Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - Volume 3, Number 2: Virtual Worlds for Kids

Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010 Editor-in-Chief

Jeremiah Spence

Guest Editors

Sun Sun Lim National University of Singapore Lynn Schofield Clark University of Denver, USA

Cover illustrator

Lim Su Pei National University of Singapore

Editorial Assistants

Cao Yuanying National University of Singapore Shobha Vadrevu National University of Singapore

Reviewers: Denise Anthony, Iccha Basnyat, Anne M. Burke, Leanne Chang, Pin Sym Foong, Sara Grimes, Elizabeth Hayes, Jackie Marsh, Alex Mitchell, Elmie Nekmat, Alvin Saw Teong Chin, Becky Herr Stephenson, Shobha Vadrevu, Karen Wohlwend, Joshua Wong Wei-Ern

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is owned and published by the Virtual Worlds Institute, Inc. – Austin, Texas, USA. The JVWR is an academic journal. As such, it is dedicated to the open exchange of information. For this reason, JVWR is freely available to individuals and institutions. Copies of this journal or articles in this journal may be distributed for research or educational purposes only free of charge and without permission. However, the JVWR does not grant permission for use of any content in advertisements or advertising supplements or in any manner that would imply an endorsement of any product or service. All uses beyond research or educational purposes require the written permission of the JVWR. Authors who publish in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research will release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works 3.0 United States (cc-by-nd) license. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is funded by its sponsors and contributions from readers.

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research Volume 3, Number 2 December 2010 “Virtual Worlds for Kids” ISSN: 1941-8477 Table of Contents • Virtual Epidemics as Learning Laboratories in Virtual Worlds o Yasmin B. Kafai, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania o Nina H. Fefferman, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources, Rutgers University • A Framework for Children’s Participatory Practices in Virtual Worlds o Terhi Tuukkanen, Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä, Finland o Ahmer Iqbal, Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä, Finland o Marja Kankaanranta, Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä, Finland • Who’s Watching Your Kids? Safety and Surveillance in Virtual Worlds for Children o Eric M. Meyers, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada o Lisa P. Nathan, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada o Kristene Unsworth, The Information School, Drexel University • Beyond Being There: A Grounded Investigation of the Value of Virtual Worlds for Remote Family Interaction o Lizzy Bleumers, IBBT-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium o An Jacobs, IBBT-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium • Making Sense of the Virtual World for Young Children: Estonian Pre-School Teachers’ Experiences and Perceptions o Andra Siibak, Institute of Journalism and Communication, University of Tartu, Estonia o Kristi Vinter, Department of Educational Science, Tallinn University, Estonia

• Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe: Advergames in the UK and Hungary o Arhlene A. Flowers, Department of Strategic Communication, Ithaca College o Katalin Lustyik, Department of Television-Radio, Ithaca College o Emese Gulyás, Association of Conscious Consumers, Hungary • Penguin Life: A Case Study of One Tween’s Experiences inside Club Penguin o Diana Burley, Department of Human and Organizational Learning, The George Washington University • Growing Up with Neopets: A Personal Case-Study o Stephanie Louise Lu, Northwestern University • Virtual worlds as a site of convergence for children’s play o Sun Sun Lim, National University of Singapore o Lynn Schofield Clark, University of Denver

Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

Virtual Epidemics as Learning Laboratories in Virtual Worlds

By Yasmin B. Kafai, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Nina H. Fefferman Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources, Rutgers University

Abstract In this article, we put forward the proposal to use virtual epidemics as learning laboratories for players to develop a better understanding of infectious disease, its social implications, and inquiry process. In the case of virtual epidemics, players can use their own experiences and observations of the community to learn about processes of infection and immunity, the interactions of social behavior, and reactions to perceived health risk – investigations difficult to replicate in real life due to ethical considerations. Different learning laboratories can engage students in testing different parameters in epidemic simulations, identifying and developing vaccines, analyzing archival records of past epidemics, and discussing ethical issues. Such laboratories would allow students to become epidemiologists using the very same tools that professional scientists now use to

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model and study the outbreak of an infectious disease. These are not unreasonable expectations given prior experiences with the virtual epidemic Whypox in Whyville.net, a large-scale virtual world with over 2 million youth ages 10-12 years. This article reviews past research findings and outlines new approaches for students in K-12 education to learn about and with virtual epidemics.

