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This spring, I spoke to a mother in suburban Washington, D.C., who was increasingly concerned about the lack of filters on her children’s school devices. During class this year, her kids watched Kendrick Lamar videos on YouTube, she told me. We came home knowing the words to a semaglutide commercial. Parents at the school shared concerns that their fourth graders were regularly playing a game called BitLife, a text-based life simulation game created in 2018.
She was among more than 45 parents, educators and experts across the country for my recent article on dangerous content and games that children are accessing on their school-issued devices.
From my reporting, I had already heard of – and tried – other games that elementary school students play in schools across the country, one of them featuring Jeffrey Epstein and another where a “cadaverous grandmother” chases the players with a bloody baseball bat. In comparison, BitLife’s premise seemed less disturbing than some others I’d played, perhaps even relatively innocent. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.)
I started the game as “Ally Baker,” the daughter of a school psychologist and a police officer. The game then presented me with random life scenarios and asked me to choose how to react. When my character was 5, a screen appeared saying, “You broke your parents’ sex toy while you were trying to figure out what it was. What are you going to do?” (The options were to admit it or lie about it.) My character was then abused by her brother, diagnosed with depression and cervical cancer. (Between these events, I also failed my driving test.) Ally Baker died at age 21.
As disturbing as it may be to think of elementary-aged children playing this game, I’ve learned in telling my recent story that this is just the tip of the iceberg. While some districts have layers of blocks and filters, others have a piecemeal approach, with far fewer blocks. And even in some districts that attempt to block content, children are often able to evade the filters and access extremely inappropriate content. In fact, many game designers – and their fellow students – help them achieve this.
When I first accessed BitLife, for example, the website boasted that it could bypass blocks because it used a proxy server: “BitLife is available to play unblocked right here on Bitlife.School. This means you can start a new life on your school Chromebook, on your library computer, or even at work during a break. I found another website hosting the game that advised players to “press CTRL+Q to hide your screen.” This changed the screen to a page titled “Math Class Notes – Week 3 Overview” with notes about a fake math lesson. (Although the tab at the top still says “Bitlife.”) Questions sent to an email address on the Bitlife website were not answered as of Thursday morning.
I also came across a Google Doc with dozens of links to unblocked games. (Schools use Google Docs, and don’t block it.) Not only are these websites well aware of schools trying to block games, but some of them appear to be actively trying to allow students to continue playing, illustrating just another of the many challenges schools face when it comes to young children and technology.
Read my story, published in partnership with Mind/Shift.
This story about gaming on school devices was produced by The Hechinger Report, an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to the Hechinger newsletter.
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