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Making “Safe”: Community-Centered Practices in a Virtual World Dedicated to Children with Autism Kathryn E. Ringland, Christine T. Wolf, Lynn Dombrowski, Gillian R. Hayes Department of Informatics University of California, Irvine {kringlan, wolfct, ldombrow, hayesg}@uci.edu ABSTRACT
The use of online games and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly in children and young adults. Parents have concerns about risks their children might encounter in these online spaces. Parents dynamically manage the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces online through both explicit and implicit means. In this work, we use empirical data gathered from a digital ethnography of a Minecraft server, Autcraft, to explore how parents of children with autism continually create a “safe” virtual world through both implicit and explicit means. In particular, we demonstrate how their actions in these spaces define and produce “safety,” shedding light on our theoretical understanding of child safety in online spaces. Author Keywords
Autism Spectrum Disorder; children; assistive technology; virtual worlds. ACM Classification Keywords
K.4.2. Social Issues: Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities. INTRODUCTION
As use of online games and virtual worlds becomes increasingly prominent, particularly for children and young adults, parents have concerns regarding their children’s welfare. For example, parents worry that their children will come to harm through exposure to pornographic and violent content, cyberbullying [9,50,51], trolling [49], griefing (i.e., intentionally breaking objects) [14,20], and sexual predators. Children with autism1 are three times more likely to be bullied in school than their neurotypical peers (i.e., those not diagnosed with autism) [3,16]. Given the tight correlation between school-based bullying and cyberbullying [4,34], it is reasonable to assume that children with autism are at great risk online. Particular attributes and behaviors of some children with autism that could lead them to be tar-
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675216
geted by bullies include topic fixation, frequent meltdowns, and an inability to be flexible in social situations [16]. Prompted by the worry over bullying and child welfare more generally, some parents have taken action to create “safe” spaces in the online worlds their children frequent. By making “safe” spaces, parents appropriate available technological tools to create conditions that better align with the experiences they wish their children to have. These innovative appropriations augment our understanding of online safety practices, particularly with regards to children with special needs. In this paper, we describe the results of an ethnographic study of an online multiplayer virtual world created specifically for children with autism and their friends and families. We show how this community has transformed a relatively open virtual world system into a highly structured space. We demonstrate how this community creates a “safe” space where the detailed, explicit structure of the system as well as implicit norms and routine experiences create expectations of safety and therefore freedom from fear of bullying. To create or render this space “safe”, parents use practices of rule creation, structure within the virtual world, mentoring, and monitoring. Additionally, we examine these practices as a means to inform our theoretical understanding of safety in online spaces, particularly in light of the differences between how parents discuss online safety and how they make safe. RELATED WORK
The CSCW community has a history of researching virtual worlds as a place of play (e.g., [12,18,36]). The “work” of childhood is play [22], during which children learn to be appropriately social [21,39]. Children’s play within virtual worlds often mimics and expands upon play in the physical world [32]. Specifically for children with autism, playing with technology as a way to scaffold the development of social skills has been an area of much research [26,47]. However, little work has specifically studied children with autism1engaging with virtual worlds [38]. Parental concerns about safety shape the way in which their children play in online spaces. A child’s context can be
1
The term autism will be used throughout this paper to denote Autism Spectrum Disorder as well as Asperger’s Syndrome as previously defined before the DSM-V changes [2].
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In addition to fears about strangers or inappropriate content that their children might encounter online, parents also worry about what inappropriate content children might generate. There are always at least two people involved in any social aggression: the bullied and the bully. A national survey of parents found that children with autism were not only more likely to become victims of bullying, but also perpetrators [3]. Parents are concerned with both sides of bullying: they do not want their children to bully nor to be bullied [9].
Figure 1. Home Office of researcher in-world.
shaped by fears imparted to them by their parents [11] and also by measures parents take to modify or restrict how their children interact in online spaces. Thus, in this section, we review related research focused on (cyber)bullying and children’s online safety. Risks
Concerns of parents and caregivers about online safety range from children viewing inappropriate content to sexual solicitation [10]. Government agencies and other entities, such as schools and community programs, have begun to educate parents and children about online safety [50,52]. Attempting to understand the scope of the problem, researchers have conducted large surveys assessing the risks that online activity poses for children. These studies have found that some youth are more at risk than others when using the Internet [29,48]. For instance, very young users in particular do not have the safety skills (e.g., bookmarking websites so they can easily find a website again or blocking messages from unwanted people) necessary to use the Internet safely [29]. Researchers have examined the risks of children’s exposure to inappropriate content, such as pornography, and ways (e.g., technological tools) to protect children from being exposed in the first place [30,46]. For example, researchers have determined the effectiveness of spam filters and content blockers to reduce potential exposure of sexual content to children [46], finding that 42% of youth (ages 10-17) had been exposed to pornographic content within the last year and that filters and blockers did have some effect on reducing this exposure [46]. Findings from the Second Youth Internet Safety Survey show a decrease in the number of youth reported receiving passive sexual solicitation (e.g., ads or spam) from 19% in 2000 to 13% in 2005 [48], with targeted sexual solicitation (e.g., unwanted chat messages) remaining stable during this time period [35]. However, parents continue to worry about sexual predators online [9,10,17].