Keywords: virtual epidemic, science inquiry, ethics, virtual laboratories

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

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Virtual Epidemics as Learning Laboratories in Virtual Worlds

By Yasmin B. Kafai, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Nina H. Fefferman DEENR, Rutgers University It is only recently that the learning potential of virtual worlds has moved into the focus of public attention (Bainbridge, 2007). While virtual worlds have been in use for many years (Gee, 2003) the unplanned virus outbreak in the World of Warcraft™ became a story in the mainstream news media (Ward, 2005) and then a case study for epidemiologists (Lofgren & Fefferman, 2007). Lofgren and Fefferman argued that virtual epidemics were more than just a game: they could help us learn about human behavior in real epidemics – research difficult to replicate in real life due to ethical considerations. Virtual viruses can simulate many aspects of real life outbreaks, in some instances even seemingly ‘deadly’ consequences when a player avatar loses its accumulated powers and resources and has to start all over again. While death in cyberspace does not equal death in real life, to players the consequences were real in terms of actual time, social capital, and dollars spent on having their avatars reach certain levels.

In this article we want to take the idea of virtual epidemics a step further by promoting them as learning laboratories for students to develop a better understanding of infectious disease, scientific inquiry, and social impact of infection-related behavior. Our goal is to illustrate how interventions such as virtual epidemics that impact both the community and the individual player can create authentic learning opportunities or laboratories. We characterize these learning laboratories as ‘authentic’ because professional epidemiologists now use virtual epidemics as a way to identify pertinent factors for modeling real-life behavior (see Exhibit 1). As a case in point, we use the outbreak of a virtual epidemic called Whypox in Whyville.net, a tween virtual world. We first provide first background on research in virtual worlds and learning about infectious disease, then describe the 2005 Whypox outbreak in which we gathered information about participants’ online interactions and personal experiences, and finally discuss a series of learning laboratories that can serve

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as models for other educational interventions in informal spaces with possible bridges into science classroom activities.

Exhibit 1 Whypox from the Perspective of an Epidemiologist: Virtual Epidemics as a Research Laboratory Virtual epidemics have equal importance for advancing the science of epidemiology.

Epidemiologists have used computer-based modeling for a long time to predict and understand patterns, examining the role individual- and group-level susceptibilities, behaviors and mitigation strategies each play in determining disease dynamics in a population (e.g. Eubank et al., 2004; Sattenspiel, & Carpenter 2004). While these computer models have allowed very detailed investigation of the epidemic outcomes of assumed human behaviors, they have relied on basic assumptions about human reactions in situations of health risk from infectious agents which are difficult to measure (Fenton, Johnson, McManus, & Erens, 2001). By engaging human players, known to become emotionally invested in their virtual communities, in analogous situations of communal health risks, epidemiologists can begin to design experiments to tease apart how people really react to such threats in ways that would be impossible to achieve in real-world experiments.

Virtual epidemics like Whypox can provide some insights into behaviors previously unconsidered in epidemiological modeling, even without the benefit of designed experimentation. For example, players who undertook personal risk in order to satisfy curiosity were observed during the World of Warcraft outbreak – these behaviors had not before been explored epidemiologically, but do have the potential to drastically affect the overall risks of disease spread.

Using the a virtual epidemic like Whypox as a basis for such experimental designs will still involve an initial period of validation and testing of a model developed for real-world epidemiological prediction. For instance, existing models need to be tailored to represent virtual world interactions, durations of contact, in-world transportation and movement, and consistency of friendship groups as well as the etiology of the Whypox itself. It also would need to be tested whether or not the existing epidemiological models do achieve accurate predictions of within-Whyville disease dynamics. This will be of great importance when determining the scope of interpretation of resulting infection outcomes to broaden a general epidemiological understanding. It is likely that altering the Whypox itself to more closely mimic specific aspects of real-world disease etiologies will allow more controlled experiments, and more accurate model outcomes and predictions, and therefore more ease in accurate interpretation for broader use.

