Virtually Safe

By Ian, on August 30th, 2006

Children’s safety may not always be at peril when they go online. In fact, the latest developments are hopefully a move in the opposite direction. I received news yesterday about a new attempt to tackle bullying through roleplay in a virtual world. The scheme is being developed by a consortium of nine European universities.

Professor Ruth Aylett, Professor of Computing Science at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University believes that with young people increasingly familiar with computer games and story-telling through virtual reality worlds, the opportunity to interact with characters who are ‘virtually’ facing the same sort of problems that the pupils might be suffering in their everyday lives could be immensely beneficial.

“If you’re a young person facing some sort of bullying on a regular basis the problem can seem too big, too overwhelming, to tackle. What we will be developing is a virtual world where the user can interface directly with a synthetic character who is also a bullying victim. That bullying scenario is played out on the screen then the user can interface with the synthetic character, discuss what has happened and make choices about how the character might like to react in future. They can then watch the next scenario and see what sort of impact that advice has in how things turn out. That way, instead of what feels like a huge problem in their own lives the decisions are broken down into bite-sized chunks affecting a virtual character.“

Any attempt to tackle bullying is clearly a good thing, and the initial results have been promising: “children like the interaction with the virtual characters and find the content highly interesting and believable”. The main usability issue has apparently been the quality of the graphics. It’s an interesting approach, though bullies themselves appear to be keeping abreast of the latest technology. On March 31, a four-year study was presented to the British Psychological Society, which revealed that nearly 15% of 11,227 children had been victims of cyber-bullying.