By Bess Naughtin
If you read our last article in The Westsider, or have a school-aged child, you probably know a thing or two about Roblox. And you probably know that one of its biggest attractions is the opportunity to spend time with friends, albeit virtually.
Roblox allows kids to explore, complete challenges and chat while their avatars wander through virtual worlds together. That social side of gaming is one of the reasons it’s so popular with kids. I’m not suggesting Roblox offers an equivalent social experience to spending time together in the physical world, but I recognise both its appeal and its merit.
Many parents, however, are rightfully uncomfortable with Roblox’s poorly classified user-generated games, in-game spending, adult themes, violence and opportunities to interact with unsafe people.
Let me introduce Big Walk. It is the newest game from Melbourne studio House House, best known for designing the hugely successful, and very silly, Untitled Goose Game. The premise of Big Walk is wonderfully simple: you and a group of friends are dropped into a large, beautiful Australian landscape and sent off to explore and solve puzzles together.
The landscape and the soundscape will feel instantly familiar. The stunning virtual playground, modelled on Wilsons Promontory, is full of puzzles to solve, things to discover and opportunities to behave ridiculously. The game isn’t built around constant competition, levelling up or trying to become the best player, it’s an online experience about simply being together.
That freedom players experience as they explore this landscape will feel familiar to plenty of young gamers who love the latitude Roblox offers. There isn’t necessarily one correct way to play Big Walk and much of the fun comes from what happens between the people playing it. In fact, the most memorable part of the experience is likely to be something completely pointless that happened along the way.
You walk, you talk, you connect, you explore, you point things out to one another, you work things out and you get distracted. And, inevitably, someone wanders off in completely the wrong direction.
The first time I played Big Walk with my three primary school-aged sons, that person lost, wandering aimlessly, was me. We were playing in separate corners of the house when I accidentally detached myself from the group and headed off in the wrong direction. I could hear the boys talking to each other downstairs.
We’ve lost Mum!
Argh!
Where is she?
I can see her! Down there!
What. Is. She. Doing?
I had no idea what I was doing. But I was entertained by the comical squeak I heard every time my virtual foot hit the virtual sand as I traversed a virtual version of the iconic Squeaky Beach. The ridiculous details and the attention to detail is what makes Big Walk magic.
Big Walk is one game made by one small team of über creative local developers. This is very different to Roblox and will appeal to parents who want to avoid the scale and unpredictability of user-generated content.
Interestingly, I offered House House the opportunity to pit Big Walk against Roblox and they politely declined. Instead, they acknowledged Roblox’s influence on their design journey and the memorable gaming experiences it had provided them, particularly during the Covid years. They cite Somewhere, Wales and Theme Park Tycoon 2 as being especially influential for them.
So perhaps parents don’t need to divide games neatly into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or convince their kids to abandon Roblox altogether, but it’s worth paying attention to the kind of experience a game is designed to create. As a mother who works in eSafety education, Big Walk feels like a breath of fresh air in a digital landscape that can often feel more like a digital hellscape.
Is the experience as wholesome as going out on an actual big walk in the bush? Of course not. But is it more wholesome than playing Roblox? Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes.
Bess Naughtin is a local primary school teacher and parent. She is also the creative director at Inform & Empower, a Footscray based organisation that partners with primary schools around Australia to deliver innovative cyber safety and digital wellbeing education.