It is also necessary to manipulate further the existing Whypox to permit concept validation within the virtual world. A greater diversity of relevant etiological and epidemiological parameters,

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such as infectivity, severity of symptoms visible to others, and mechanism of transmission of infection, will allow epidemiologists to design a full series of controlled experiments exploring the reactions of individuals to diseases that differ in precisely controlled and defined ways. Since diseases in the real world frequently differ in more than one aspect from each other, it is difficult to know which specific characteristics are inciting which reactions in the population. By controlling the strains of Whypox in this way and observing the differences in responses, researchers can begin to better understand human reactions to disease. Further, they can explore the roles played by education, rumors, media reporting, and public health initiatives at shaping or mitigating those responses.

Finally, epidemiologists can observe relative transmission rates and numbers of Whyville inhabitants ultimately infected by the different strains of Whypox. Since they will have complete knowledge of the purposefully designed epidemiological parameters, they will be able to tease out the direct impact of the observed behaviors on the outbreak dynamics and determine which social, environmental and disease-related characteristics were most influential at altering individual and group behaviors in response to disease threats. These types of questions are of critical importance when making public health decisions, and can be uniquely addressed in virtual worlds because of the complete availability of use and interactivity data.

Learning in Virtual Worlds Our proposal of developing learning laboratories builds on previous research of computer-based tools and virtual worlds for learning about various aspects of infectious disease. While wearable or handheld computer applications have been designed for students to experience short-term simulations of epidemic outbreaks in classroom settings (Colella, 2000; Hug, Krajcik, & Marx, 2005), virtual worlds have extended these investigations in time length, complexity, and number of participants by creating large-scale, graphic, and real-time simulations. This emerging field is led by developments of Quest Atlantis (Barab, Arici, & Jackson, 2005), RiverCity (Dede, Nelson, Ketelhut, Clarke, & Bowman 2004), and Whyville (Neulight, Kafai, Kao, Foley, & Galas, 2007). Most pertinent is research on the virtual world River City where students learn about the process of scientific inquiry by examining the sewer system and housing conditions in the 19th century, simulating some of the first functional epidemic control models in public health (Snow, 1855). Students use their avatars to interview the city’s virtual inhabitants and collect data about sanitary conditions within the city but the avatars did not experience the diseases themselves. Studies have shown that previously low-performing students are more motivated to learn about the scientific process (Nelson & Ketelhut, 2007). In Whyville.net, players create avatars who experience an

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outbreak of a virtual epidemic called Whypox over several weeks. When students participated in Whypox as part of their sixth grade science curriculum on infectious disease, they learned to draw comparisons between real life and the virtual epidemics in classroom discussions (Neulight et al., 2007). These initial findings prompted us to investigate online activities and experiences in a virtual epidemic – described in the following section in more detail.

Design of and Experience in a Virtual Epidemic Whyville.net is a massive virtual world with currently over 4.2 million registered players ages 8-16 years. Until 2007, an annual outbreak of a virtual epidemic called Whypox impacted the whole community; now Whypox is a permanent part of Whyville life. Whypox, then and now, is a virus created by the company who hosts Whyville and usually launched at a public area of the virtual world visited by many players. Its mechanism of disease transmission can vary in type such as chatting or mailing with someone infected, getting hit with a projectile from an infected person, or just being in the same place as other infected people, as well as in the likelihood of getting infected and in visible manifestations. While players do not know what the actual mechanisms of disease transmission are, it leads them to articulate theories about possible causes and progressions of Whypox.