Bullying in schools and other physical spaces has long been a concern. However, cyberbullying (i.e., bullying that occurs online) has raised new worries for many parents and educators. There is no consistent definition of cyberbullying, other than it is very similar to physical world bullying [8,28,34]. Cyberbullying can consist of activities such as spreading rumors, making derogatory comments, and making threats [34]. Cyberbullying is more often perpetrated by individuals who are known to children in their offline world (e.g., classmates) rather than strangers or individuals known only through online interactions [34]. Definitions of what behaviors count as bullying vary by community. Outsiders may view many forms of negative social behavior as cyberbullying, whereas members of a particular community may have distinct classifications for these same behaviors and practices [14,20,33]. Parents may also view some activities within virtual worlds—such as destruction of in-world property, harassment, and theft—as cyberbullying, while participants in these virtual world communities term it griefing [9,14,20]. In fact, children and adults who participate in these online communities differentiate between trolling, griefing, bullying, and drama [9,11,14,20,33]. However, parents who do not spend time in world tend not to differentiate between these different terms [11]. Because of the differing viewpoints about cyberbullying between parents and children, solutions to creating safe spaces can also differ. There is an ongoing debate on how to stop or curb negative, aggressive behaviors in virtual worlds [14], with each virtual world adopting different strategies [7,37]. Most agree that cyberbullying is a problem that needs a solution to create a safer online experience for children [4,8,24]. We build on these related streams of research to demonstrate how a community of parents and players with autism create spaces believed to be safer online by creating structure in a normally open and free virtual world. METHODS
As a part of an ongoing digital ethnography, we conducted observations in a Minecraft2 virtual world dedicated to children with autism and their families, Autcraft. The digital ethnography includes immersive participant observations in 2
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the virtual world [6,7,37], conducted by the first author. The first author has 2.5 years experience playing Minecraft recreationally, playing approximately 15 hours per month. The first author gained access to Autcraft via permission of the server’s creator. In Autcraft, we have collected 30 hours of in-world observations and analyzed a myriad of digital artifacts surrounding the virtual world. This digital ethnographic study is structurally similar to others conducted with disability communities in virtual worlds, such as Irani et al.’s work in Second Life [25]. In-world observations include participating in activities on the server, recording dialogue as it appears in the chat, and writing extensive field notes on everyday practices and events as they occur in the virtual world. Researcher participation in the world also included building an in-world home office that acts as a home-base for in-world activities and enabled other players to visit and ask the researcher questions, as the researcher’s presence and purpose were made clear to the community through announcements on Autcraft web forums and through in-world chat (See Figure 1). Observations occurred at various times during the day and evening, mostly during the afternoon and evening hours after North American children (i.e., the bulk of the permitted players) would be home from school. However, as this is a global server, observations have also occurred at other times of the day as well, with approximately 10 hours occurring during the afternoon and evening for players in Australia (e.g., where another large segment of the players live). One of the requirements for playing on the server is that all chat activities occur in English, meaning most players are located in English speaking countries. In addition to conducting participant observation, researchers conducted two semi-structured expert interviews with
Figure 2. A player next to a pond in a forest in a Minecraft virtual world.
the creator of Autcraft and have analyzed digital artifacts (e.g., community blog posts, web forum posts, and community website pages) collected over a period of six months in early 2014. These included reading approximately 500 forum threads (which included approximately 5,000 forum posts), as well as reading 15 blog posts created by players, parents, and administrators. The first author also participated in the forums, posting information about the research project and answering questions players had about the study. The interviews and all observations were recorded, transcribed, and inspected together. We used an inductive approach to derive the emergent themes from our data, following techniques similar to those employed in grounded theory [13]. We conducted weekly meetings, during which observations and interviews were discussed, scrutinized, and written into analytic memos. We organized these memos initially through open coding. Through these preliminary codes, types of practices and meanings emerged, particularly patterns of common behaviors and situations around practices of safeguarding. Additionally, through directed coding around the theme of safeguarding behaviors, we identified the dimensions and degrees of variation around these behaviors (e.g., the various kinds of safety these parents are making). We used affinity diagramming and axial coding to understand the relationship between, across, and within these codes. RESEARCH SETTING
Minecraft is an open-ended, free-play style game through which players can interact in a virtual world with no particular goals or play requirements [19]. The open-endedness of Minecraft allows for an expression of individuality and creativity during play, which may make the game particularly compelling for players [19]. The graphics are intentionally pixelated and blocky (See Figure 2). Minecraft can be played as either a single or a multiplayer game. In a single player game, the player is alone in his or her own unique virtual world. This virtual world is procedurally generated at the outset of the initial play session creating a randomly unique world each time a new virtual world is started. As a multiplayer game, Minecraft allows players to interact with others and be as socially engaged as the individual player desires in a procedurally generated virtual world. One world could have each individual building on his or her own land plot, while another could have a communal space where everyone builds collaboratively. Multiplayer Minecraft servers are virtual worlds that allow multiple players to interact with each other and objects in a shared space. The server in our study, Autcraft, is a semiprivate server that currently has approximately 4,000 whitelisted players (i.e., permitted players). Players can only be added to the whitelist if they attest to having autism or a friend or family member with autism who plays on the server. The community Facebook page states that Autcraft is “[the] first Minecraft server dedicated to providing a safe, fun and learning environment for children on the au-
