FERGUSON, A MIDDLE schooler in Ontario, Canada, had been tapping out the same four-letter sequence on his keyboard for hours. He was steering his digital avatar, a Lego-man-like military grunt, in laps around a futuristic airfield. Although his fingers ached, he would gladly have gone on for hours more. Every keystroke brought the 11-year-old closer to his goal: scaling the ranks of a group in the video game Roblox.

The group had rules. Strict rules. Players dressed as pilots and marines went around barking out orders in little speech bubbles. When Ferguson wasn’t running laps, he was doing drills or scaling walls—boot camp stuff. The only three words he could say during training were “YES,” “NO,” and “SIR.” And “SIR” generally applied to one person, Malcolm, the domineering adolescent who ruled the group. “His thing was the winky face,” Ferguson says. “He was charming. He was funny. He always had a response; it was instant. He was a dick.”

At the time, in 2009, Roblox was just over two years old, but several million people—most of them kids and teens—were already playing it. The game isn’t really a game; it is a hub of interconnected virtual worlds, more like a sprawling mall video arcade than a stand-alone Street Fighter II machine. Roblox gives players a simple set of tools to create any environment they want, from Naruto’s anime village to a high school for mermaids to Somewhere, Wales. Players have built games about beekeeping, managing a theme park, flipping pizzas, shoveling snow, using a public bathroom, and flinging themselves down staircases. They have also built spaces to hang out and role-play different characters and scenarios—rushing a sorority, policing Washington, DC.

Ferguson was attracted to the more organized, militaristic role-plays. (Now 23, he asked that I refer to him only by his online name. He says he hears it more often than his given name; also, he doesn’t want to be doxed.) Growing up, he says, he was an annoying kid. He was checked out of school, had no hobbies or goals or friends. “Literally, like, zero,” he says. Self-­esteem issues and social anxiety made him listless, hard to relate to. It didn’t matter. When he got home from school every day, he’d load up Roblox. There, he says, “I could be king of the fucking world.”

Or at least the king’s errand boy. In that early group he was in with Malcolm—a role-play based on the sci-fi military game Halo—Ferguson proved his loyalty, drill after drill, lap after lap. Malcolm (not his real name) didn’t demand control; he simply behaved with the total assurance that he would always have it. “It very much was like being in a small military team,” Ferguson says. “You value that person’s opinion. You strive to do the best. You have to constantly check up to their standards.” Eventually, Ferguson became one of Malcolm’s trusted lieutenants.

In 2014, according to Ferguson, Malcolm watched HBO’s Rome, which depicts the Roman Republic’s violent (and apparently very raunchy) transformation into an empire. Inspired, he told Ferguson they would be swapping their uniforms for togas. Together, they forged Malcolm’s proudest achievement within ­Roblox—a group called the Senate and People of Rome. The name conjured high-minded ideals of representative democracy, but this was a true fascist state, complete with shock troops, ­slavery, and degeneracy laws. Malcolm took the title ­Your­Caesar. In 2015, at the height of the group’s popularity, he and Ferguson claim, they and their red-pilled enforcers held sway over some 20,000 players.

Roblox is no longer the lightly policed sandbox it once was. The company that owns it went public in March and is valued at $55 billion. Tens of millions of people play the game daily, thanks in part to a recent pandemic surge. It has stronger moderation policies, enforced by a team of humans and AIs: You can’t call people your slaves. You can’t have swastikas. In fact, you can’t have any German regalia at all from between 1939 and 1945.

Still, present-day Roblox isn’t all mermaids and pizzaiolos. Three former members of the Senate and People of Rome say the game still has a problem with far-right extremists. In early May, the associate director of the Anti-­Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, Daniel Kelley, found two Roblox re-creations of the Christchurch mosque shooting. (They have since been taken down.) And there are still Nazi role-plays. One, called Innsbruck Border Simulator, received more than a million visits between mid-2019 and late May or early June of this year, when—not long after I asked a question about it—Roblox removed it.

But how do these communities shape who young players become? Dungeons & Dragons was supposedly going to turn kids into devil worshippers. Call of Duty was going to make them feral warhounds. “It’s the same thing you see in relation to alt-right recruitment,” says Rachel Kowert, the director of research at Take This, a nonprofit that supports the mental health of game developers and players. “‘And they play video games’ or ‘And this happened in video games.’” It’s harder to pin down because. “There’s a line of research talking about how games are socially reinforcing,” she says. “There’s this process of othering in some games, us versus them. All of these things do seem to make a cocktail that would be prime for people to recruit to extreme causes. But whether it does or not is a totally different question. Because nobody knows.”

Ferguson, who today claims he is penitent for his role in the Senate and People of Rome, says he wants people to know about it, to make sense of it, to learn something, and hopefully, eventually, make it stop. They just have to get it first. “I say, ‘Oh, when I was a kid, I started playing this game. Suddenly, I’m hanging out with Nazis, learning how to build a republic on the back of slavery,’” he says. “But no one understands how. ‘It’s just a game.’”