When Whypox hit Whyville in the early winter of 2005, it had an immediate effect on Whyvillians, largely because it manifested itself in the two most popular activities: avatar looks and social interactions with others. The first symptom of Whypox is the appearance of red dots on one’s avatar. The second symptom is the random interruption of chat and replacement of typed text with “Achoo.” While these features of Whypox may at first seem funny or a nuisance, they interrupt valued social functions and activities. We found that multiple aspects of Whyville life were impacted by Whypox that indicate its perceived relevance: visits of the Whyville CDC, a virtual Center for Disease Control (not associated with the real one), uses of epidemic simulator, writings in the online newspaper, and personal reactions to the lived experience.

Our information is based on a 2005 study (Kafai, Feldon, Fields, Giang, & Quintero, 2007) in which we recruited 438 online Whyville players between ages 10 and 16 years and surveyed them about their science and technology interests, Whyville activities, and understanding of Whypox. We also tracked their online movements and chat interactions

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before, during, and after the Whypox outbreak. In addition, we conducted a content analysis of writings about Whypox published in the weekly online newspaper The Whyville Times.

The virus spread fairly quickly and within three days of its launch, incidence of the disease had peaked and infected more than 4000 community members. We know from our tracking data that visits to the Whyville CDC before the outbreak of Whypox are close to non-existent with the exception of the occasional curious peek or accidental visit. This all changed once Whypox arrived: the number of visits jumped to 5,386 in a two-week window.

The Whyville CDC features an archive with information about previous infections and a bulletin board where players posted hypotheses about the causes of Whypox and its etiological characteristics. Within these postings, most Whyvillians agreed that people got better within two weeks, but there was greater variety in their speculation about how Whypox was spread. The majority of suggested mechanisms of infection mirrored those types of interactions commonly assumed by the public in real-world epidemics, even in the absence of scientific evidence. Others thought you became infected from the sun or not wearing warm clothes when it was cold outside. The process of postulating these causes and effects, and comparing them to observed or reported case histories is the same exploratory process employed by both members of the worried public and professional epidemiologists during the early stages of any outbreak.

We also found preliminary evidence that Whyvillians use experimental simulations to test hypotheses about rates of infection and epidemiology. Within the Whyville CDC, simulators let participants set and test different parameters for the rate and duration of infection. We observed that the frequency of the epidemic simulator use peaked during the Whypox outbreaks: over 1,400 simulations were performed by 171 of the 438 online players who participated in a study. We saw that 116 of them engaged in some form of more systematic investigation by running the simulations three or more times and half of them demonstrated significant improvements in the accuracy of their predictions (Feldon, & Gilmore, 2006).

At the same time that Whypox was peaking, articles begin to appear in the Whyville Times. In the February 6, 2005 and February 13, 2005 issues, when Whypox was the most prevalent, 3 of 20 and 5 of 21 articles, respectively, appeared in the weekly issues. In these articles, Whyvillian authors discussed when and where they discovered Whypox, theories for how it was transmitted, and even a scam where some Whyvillians “offered” to heal those infected if only they would be given passwords to accounts so that they could use their “computer genius” to cure people. Interestingly, many articles reported discovering Whypox

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in one place and thought it might be a joke, but then realized something different was happening when they found the effects to be more widespread. As one author described it: “Other times before this morning, people would go around faking the Whypox and saying Achoo. I played along this morning, fake sneezing like everyone else. But little did I know, they were sneezing beyond their control.” Many Whyvillians felt that Whypox was like a real infectious disease, citing its contagious nature as the most realistic feature. These very aspects of Whypox made it an integral part of Whyville community life; they also provide the foundation for considering virtual epidemics as a context for learning laboratories.

Virtual Epidemics as Learning Laboratories Based on these developments and our initial observations, we contend that a virtual epidemic like Whypox can offer promising opportunities for participants to design and implement empirical experiments that investigate human response to social, infectious risks.

Participation in Whypox will offer players a first hand experience with an epidemic outbreak because it provides an authentic context for studying communicable diseases that cannot be replicated in life for ethical reasons. We envision the following observatories, simulators, archives, and public panels as examples of such learning laboratories.