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tism spectrum and their families.” Minecraft generally has no specific directed goals, unlike like a traditional ‘game’. However, the Autcraft server does express the goal of allowing players to play without the fear of being bullied. As such, the server provides a supportive environment in which children can gain social skills while participating in an activity they enjoy (e.g., creative play). A virtual world is well suited to the particular needs of children with autism (e.g., the need for coaching in particular social situations and special accommodations for sensory needs, etc.) and can be a boon for parents who struggle to find appropriate, supportive social activities in which their children can participate. Another perceived benefit of the server may be the camaraderie from interacting with others experiencing autism. One parent even noted how her child said he was happy to have autism, because otherwise, he would not be able to play on the server. While some players only play on Autcraft, others also play on other servers not specifically dedicated to autism. In addition to playing on these larger servers, many players also have their own private servers for their family or also play in single player games. In fact, while on Autcraft, players will discuss leaving the server to go play on a “normal” server or in their own game for a while, usually to come back later. Unique Features
Autcraft has some unique features that make it different from other Minecraft servers. This includes how the virtual world is administered, unique spaces within the virtual world, and specialized events and activities. Many of these features are accomplished through “mods” (i.e., additional software packages that modify the original game) to either the single player or multiplayer game. Using these mods, a server owner can customize the virtual world, gameplay, and objects within the virtual world (e.g., add or modify existing objects found within the virtual world). Autcraft is set up with specific measures in place with the intention of creating a “fun, safe environment for children with autism”. These safety measures include giving each player the ability to keep their items safe from other players, turning off violent monsters, and monitoring and logging of all activity by administrators, moderators, and add-on tools. Administration
Autcraft’s rules are enforced by administrators, junior helpers, and senior helpers. Administrators have the ability to be invisible in the game in order to monitor activity unobtrusively and to maintain the game without being bothered by other players. Helpers are both adults and children that have been selected by the administrators as being ‘responsible enough’ for the position. Junior helpers are children, while senior helpers are adults on the server. In the main area, there is a board with all the current junior helpers listed and a sign, which describes how junior helpers are selected. It reads:
“Jr. Helpers ~ Always helpful. Helpers are picked because they help others and they help the community. They also follow the rules. The [administrators] are always watching. Don’t ask to become a helper. We will ask you when we think you are ready.” Community Areas
In addition to special rules and roles, administrators have created unique spaces for players on the server. These spaces serve as meeting places, areas for building, and a means to go on adventures with other players. Spawn. The area where players arrive when they first access the virtual world is the starting area, commonly referred to as the “spawn”. This is the area where all the current administrators, helpers, and Player of the Week are displayed. Portals to all the other areas players can access in the virtual world are found in the spawn area, the entryway of the virtual world. Mini-Games. Small, enclosed games or mini-games are group activities that players can choose to take part in within the virtual world. These games have their own arenas that players can access by teleporting through a portal found in the starting area. Mini-games include: Paint Ball, Hide & Seek, Wither Battles, Parkour, and Spleef. In each of these areas, when the player teleports to the arena, players are given the equipment they need in order to participate in the game. One of the more popular mini-games is Hide & Seek, an extension of the classic “hide and seek” children’s game. In this alternate version, hiders that have been caught by the seeker also become a seeker. This allows players to continue playing even after they have been found. In addition, players call out taunts (or hints) to the seeker as time begins to run out to give the seeker a sporting chance to win. For instance, a player might say, “I can’t believe I haven’t been found yet. I’m very near the rose bushes!” Villages. Villages are large, public community sites. These can be used by everyone, but cannot be altered by players (i.e., players cannot place or destroy structures in these spaces). Villages include many different kinds of buildings including: hotels, banks, schools, churches, libraries, reading spaces (including outdoor reading gardens), general stores, court houses, and jails. These serve as common meeting grounds for players to engage in various activities. Player Activities
Players participate in a number of activities within the spaces created by administrators. These activities include building houses and other structures, participating in communal building projects, and socializing within these various spaces. Player Houses. In the Peaceful Survival World (as opposed to other areas where building is not permitted or only temporary), players can build their houses anywhere outside of the administrator created village as long as they are at least
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30 blocks away from other players’ buildings. Administrators can “protect” player created houses. Once a house is protected, only designated players (i.e., owners) can add or remove blocks in that house. This protection feature is not available in the original Minecraft software, but is a mod that the administration selected when creating the server. Community Spaces. Players can also form groups to create their own community spaces. Players have made villages of their own where each member has a house and as a group, they have created other buildings, such as cafés or other places to be together. One player made a “Hang Out Place” with a dance floor, cooking area, horse swimming center, and lounge chairs. As noted on a sign left by the space’s creator, “No killing horses is magior,” meaning that not killing horses was a “major” rule for that communal area. These places serve as spaces for community events to take place such as firework displays. PARENTAL SAFETY CONCERNS AND “MAKING SAFE” PRACTICES
“Safety” is a thorny concept in any setting, but when considering children and online social spaces, it can become even more complicated. Children mature and learn continually, and not at a steady or predictable rate. Additionally, the children’s in-world experiences are largely shaped by their parents and other adults, particularly in the case of Autcraft. Thus, in this research, we focused on the views of the parents, because they have the resources and control to set up and encourage or require their children to use “safe” spaces in online worlds. However, parenting approaches vary widely amongst and even within different cultures and geographies. In this section, we unpack the idea of “safety” as the parents described it in interviews and digital artifacts. We then compare this to the described and observed practices these parents undertake to make Autcraft “safe” for their children. A key finding of this work is that the parents’ practices often do not align with their descriptions of safety. By examining both, we deepen our theoretical understanding of online safety, specifically in regard to three categories: emotional safety, physical safety, and social safety. These categories are deeply intertwined, as are the definitions and actions surrounding safety. Our analysis illustrates what families understand safety to mean online, even when they cannot always articulate that understanding. Emotional Safety
In this section, we describe how parents understand emotional safety in the context of Autcraft and the different practices they engage in to keep their children from emotional harm. Parents define emotional safety in online spaces as securing the child’s self esteem, sense of security, and identity acceptance. For parents, emotional safety is breeched when avoidable negative and/or inappropriate behaviors occur, including bullying, trolling, griefing, and sharing inappropriate content.
