual Hollywood, with its power imbalances and abuse. One of the most popular animators, PghLFilms, who was nominated for a Roblox Innovation Award in 2022, had his account shut down after allegations that he sent inappropriate posts and videos of animals decomposing to Discord servers with minors. (PghLFilms has publicly denied the accusations.) Jay described other gossip including a cheating scandal and animators being canceled for grooming. “It became a common stereotype to the point where I just look at my Instagram Reels comments and see people hoping that I don’t touch kids,” sighs Jay, who is himself a kid. “That’s a really horrible stereotype to be in.”
But in other respects, the Roblox media community is cool because it’s resisting the defining monetary mechanism of the platform, which is users making games for others to play. Instead, these creators pilfer the platform’s engine and aesthetic to make movies for their own benefit, which no one can “play” like a video game or spend Robux on that goes to the overlords. 20-year-old Riley told me she’s made a little less than $150,000 from the over 800 videos she’s posted across five years on YouTube.
Everyone I spoke to exuded a level of passion you wouldn’t expect from the clickbait thumbnails dredged up by a cursory “Roblox RP” search online. These are people who believe in toiling away for months or years to make “art,” even if it would be mocked by much of the population. Roblox media has helped them find themselves and their communities. Annabelle has befriended and met up with other Roblox cinematographers like Brandon Hau, whose debut Roblox movie Abducted she acted in, and which premiered online and at a physical party in the Bay Area. Riley says many of her current collaborators are people who were once fans, who she’s now met up with multiple times in real-life. One of her closest friends, the guy who plays Finley, is LGBTQ, so she decided to make his character canonically gay as well, with a roleplay video of Finley coming out and attending the school dance with a boy. “I didn’t want to make him love someone that he doesn’t, even if it’s just for the show,” she says. “That was really important to me — so people watching could feel heard and didn’t feel like they had to be quiet about it.”
Kieran Press-Reynolds is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, who does a weekly column called Rabbit Holed for Pitchfork. They edit the blog No Bells and have written about deep-internet weirdness and madcap influencers for places like GQ, i-D, and The Face.
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