Observation Lab To begin with, virtual epidemics allow for valuable scientific inquiry by observing the behaviors of oneself and other Whyvillians during the epidemic outbreak. We can provide tools for visualizing various aspects of this outbreak in the larger community. For instance, one graph could showcase the daily tally of infected Whyville players, thus providing a quantitative and longitudinal overview of its impact, while another graph could display the number of infected players at various locations in Whyville and thus reveal centers of concentration. Other graphs could show all active strains in the infected population of Whyville, and visualize their distribution across different popular Whyville location. Finally, content of public chat could be fed into tag crowds that indicate the major topics of conversations among Whyvillians. Visualizations of this type are easily embedded in Whyville and accessible in any Internet browser. Players’ interpretations of visualizations could be posted in discussion forums where other players’ ratings of the content could provide prompt feedback and a form of peer assessment. In addition, such feedback could

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assist students who often have issues in interpreting complex visualizations. Other forms of assistance could be provided in sidebars or short tutorials or in offline classroom discussions.

Simulation Lab Virtual epidemics also allow for valuable scientific experimentation by providing simulators that allow players to test different scenarios. Here players could test different parameters of an epidemic by running controlled scientific experiments to answer narrowly defined, specific questions about the influence of individual factors within a multifactor, complex biological system. Such simulators allow for formulating, testing and subsequently rejecting or accepting a hypothesis – key features of the scientific inquiry process. In addition, such online simulations allow for embedded assessments as students’ growing accuracy in predictions could be used as a measure for their better understanding of salient features. The combination of observed and hypothetical behaviors offers intriguing opportunities to help players understand the idea of using inferred relationships from observed data to make predictions about future, unknown outcomes for use in decision making for public policy. While students’ issues with hypothesis formulation and testing have been documented in the research literature, offline support in form of teacher questions and feedback and online support in form of discussion forums could provide much needed assistance and help integrate these activities into the science classroom curriculum (Linn & Hsi, 2000).

Vaccine Design Lab Whyville can provide virtual laboratories in which players identify the strain of Whypox virus with which they are infected and then design a vaccine that might protect them against future outbreaks. This approach would also emulate current flu vaccine design where researchers try to identify and predict strains that will be prevalent in the coming season and in particular geographic regions. While such approaches are not feasible in current school laboratories due to the lack of equipment, these online versions can engage students in equivalent processes of detecting patterns in strains and designing appropriate vaccines.

Archive Analyses Lab With Whypox, we also have the unprecedented opportunity to add a historical context to the study of virtual epidemics. From 2001 to 2007 Whypox was a seasonal event often concurrent with the outbreak of the flu season. The Whyville CDC contains an archive of the

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early Whypox outbreaks documenting players’ experiences and theories about the causes and spread in discussion boards, community newspaper articles, and graphs. Students can use these materials to study patterns and experiences of past outbreaks, engage in comparative analyses, and make predictions about current outcomes. While many young players do not have extensive experience in learning with primary sources, previous research suggests that even elementary students can understand and use sourcing strategies (Kafai and GillilandSwetland 2001) Public Panels in the Ethics Lab Finally, we know from the reactions of Whyville players that fear of infection impacted player behavior during the outbreak ranging from ostracism to players expressing interest in getting infected. The social ramifications of prevention, protection, and interaction with others provide an authentic context for players to discuss ethical issues associated with vaccination, quarantine measures, and public health. For instance, appropriate measures can be taken within the community to control the spread of disease in ways that blanket, nonspecific measures may not be able to achieve. Participation in un-monitored online discussion boards can at times be problematic because players might veer off topic but seeding discussions with prompts or questions can help focus postings.

These learning laboratories are a first proposal for dedicated spaces in virtual worlds that provide a more in-depth investigation and understanding of lived experiences in virtual epidemics. One popular form of assessment in massive communities is crowd-sourcing in which virtual world participants rate contributions and hence provide feedback about their value to other players. Other forms of feedback and assessment are summaries of activity logs that inform teachers whether students have participated in essential activities.

Researchers are just beginning to develop assessment tools for virtual worlds, in particular those that can leverage the analyses of player behaviors and interactions in an efficient manner (Ketelhut, Schifter, & Nelson, 2008).