These risks come from behaviors enacted by an insensitive or cruel “other.” On his blog3, Stuart Duncan, Autcraft’s founder, describes the prevalence of these negative experiences in both online and real world settings: Most players come to us with tales of bullying and hate from other servers. Many of those same players experience the same thing from school and in other aspects of their life. They feel they have no friends, no one to talk to and they are angry. Bullying and negative social experiences could lead to children with autism viewing their differences (from neurotypical children) as a source of unhappiness [5]. Stuart Duncan explicitly praises avoiding judgment for differences as a feature of the server on his blog: Just last night, a new player said ‘this is the only server i have found without being judged for being ‘different’. Those with disabilities often struggle with positive identity formation in the face of exclusion and negative social experiences [31]. In participating on this server, parents attempt to build a safe space in which players can develop positive self-image and find self-worth without fear of judgment from others. Preventing Emotional Pain through Explicit Rules
Rude behavior, name-calling and bullying are explicitly prohibited by the community rules4 of Autcraft: No one likes to be called a name, no one likes it when someone is mean to them, and no one likes to be bullied. Explicit rules also regulate acceptable chat discourse, including the prohibition of chat spam or caps, swearing, name-calling, and bullying. These rules govern both the chat content (e.g., dating, scary content, etc.) and the mechanisms by which the conversations may take place (e.g., no bullying, spam, all caps, etc.). For example, the community actively discourages and restricts potentially “scary” content by regulating avatar appearance and chat content. Given the wide age range of players, the community restricts the use or discussion of fictional monsters associated with the game, often referred to as the “no Herobrine5” rule, because such content may be intimidating and frightening for younger players. Justification of rules about content are explained by a parent on the community forum: We want [this server] to be a safe, happy, comfortable place for all our players to enjoy no matter what they're afraid of or who they're talking to. This parental stance focused on protection, particularly for younger children, can lead to some resistance from the old3
http://www.stuartduncan.name/ http://www.autcraft.com/rules 5 Herobrine is a fan fiction monster in Minecraft lore. 4
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er players. For example, the “no dating” rule prohibits players “to talk about dating, or love, or marriage, or being a boyfriend/girlfriend” as well as “pretending to talk about these things…[including] role playing.” These explicit rules engender meta-discussions among the players about dating via discourse around the rules themselves: 6
for permission to be in the castle and was in turn chastised for yelling: The player, piratescurse, tells off some other players for being mean by going into another player’s, bel’s, castle without permission. Another player counters by saying that piratescurse is “taking over” the castle by policing it. Piratescurse insists that the players ask permission, this time with force, “guys ASK BEL FIRST.” Another player chimes in to admonish piratescurse for the use of all caps. More arguing unfolds, with another player in the chat complaining that players are taking their things from the castle. Finally, one player calls for another player to be banned from the game. Piratescurse does not give up the fight easily, and begins calling for anyone to help him, “someone came into my [castle] without asking HELP HELP”.
*hugging Candy3421sis*
This is just friendhugs Dating is not allowed on autcraft whats dating no plez there are apparently a lot of things not allowed on autcraft Dating is what you do with your girlfriend
In this instance, the argument ended when a senior helper stepped in and defused the situation. The most common activities that are policed are that of inappropriate language, use of caps, and spamming. As in the example above, when piratescurse first wrote in all caps, another player noted the rule breaking by reminding everyone in chat, “caps piratescurse”.
matt_awesome please stop Ok sorry I just told about the rules we wouldn't want autistic people to breed, obviously... that was sarcasm Listen to bb1 Hey, Cryptic, that's not the point and it's a mean thing to say, even if you're joking :/
Of course, rules must be enforced to be effective. And, as we can see in this example, several types of players—junior helpers, senior helpers, and other players—may work together to stop someone from engaging in what has been deemed inappropriate discourse. Monitoring and Enforcement
Administrators (i.e., parents who have administrative power in-world), senior helpers (i.e., select parents), and junior helpers (i.e., select children) monitor all chat within the virtual world. In addition to administrative monitoring of chat, the players also monitor each other’s chat and activities while in the virtual world. This evidences the extent to which the players have internalized and come to rely on the emotional security the world's predictability affords via rules. Players frequently chime in via chat that a rule is being broken. This behavior creates a self-sustaining safeguarding practice. It speaks to the way in which the rules created by the parents have become important to the children as an embodiment of safety. Below is an excerpt from field notes describing an incident in which players were all role-playing at another player’s castle, “bellum”, who happened to be offline at the time. One player, “piratescurse”, was attempting to police these other players for not asking 6
All player names are pseudonyms.
