Featuring cutesy outfits, fun anime characters, and mini-games where you can ride an orca, Gacha Life sounds like the ideal app for younger kids on paper. But behind the pastel colors, there’s a much darker side to Gacha Life – a toxic user community, violence and abuse, and themes that might raise the hairs on the back of your neck. So, how did this sweet little game build such a bad name for itself online? We explore why parents need to be wary of Gacha Life and whether it’s safe to let kids play.
What is Gacha Life?
Gacha Life is an online roleplaying game that lets you play dress-up with anime-inspired characters and act out scenarios with them. It’s popular with younger teens and tweens, mostly because it’s easy to use and the roleplaying possibilities are endless. The app easily allows kids to explore their creativity and storytelling capabilities.
While the word gacha appears in the title, Gacha Life isn’t a “gacha game”. These are games which push users towards making in-app purchases and spending in-game currency to receive random items. This type of app has been likened to gambling, so it’s important to note that Gacha Life doesn’t share these characteristics – in Japanese, the word gacha refers to a small toy sold from vending machines, which is often given randomly, just like the prizes in gacha games.
What can you do with Gacha Life?
As a roleplaying game, it all depends on how you want to use the app. Kids can create endless scenarios, but the main features of Gacha Life are:
1. Customizable characters: hair color, outfits, and facial features are fully custom. When you first start using Gacha Life, you can select characters from a preset selection, but then build on them or edit them completely to make them your own.
2. Studio mode: this function allows players to create scenes with characters, where they can also pose them and add speech bubbles to make them talk and interact with one another.
3. Mini games: from math quizzes to hitting bunnies in whack-a-mole style, Gacha Life has a selection of mini-games that reward users with gems (the in-game currency of Gacha Life) the higher their score. Higher scores place users onto a global leaderboard. Players can also get more gems by watching in-game ads, or spending real-life money through in-app purchases.
4. Gacha: The Japanese word gacha refers to small toys randomly allocated from a vending machine. In Gacha Life, this is where the random aspect comes in: users spend their in-game Gem currency to collect a series of gacha items, which they can later give to NPCs (non-playable characters).
5. Life mode: in the Life mode section, players can explore, traveling to different parts of the game to meet NPCs and interact with them. Players earn points and progress in levels the more they talk to NPCs, along with other features like giving them gifts and answering quizzes.
How old do you have to be to play Gacha Life?
Google Play awards Gacha Life their Everyone label, which means the content is generally considered to be suitable for all ages. The Apple Store, on the other hand, rates it as suitable for ages 9+. Lunime, the developer behind Gacha Life, doesn’t recommend a particular age for gameplay, but as the app collects data, the privacy policy indicates users should be aged 13 and up.
Is Gacha Life for kids?
In theory, Gacha Life is a pretty kid-friendly game – the plots in Life mode are inoffensive, while the games are simplistic and harmless. After all, what parent would be put off by math quizzes, or a character riding a narwhal?
There are very few red flags within the game itself, and the most parents would need to look out for are some of the outfits kids can dress the characters in, or the ads and in-app purchases that are displayed during gameplay.
The game comes with a very dark side, however. The problem with Gacha Life is not the game itself, but what users are doing with it. Because the app allows you to create content and upload it to social media, with no moderation within the app itself, searching online for Gacha Life stories and videos can easily bring up sexually explicit and violent content – a far cry from the fun, child-friendly image of the app itself.
Why is Gacha Life inappropriate?
Because the gacha characters can be posed any way the user wants, and the chat section allows the player to enter any accompanying text they like, there’s no control over what people can potentially create. Despite millions of users quietly playing away throughout the world, a small, toxic subset of users have created a bad name for Gacha Life online through user-generated content containing:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Homophobia
- Sexual imagery or storylines
Thanks to the Studio feature, YouTube is host to thousands of Gacha Life videos telling stories containing sexual and adult content. This is also apparent in the high search volumes on Google for Gacha Life porn, Gacha life sex, and Gacha Life p o r n, along with searches on social media for the hashtag “Gacha heat”, a trend in the gacha community where the focal part of the story revolves around sexual imagery, violence and dominant or abusive relationships.
This hashtag often spills over into other Gacha Life hashtags on social media, meaning even if kids aren’t looking for this kind of content, they may be exposed to videos containing upsetting or inappropriate themes.
Qustodio’s advice for parents
Just looking at the app, Gacha Life is pretty harmless for kids to play, and offers younger children the opportunity to get creative through customization and storytelling. The only things to consider within the game are its extensive “gacha” collectables, in-app purchases, adverts, and data collection for under 13s – kids should be careful not to enter any personal information anywhere.
The problem with Gacha Life comes with exploring the app on the internet and over social media. Kids can easily be exposed to a host of inappropriate content, trends, and adult imagery, whether they look for it or not.
To help keep kids safe as they enjoy Gacha Life and other apps:
- Turn SafeSearch on to act as an automatic porn filter.
- Keep an eye on the YouTube videos your child watches, especially the younger they are. Qustodio’s YouTube monitoring feature allows you to see which videos your child has been watching, and uses AI technology to flag problematic YouTube searches so you can react in the moment.
- Talk openly to your child about the games they like to play online, and the type of content they access when they go online. By offering yourself up as a safe, non-judgmental space, they’ll be more likely to turn to you if they see something that troubles them.
- Set time limits on apps and create healthy screen time routines that allow your child to balance their tech use with their offline obligations, family life, and screen-free moments.
- Block problematic apps and websites, such as social media platforms, for younger kids who aren’t old enough to be accessing them. Talk to your child about these limits and let them know why it’s important for you to keep them safe online.
- Don’t save credit card details on devices and set up profiles for your children that are not connected to your payment details, to avoid any surprise in-app purchases.
By establishing clear family expectations, and being involved in your child’s digital life, you’re more likely to be able to control access to platforms that are inappropriate for younger children, and give them the right support as they play and have fun online.
