Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla said they have a "great degree of confidence" that the alleged gunman was influenced by Roblox. Maria Tan, ABS-CBN News/File
MANILA — Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla on Wednesday urged Congress to regulate children's use of games that allow them to act like a shooter as he flagged platforms could be used to "radicalize" youngsters.
"I call upon Congress again to help us control and curb the use of first-person shooter games that influence these young minds," Remulla said at a press conference following Tuesday's deadly school shooting in Zamboanga City.
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While authorities have yet to do a forensic examination on the gadgets of the shooter in the Ateneo de Zamboanga incident, Remulla said they have a "great degree of confidence" that he was influenced by online gaming platform Roblox.
"Roblox in itself is not a dangerous game. It is the chat group that is beside it, doon nagkakaroon ng buyuan doon, nagkakaroon ng radicalization," he said.
Roblox is a game creation platform that allows users to construct and play games they built, including ones that use first-person shooters.
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The alleged student gunman was "quite a Roblox fanatic," Zamboanga City Mayor Khymer Olaso said Tuesday, citing circulating text messages.
In April, Roblox announced new account types designed to provide age-checked kids and younger teens with age-appropriate content and features.
"Earlier this year, Roblox established a new industry benchmark by becoming the first online gaming platform to require mandatory facial age checks to access chat," it said in a statement amid a Senate investigation into alleged grooming and child safety.
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'ONLINE GAMES AS ENTRY POINT'
The Zamboanga school shooting was the country's second in months.
In June, three teenaged students were killed and 20 others wounded in a gun attack at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, Leyte.
Following the Tacloban incident, Remulla said that online games "espousing violence" like the open-world gaming platform GoreBox "should be permanently banned" in the Philippines.
He said then the game "desensitizes" young people into the elements of death, violence and murder.
Sen. Risa Hontiveros previously warned that online games were being used as an entry point for groups such as the extremist "764" network to influence children to perform attacks.
She said social media platforms were then used by the extremist groups to further communicate with target children.
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SOCIAL MEDIA BAN?
Remulla also signaled he wanted regulation for social media use of Filipino children, as he pointed to Australia's social media restriction for under-16s as a "great model."
"Baka panahon na para tingnan natin 'yon (Maybe it's time to check their law)," he said, stressing that such a similar measure alone won't solve the problem of school shootings, which are rare in the Philippines.
"Hindi naman one size fits all ang solusyon dito sa problema na ito, maraming kailangang gawin," he added.
(The solution to this problem is not one size fits all, many things are needed to be done.)
One of the first peer-reviewed evaluations of the Australian measure, published this month in the British Medical Journal, found "insufficient evidence" that it had much impact on social media use by youngsters.
The researchers surveyed more than 400 young people immediately before the restrictions came into effect, and again three months after, finding "substantial circumvention" of the rules. —With a report from Agence France-Presse
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