By means of another mod, administrators are able to monitor all chats, including private messages sent from one player to another. This allows the administrators to see any bullying that may occur out of view from the public virtual world forum. Parents’ fear about the emotional safety of their children is so great that curtailing the privacy of the players on Autcraft, even in spaces assumed to be private, may be an appropriate sacrifice. One might imagine a “safe” emotional space in which actions and discussions can be practiced, sometimes with negative consequences, as a type of learning. However, by choosing rule enforcement and surveillance as the primary modes of addressing emotional safety, Autcraft parents implicitly signal that being “safe” means avoiding all risk through obedience to rules and enjoyment of benign activities. Players trust selected others to protect them rather than being provided the agency to learn to be safe themselves. Enforcement Hierarchy
Beyond explicit rules, the Autcraft servers are set up in such a way as to reduce the potential for negative or inappropriate behaviors that might emerge over time. Parents explicitly control access, monitor and regulate chat communications, and restrict content they deem as potentially frightening to their children. These actions go beyond the definitions of emotional risk the parents provide in interviews, chat forums, and websites, which are largely focused on specific concerns around bullying, and move into a set of risks that are much harder to define and may vary from parent to parent (e.g., content that is inappropriate for one age group of children, but not another).
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Tightly controlled access to Autcraft is key to its operation, because any given parent might view particular actions or content differently from another. For example, some sexual content might be viewed by one parent as a normal part of adolescence and by another as deeply inappropriate. Likewise, humor and jokes are highly contextual and person dependent: one person’s joke is another’s bullying or offensive behavior. Access to Autcraft is regulated through a vetting process, which culminates in individuals being placed on a whitelist, allowing players to access the game. This gatekeeping practice ensures that players have a connection to the autism community (e.g., have autism or are a family member or friend of a player with autism). This personal connection to autism attempts to alleviate the stigma towards autism and reduce the likelihood that members of the group will victimize one another [15]. Typically, the vetting process occurs when individuals describe their connection to autism and agree to follow the rules of the community. Allowing only those with a direct connection to the autism community helps ensure safety by allowing players to express their differences without fear of repercussions such as stigma. Additionally, server administrators provide individual players with greater access and responsibilities over time. This practice has the dual effect of taking some of the workload off the parents and empowering some more senior members of the community to develop greater social skills and confidence by becoming “helpers.” Although most in-world policing occurs by players reminding one another of the rules, those who have been promoted to junior and senior helpers have the ability to mute and jail players who are breaking rules. These policing functions help maintain the rules while requiring players with autism (i.e., junior helpers) to police their friends. This can be quite a responsibility, as one young player referred to logging onto Autcraft as a junior helper as “going back to work”. On the one hand, peer enforcement may improve the in-world experience dramatically for both the helpers and the players they monitor— much like the traditional “hall monitor” in schools. On the other hand, however, by offloading the enforcement of rules developed by adults with particular concerns, parents may inadvertently be increasing the stress and social anxiety of their children, another kind of emotional risk. Regardless, the inclusion—and exclusion—of particular players from the server or from the ranks of helpers implicitly demonstrates a key component of safety as enacted by the Autcraft server. Emotional safety, in light of this hierarchy, must be understood as an evolving boundary regulation process, much like privacy has been understood by others [1,40]. What might hurt another’s feelings or cause emotional discomfort is under continuous negotiation. Meanwhile, the boundaries between safe and unsafe are tightly controlled. The administrators of Autcraft must navigate the tension between inclusion of those who need such
a space with protection of the space from the general public who might want in. Likewise, they must balance the needs of developing emotional maturity—through questioning discourses and promoting helpers—with the need to protect those inside the boundaries of the safe space from emotional harm. Physical Safety
Despite virtual worlds having no explicit physicality themselves, parents have substantial concerns that center on what we name virtual physical safety. This type of safety has two components: the transfer of risk from the virtual world into the physical, such as the risk that might be posed by sexual predators, and the risk to the physical elements of the avatar in the virtual world (e.g., being killed in world, having a player’s home or other buildings destroyed, and item theft). Physical Risk Inside a Virtual World
Risks of all kinds in and surrounding Autcraft come under the label of bullying. Just as bullies in the physical world not only taunt, but also injure their victims, the same is true in the virtual world. Parents fear their children’s avatars or property may come to harm at the hands of online bullies. In an interview with Stuart Duncan, he describes the physical risks inside a virtual world: All of these people were telling the same stories, about how their children were bullied on every server they tried. Even on XBox, where you can only play with people you add as a "friend"... it was [nonstop] bullying. Either killing them all the time, stealing their things, destroying everything [they] build. Unsurprisingly, there are explicit rules from the Autcraft community website around both injury to the avatar and “griefing”: …building a trap of any sort for players, Trapping (blocking them in), break a block out from under someone or otherwise somehow find a way to kill another player will result in being jailed. If something was created, crafted, built, placed or simply owned by another player, it is not ok to take it or break it. Some rules regarding physical safety can be enforced in part through mods. Technology-assisted rule enforcement leaves little ambiguity. Player versus player damage is turned off in all areas of the virtual world except for a specific arena designated for combat. This means that players cannot attack and injure or kill one another outside the combat arena. Administrators can “protect” player created houses. Once a house is protected, only designated players (i.e., owners) can add or remove blocks in that house. Property protection also safeguards players’ virtual animals from harm from other players if they are fenced within the property. Not all property can be protected automatically, however, and in practice, those rules that cannot be enforced automat-
