Jesse Van Rootselaar, the 18-year-old suspected of killing eight people and injuring 25 in a mass shooting in a secondary school in Canada, created a Roblox game that allowed players to simulate a mass shooting in a level that looks like a shopping mall, Roblox has confirmed.
“We have removed the user account connected to this horrifying incident as well as any content associated with the suspect,” Roblox told 404 Media in an email. “We are committed to fully supporting law enforcement in their investigation.”
Van Rootselaar’s account and Roblox game were initially discovered by users in the online forum Kiwi Farms. Videos of the Roblox game or “experience,” as they’re called on the platform, show a Roblox character picking up various weapons and shooting other Roblox characters in a shopping mall, made their way to X before Roblox removed the game.
Roblox said Van Rootselaar’s account and any content they created was removed from Roblox yesterday. The shooting Van Rootselaar is accused of committing took place at a school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia on February 10. Roblox added that the “Mall experience” could only be accessed through Roblox Studio, a separate app that developers use to design games. Because of this, Roblox said, the experience had only seven visits.
There’s a long history of mass shooters and their experience with video games, which are often used as scapegoats for mass shootings as opposed to gun manufacturers or weak gun control laws. Columbine Shooter Eric Harris had designed custom levels for Doom. During his first administration, Trump suggested video games lay at the root of mass shootings. Repeated studies of the subject have shown there’s no link.
As we recently discussed on the podcast, Roblox is nearly ubiquitous among young people and is more like a social platform than other, traditional online games. Roblox allows players to create nearly anything they can imagine, but crudely. Much like every other Roblox experience, videos of Van Rootselaar’s mall game features blocky, cartoonish characters, and is in no way photorealistic or very graphic.
Roblox told us it uses a combination of AI and a team of “safety specialists” to review everything uploaded to the platform before it is ever shown to another user. It also said that while no system is perfect, it’s committed to safety and will continue to strengthen its protections.
