Roblox was supposed to be a digital playground, a place where kids built castles, ran pizza shops, and pretended to own theme parks. Instead, it’s managed to spawn something darker. Literally.
Enter Spawnism, a so-called religion where children are being lured into believing the game’s respawn symbol is divine. In 2025, kids are carving a glowing white circle from a video game into their skin to “secure eternal life.” Because nothing says future of the metaverse like ritualistic self-harm over a PNG.
Spawnism began as throwaway lore in Forsaken, a Roblox horror game designed for jump scares, not theology. The story featured a fictional cult that worshipped “The Spawn”, a digital promise of a second life. The symbol looked like a glowing ring, meant to mark where fallen players reappear. It was clever world-building, until some players decided it wasn’t fiction.
By late 2023, the line between gameplay and belief began to dissolve. Children, some barely teenagers, started forming fan servers devoted to “The Spawn,” complete with prayers, rituals, and digital scripture. What began as edgy roleplay metastasised into real-world behaviour. Reports soon surfaced of kids carving the symbol into their skin, coaxed on by anonymous avatars in Discord channels and private chats.
The platform, designed to let users build any world they could imagine, had accidentally created the perfect laboratory for belief, a place where the border between myth and reality could vanish with a few lines of code.
At the centre of it all sits a shadowy off-platform group known as the Com Network. They present themselves as Spawnism evangelists, kind, understanding, spiritual. But the rituals they promote aren’t symbolic. They’re bait. Victims describe being coaxed into harmful acts while predators record and share the footage as leverage. It’s blackmail disguised as transcendence, industrialised grooming wrapped in pixelated faith.
Moderation can’t keep up. Thousands of reports flood the system every day, but predators blend in perfectly, same avatars, same casual chatter. Some children have already taken their lives. Others remain trapped in the delusion that the respawn symbol will save them.
Parents, meanwhile, still think Roblox is digital Lego, safe, educational, harmless. They see pastel worlds and cheerful music, not danger. But Roblox isn’t Minecraft. It’s Lord of the Flies with microtransactions. Over 200 million users log in every month, most of them children, and where the crowds go, predators follow.
Virtual worlds amplify belief. They make fiction feel real through repetition and emotional feedback. Spawnism grew from that ecosystem, a religion born of loneliness and reinforced by design. It didn’t happen in spite of Roblox’s success. It happened because of it.
To a child, the internet isn’t virtual. It’s the world, just smaller and brighter. Friendships, heartbreak, rivalries, they’re all real. So when predators infiltrate those spaces, they don’t feel like outsiders. They feel like friends. The manipulation starts small: a quest, a challenge, a secret. The grooming doesn’t look like grooming; it looks like gameplay.
Even Roblox’s safety features, AI moderation, content filters, community rules, can’t stop what’s built to slip through them. The Com Network doesn’t speak in obvious words. It speaks in coded emojis, hidden channels, and layered slang. It’s a language designed to evade detection while pretending to be harmless.
Spawnism isn’t just an internet curiosity. It’s a signpost. A glimpse of what happens when children grow up in worlds where story, faith, and fear overlap until they’re indistinguishable. In that environment, belief systems born in code feel no less valid than those born in cathedrals. The digital becomes divine the moment it gives meaning, and meaning is exactly what predators know how to sell.
Every login, every message, every whispered prayer to “The Spawn” still feeds the same system. Each tragedy, each lost child, still counts as engagement. It isn’t a glitch in the system, it is the system. Trauma generates clicks, clicks generate profit, and every exploit becomes a datapoint.
The respawn symbol was meant to represent second chances. A visual for “try again.” But it escaped its purpose. It became a promise. In some circles, children genuinely believe carving it into their skin ensures rebirth inside the game. A simple mechanic has become a theology of harm.
The horror isn’t that kids believe this. The horror is that the ecosystem makes belief like this make sense. A world where avatars outlive players, where death is a loading screen, where consequence is optional.
We used to laugh at the idea of digital gods. Now they’re here, born from algorithms, raised on isolation, and fed by attention. Spawnism isn’t religion in the old sense. It’s reflection. A mirror showing what happens when connection becomes synthetic and faith becomes a brand.
And maybe that’s why it feels inevitable. The cult of the respawn fits perfectly in an era that promises infinite lives, infinite retries, infinite second chances, right up until there aren’t any left.
The metaverse was supposed to connect us. Instead, it’s breeding isolation in high definition. Spawnism is what happens when meaning gets outsourced to machines, when children look for transcendence in pixels because the real world stopped feeling safe. The only ones truly “respawning” are the abusers, cycling through accounts, servers, and loopholes, while the rest of us stare at a glowing symbol that used to mean hope.
Now it means something else entirely.
And if we’re not careful, the next generation won’t just play inside the machine.
They’ll pray to it.