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ically—primarily focused on “griefing”—are variably enforced. Although these rules are quite detailed in their wording, administrator actions provide insight into the actual meaning of avoidance of griefing in this space. For example, while the rule against destroying property is enforced for players who repeatedly inflict damage on other player’s possessions, other players, especially younger players, typically are not punished for property destruction. In this case, parent and helper actions help us to see that learning to navigate the physical space—including through construction and destruction of property—is a value of a “safe” space. Young and new players can make mistakes when interacting within the world. They may not understand the consequences of their actions, be new to interacting with the physics of the space, and so on. Additionally, there is recognition that having autism increases the likelihood that one might have poor executive functioning and anger management skills [23,41]. These infractions—particularly when they happen infrequently—then are handled by talking to the player about the problem in the chat window. Mentoring replaces punishment to privilege the emotional wellbeing of the perpetrator over the physical safety of others. Virtual Risks to the Physical World
As parents have stated in other surveys [9,51], one of the biggest concerns about their children going online is the risk of strangers hurting them in some way in the offline world. To mitigate this risk, the Autcraft community website explicitly prohibits sharing of personal information: The Internet is a scary place sometimes and not everyone is who they appear to be. As such, sometimes we even need to be protected from ourselves where this is concerned. No personal information other than your first name may be shared on the server, on our forums, on our Facebook page. Parents are worried about their children divulging information that strangers can use to harass them or even simply to locate them in the physical world. By creating such rigid regulation of information flow in this space, parents may actually prevent their children from learning how and when to disclose such information in a relatively safe experimental world. The child players, however, appear to bristle at these rules, recognizing that the risk is limited for some personal information that is technically prohibited, as is shown in the following excerpt from researcher field notes: One player mentions that their school does not start for another week because they are in the state of New Mexico. Suddenly, several players are speaking up in chat comparing and discussing which state they live in. When one player asks what town players live in, another player says, “please be [careful] telling where you live, safety first”. The first player says, “fine what county”. A junior helper then also joins the chat, “guys please don’t share
where [you] live”. This is retorted by the original player, “[it’s] not like we are sharing our [address, it’s] a state”. In this example, as in the chat transcript in the emotional safety section, other players began enforcing the rules. By the end of the conversation, a junior helper advised players not to share personal information. Even in the face of such authority, however, the players respond with their own understanding of what it means to avoid risk and be safe, a more liberal definition than the rules provide but still fairly conservative from a general online community viewpoint. No one was punished for these infractions, and the situation was not deemed serious enough for intervention from a senior helper or administrators. This indicates that in context, the parents themselves may also see the wisdom of a more tempered approach regardless of what is explicitly stated and defined on the community’s website. Social Safety
Parents’ actions demonstrate an important element to their working definition of safety: the ability to learn social skills and act as a community. Social safety is rarely spoken about within the community, but rather simply enacted through practices such as structure, role-playing, and mentoring. Additional Social Structure
Neurotypical children often learn their social skills in classrooms, playgrounds, and virtual worlds like Minecraft through a lot of trial and error, watching, and mimicking [21,22,39]. These kind of free-form explorations of the social world are supported particularly well by Minecraft. However, as is described by Duncan in an interview, additional structures are often necessary to teach social skills to children with autism [42]: Minecraft servers are everywhere but they’re largely left free. That is to say, they let players do as they please. And rightly so really, considering Minecraft is a sandbox, a free to do as you please type of game. But that environment isn’t great for those that may struggle socially. Autcraft seeks to be a place for children with autism to learn appropriate social skills and relationships with other children, and therefore, the administrators have created structured social skills interventions throughout the world. Mods help support the basic social act of welcoming a new player. When a new player logs into the world for the first time, the chat window instructs all players online to welcome the new player:
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slithytove joined the game. Hello slithytove!! Welcome to Autcraft Spawn! Welcome, slithytove! Welcome slithytove to AutCraft!
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Figure 3. A giant pony construction found in Ponyville.
Figure 4. Giant recreations of the Autcraft administrators overlooking Giantland.
