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Commentary: Banning violent online games after Philippine school shooting will not protect children
The instinct to blame online games is understandable but wrong. Children live in a digital ecosystem designed to profile, influence and monetise; ratings and parental controls alone are not enough
- PUBLISHED: Fri 26 Jun 2026, 6:00 AM UPDATED: Fri 26 Jun 2026, 1:31 PM
- By:
- Rayad Kamal Ayub
The author is managing director of Dubai-based Rayad Group and an expert on cybersecurity and technology.
For 12 years, my work has been to think like an attacker, mapping how a serious breach actually happens. It is never one flaw. It is a chain of small, permitted steps—each harmless on its own—that ends in something catastrophic. The most exposed system I have ever had to study is not a network or a bank. It is a child online.
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On June 22, two boys aged 14 and 15 opened fire inside San Jose National High School in Tacloban City. Three students were killed and 20 more were injured. Within two days, Philippine authorities had temporarily blocked an ultra-violent sandbox game called GoreBox, after investigators found that the younger suspect had been an avid player.
The instinct to blame the game is understandable but it is wrong. Decades of evidence do not show that violent games, by themselves, manufacture killers; billions play them and harm no one. The investigators have said as much, calling the block a precaution, not a verdict, while bullying is examined. Correlation is not causation.
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But there is a worse mistake than blaming one game, and we keep making it: Deciding that because no single game is the cause, there is no cause worth confronting.
The real question was never whether one title or online game created a killer. It is what kind of environment now surrounds a vulnerable child, hour after hour, while the adults look elsewhere.
Look at that environment the way I look at an intrusion. It begins not with violence but with curiosity. A child installs a game. The game recommends a community. The community moves to a private chat. The algorithm serves content that is steadily more extreme. A stranger supplies the belonging that home did not. Each step is permitted, each innocent. Together they form a funnel, and the child is moving down it.
Recruiters aiming minors
Increasingly there is a final stage earlier generations never faced: the lure of money. Cash, crypto or in-game assets for attention, loyalty or obedience. That is not entertainment but behavioural capture. It reframes danger as opportunity and builds trust with someone a parent will never meet. Pair a violent game with a private channel and a payment, and you no longer have a child playing. You have the working method of a recruiter, aimed at a minor.
This is not a fringe concern. The world has roughly 3.6 billion gamers, and Asia is the epicentre: East Asia is the largest market, Southeast Asia, where Tacloban sits, is among the fastest growing, and across South Asia, India alone is on course for some 700 million players by 2029.
Asia and the Middle East together will soon hold close to 2 billion gamers, more than the rest of the world combined; in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt alone, the number will reach 84.3 million by 2029.
The World Health Organization estimates that one in seven adolescents already lives with a mental disorder. A great many of those players are children.
Not for parents to solve alone
This is no longer a screen-time problem for parents to solve alone. An adult rating means little when a child clears it with a false date of birth. No parent can audit every message and nudge in a day. The platforms can. They see patterns no family ever will, and visibility on that scale carries responsibility.
Some governments have grasped this. Under the UAE Cabinet Resolution No. 106 of 2026, children under 15 may not hold personal social media accounts, older teenagers get enhanced protection, and a parent cannot sign it away; a self-declared birthday no longer suffices.
Australia has gone further, barring under-16s from major platforms and putting the penalty, up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, on companies not families. Denmark and Malaysia are following. Protecting children online is becoming public policy, not private discipline.
Determined children will bypass any rule; they always have. But weak enforcement never justifies abandoning a sensible law. Seatbelts do not prevent every death, anti-fraud rules every fraud, or screening every plot. Each raises the floor and shifts the burden to those best placed to carry it.
The goal must therefore be larger than scrubbing violent clips. Chase content alone and you miss the mechanism and manipulation through community, escalation and money.
Come out stronger or be captured
Platforms should be required to detect and disrupt grooming, suspicious migration into private spaces, the escalation of weapons and violent role-play, and any attempt to put money in front of a minor. They should run safety assessments, keep audit trails, and bear liability when they knowingly expose a child to adult material.
None of this means making GoreBox, or any game, a scapegoat and closing the file. Most children who play will never harm anyone. It means abandoning a comfortable fiction that a child can safely navigate, alone, an ecosystem that adults engineered and that adults themselves would not enter without caution.
The Tacloban school shooting should not dissolve into the next news cycle. It should be the moment we admit that childhood has become part of the threat landscape, and defend it as such. We learned, eventually, to harden our networks, our banks and our borders.
The test of this decade is whether we will do the same for the one system we claim to value most. The measure of a digital society will not be the power of its algorithms or the size of its companies. It will be whether childhood comes through it stronger, or comes through it captured.