Welcome Hello slithytove hi tove :) Howdy tove. welcome slithytove
In addition, the chat window occasionally sends messages instructing players how to complete certain tasks (e.g., how to protect a house when the player finishes building it). These built in instructions give the players cues on how to be supportive of one another. Autcraft also gives structure and context to the players through the physical spaces within the virtual world. Administrators have sectioned off various areas within the virtual world and created distinct locations in these areas. For example, Peaceful Survival World, a location within the world of Autcraft, is the only area players are permitted to build their homes and other creations. Parents often take the lead in large construction sites. For example, the community villages and themed zones such as Ponyville (See Figure 3) and Giantland (See Figure 4). Driven by the need to create a contextualized space for their children to play, parents run the risk of overreaching and not giving their children the freedom to build in Minecraft for himself or herself. However, this is sometimes balanced by having “build groups” consisting of parents and children who work on projects together, such as Doctor Who Island. Individual players (both parents and children alike) create personal and public spaces in Autcraft. These spaces give the players context for various activities. An example of player created spaces is that for mourning of physical world people or pets. One such memorial is a large cross with flowers growing around its base. On a sign below the cross it reads “R.I.P. Bubbles dad”. Another player created a special memorial room in his community house for his de-
ceased dog (See Figure 5) that can only be accessed with permission of the player. Inside the room are flowers, signs with inscriptions about the beloved pet, and an in-world dog that lives on in the virtual world. Parents strive to encourage children players to create both literal and metaphorical structure in the virtual world. For example, when a child complained of being lonely, a parent suggested building a clubhouse and inviting other players to come over and play. Role Play
Children learn through play [39,45], and whether online or off, role-playing provides a means for trying on potential future careers, various social configurations, and so on. To facilitate role-playing, at the behest of a group of young players, the Autcraft parents created "Role Play Castle." As one parent posted about the benefits of role-playing on the community forum: It allows people with autism the opportunity to play around with social interaction without the pressure of worrying about getting it wrong. Despite its recognized benefits [26,43,44], many of the adults on the server are conflicted about allowing roleplaying. This activity can blur the rules of the server, potentially impacting the emotional and physical safety of players. For example, a lively sword fight could easily end in physical damage to a player’s body. Likewise, playing “house” invariably leans toward discussions about dating, marriage, or future imagined children, and a fictitious daring spy mission might frighten young children. The positive nature of role-play—that it sparks potentially endless imagination—is the very thing that creates substantial risk. Thus, the very existence of Role Play Castle without substantial rules and regulations surrounding it demonstrates how conflicted the Autcraft community is around issues of safety as they are enacted in world. These parents recognize both the importance of play as a necessary aspect of socialization,
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important given the challenges children with autism experience around social skills, and the potential social risks associated with unregulated play spaces. Learning through Mentoring
Administrators and peers teach players about fairness, work, and sharing. These community values are a part of the official community rules: …we encourage everyone to be generous, to be nice and to help as much as you can. You don't have to give your stuff away but to just give someone a little help if they need it. And always do your best to remember to say "please" and "thank you". The server has its own monetary system with which players can purchase objects. In addition, players often barter items that they might need. Players may share objects with others through community chests. People offer to trade or give away objects through the chat dialog. Players also will meet at the spawn to give away excess items, calling it a “drop party”. This means they will just drop their items on the floor and if anyone wants them, they can pick them up. As one parent said on the community blog: I wanted to say, my son is loving Autcraft. Another child gave him gifts today and he was shocked. A little while later he said to me, ‘I didn’t really want to, but I gave some gifts away to others. It makes me want to give things to people.’ It is a new thing for him to want to share. Sharing is a community value, which is then taught to and encouraged in younger players through these activities. More experienced players engage in mentoring of other players to perpetuate sharing practices throughout the community. Social safety is ambiguous and flexible, with risks that are hard to define. Parental actions in this venue indicate an interest in education over protection. Structures and rules are still heavily used, but they are conceived as tools for learning more so than regulations to be policed. These tightly controlled structures create a space in which children with autism can play collaboratively. However, they also restrict the kinds of relationships players can form with each other. They may also make it more difficult for the children to translate the social skills they learn in game to their lives outside of the game. This kind of generalization is a key goal for socials skills interventions but extremely challenging to meet. DISCUSSION
Parents must balance the needs of their children to explore, learn, and grow with the potential risks such exploration inherently includes. Anyone who has watched a child take a first step, jump from a high height, or ask a crush on a date knows the anxiety that comes with these acts. When those children have special needs, this anxiety can become even
Figure 5. Player created memorial for a family dog.
more profound, leading parents to define and redefine their own thoughts about safety, independence, and even childhood itself through both their discussions and their actions. In this work, we explored how parents make “safe” spaces for their children online, a place that has both the potential for limitless learning and exploration, but also terrifying risks. Our results demonstrate that it is not enough to define safety based solely on what parents are able to articulate. Actions of the parents in the Autcraft community make safety through their monitoring and enforcement of rules through a variety of social and technological means. Safety is accomplished in these settings by actions that prioritize and balance risks and rewards and attempt to align viewpoints of various members of the community. In this online community, there are several key complications associated with attempting to reduce risk. Reducing one risk can increase another. Actions to mitigate risk can infringe on a child’s personal growth. The community has to prioritize certain risks over others due to resource constraints. Finally, children sometimes resist being controlled. Members of the community—largely led by parent administrators but including child players, parent players, and helpers—collectively determine which risks to mitigate and how to resolve them (e.g., through the mods to the software, rules, and so on). The prioritization of safety-related actions takes place through various channels. Parents negotiate with one another through forum and chat discussions, through social networking sites, and also through the software code. Throughout these processes, the outside world is consistently seen as threatening. It is perhaps unsurprising that such fear would exist amongst community members given the reason for Autcraft’s creation in the first place. Parents with children of special needs have a unique set of lived experiences that may make the social world feel inherently unsafe. Parents who are accustomed to hearing about their children’s deficits [27,31] are understandably more likely to
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fear the dangers that surround them. They may see a need to control not only dangers from the outside world, but also the danger of those found in the difference in their own child. However, at the same time, many parents of children with special needs regularly lament that their children can learn more, do more, and be more than the outside world allows. Thus, parents must balance the risk of harm from others with the risk of enabling enough control over the environment to allow their children to grow and mature. Safeguarding—keeping out the dangers of the outside world—can have the unintended consequence of reduced opportunities to learn and perhaps even infantilizing children as they grow into adolescents and adults. In practice, parents must continually work to align themselves with the interests and actions of other parents as well as children on the Autcraft server. Without this alignment process, their efforts to make a safe space cannot be effective. Parents and their children must agree and enact the same practices to mitigate risk. This tension can be seen when children and young adults push back on their parents’ control and create their own practices. Through this virtual world, parents have created the means by which their children can gain more responsibility in enforcement of rules through the junior helper role. This role, as well as informal policing by server members who are not officially designated as junior helpers, may help children learn self-regulation and how to read the social cues necessary to regulate others, important skills for children with autism. There is, however, a tension between the potential benefits from learning these types of regulating behaviors and their potential to create stress or social anxiety from the undue burden these types of responsibilities can create. As we see, ‘play’ begins to feel like ‘work’ for some children taking on these junior helper roles. Parents must also find alignment between each other, determining not only for themselves what practices to employ and which risks to prioritize, but also aligning their beliefs and practices with other parents. Parents must agree on the “right” way to safeguard each other’s children while in the online space. Meanwhile, administrators and players, parents and children, continually redefine the boundaries of “safe.” Safety is never complete, can never really be achieved, because it is continually developed and produced. Given the challenges parents face in their daily lives, the creation of Autcraft as a safe online space for children with autism to play is in itself rather astonishing. Parenting is an inherently fraught endeavor, with numerous schools of thought. From debates about co-sleeping or sleep training and cloth or paper diapers to the merits of a gluten free diet or ABA therapy, parents align with, judge, and argue with other parents in nearly every aspect of their child rearing. Thus, the very existence of Autcraft, a collective endeavor created by thousands, is impressive. Ultimately, the process of balancing and aligning views and actions allow a disparate community with a shared goal to make a safe space in
the online world. At the same time, they are making a new concept of online safety. While parents readily label certain practices as unsafe (e.g., bullying), an agreed upon, coherent definition of safety eludes parents’ explicit discussions (e.g., blogs, chats, forum posts, even posts about rules, etc.) and for good reason. Safety must be made, it cannot just be discussed. Any parental attempts at explicitly defining the practices that form safe conduct will have a limitation in that what is 'safe' cannot be universally applicable to all situations and contexts. In the context of Autcraft, safety comes out of a continually negotiated process through which both parents and children strive for a balance between risk and autonomy in a given situation. Through both social and technological means, the concept of online safety emerges as one that is dynamic, contextual, rapidly shifting, and continually negotiated. Through their interactions, parents and children continually define and redefine the fluid boundaries between safe and unsafe, allowing for the evolution of both the technological platform’s capacity to allow for safe practices and the inhabitant’s social practices the platform is meant to guard. No static definition of safety can account for what we see in this work: safety is, in fact, a process. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The results of our work suggest that parents define and enact safety in complementary, but different ways. By examining both their production of safety through appropriation of the Minecraft platform and their discourse around safety, we can develop a deeper understanding of the evolving meaning of “safe” in online spaces. Three categories of risks emerge from our empirical work—emotional, physical, and social—but even these categories should be seen as evolving. This work therefore contributes to our greater understanding of online safety and collaboration by recasting safety as a process enacted by a community in online spaces. Our work demonstrates how players—both parents and their children—continually manage the dynamic boundaries between safe and unsafe in an online virtual world, Autcraft. The production of a safe space is a feat unto itself, and the communal processes by which parents negotiate with one another to create this space is worth exploring in detail in future work. A deeper look at what happens when parents do not agree on what “safe” means and how they resolve that tension could illuminate further how safety is crafted in online spaces. Additionally, this work has thus far privileged the parents— as indeed does the platform itself. Future work should explore these same experiences from the viewpoint of the children and the tensions between parents and children as safety is made in online spaces. More work is needed to examine how the children in these virtual worlds engage in safety practices, accept or reject safety measures imposed by their parents, and still fulfill their own needs and desires for socializing and fun in these online spaces.
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By shifting to a view of safety as a process and recognizing that the discourse and actions of people in virtual worlds collectively make safety, we can push the field farther in terms of our understanding of collaborative online experiences. We can also strengthen our ability to create educational interventions for children about online safety and create additional supports for parents making safety in online spaces. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank the members of Autcraft for the warm welcome to their community, in particular Stuart Duncan and other participants for their time and insights. We appreciate the thoughtful feedback from the members of the LUCI lab and STAR group at UCI. We also thank Paul Dourish, Melissa Mazmanian, and Jed Brubaker for helpful conversations during the formative stages of this paper. This work was supported in part by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. We would also like to thank Robert and Barbara Kleist for their support. This work is covered by human subjects protocol #2014-1079 at the University of California, Irvine. REFERENCES
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