By observing and participating in Whypox, simulating the infection rates and other parameters, investigating the history of virtual epidemics, and discussing ethical and social concerns, we can engage youth in understanding key aspects of infectious diseases and epidemics that are a central part of living systems in the Grade 5-8 science curriculum.

Moreover, virtual epidemics as proposed offer an integrated approach because historical, social and ethical considerations are all part of scientific inquiry. By providing experience at all three levels of the scientific process of investigative epidemiological research,

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Whyvillians will gain a direct understanding of the processes of infectious disease in populations, but importantly, they will also see how applied scientific research can provide recommendations for action to protect the public.

Conclusions Our proposal of virtual epidemics offers a new model for learning in virtual worlds because it leverages particular design features of virtual worlds: real time, personal representation, and massive numbers of players. The idea of learning laboratories moves beyond the recognized value of virtual laboratories and thus could be more easily adopted by commercial virtual worlds. Participation in and study of virtual epidemics offer an authentic context within which to become familiar with the need for, and practice of, these aspects of empirical experimentation, one that is not only familiar but also of personal relevance as virtual worlds have become the new meeting place for youth. By bringing the mindset and tools of epidemiologists to virtual epidemics, we offer a viable approach for youth to become engaged in science and provide them with new lenses to understand the virtual worlds they inhabit.

Given the millions of players in virtual worlds, the success of our design could make virtual epidemics accessible to thousands of learners in classrooms, afterschool clubs and homes. Most importantly, virtual epidemics provide a test bed for youth to experience and understand issues about communicable diseases and vaccination that are at the forefront of today’s public debate. Public health prevention and protection measures are connected to behavioral changes and conceptual understanding of infectious processes and interactions. It is here where a better understanding of epidemic dynamics, real or virtual, can have a broader impact on personal and societal health.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by a grant of the National Science Foundation to the first author and by a grant of the Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analytics to the second author. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the supporting funding agency, the University of Pennsylvania, or Rutgers University. Various aspects of this research have been presented at the 2007 Communities and Technologies Conference and a 2006 EARLI workshop.

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Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

A Framework for Children’s Participatory Practices in Virtual Worlds

By Terhi Tuukkanen Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä Ahmer Iqbal Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä Marja Kankaanranta Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä

Abstract In recent years, participation of children in virtual worlds has grown and children are also the largest number of users of virtual worlds (KZero, 2009a). This growth in participation in virtual worlds has brought out discussion about their effects on children’s lives. In this article, we consider opportunities of virtual worlds to engage and educate children about their civic life.

The aim of this paper is to establish a framework for participation in virtual worlds and to test the framework by looking at current participatory practices in virtual worlds.

In this paper we present a framework for children’s participation in virtual worlds which is based on research review. Our framework sees children in virtual worlds as social actors, learners of civic participation and as citizens. Results of a survey conducted to find the participatory practices of children in virtual worlds are also presented. The results indicate that children are highly interested in socializing with friends and engaging in avatar related activities. It was also found that traditional forms of civic participation are not very common in virtual worlds. Thus, there is a need to promote traditional forms of civic participation and at the same time look at new opportunities presented by virtual worlds for civic participation.

Keywords: virtual worlds; virtual participation; civic participation; civic education; children’s participation.

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

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A Framework for Children’s Participatory Practices in Virtual Worlds Virtual worlds captivate children with imaginary, immersive and collaborative environments. In recent years some of the virtual worlds have seen an exponential growth in the number of users. Most of this growth has come from child-centered virtual worlds aimed at 10-15-year-old children as is revealed through a comparative analysis of registered user accounts of virtual worlds for the first quarter of 2009 and at the end of fourth quarter of 2009 (KZero, 2009a). As virtual worlds and other virtual spaces such as games and websites have become almost a natural part of children’s daily life, their supposed positive as well as negative effects on children’s lives have been discussed. Some people have argued that virtual spaces contain many risks for children, related to inappropriate content and social interaction, while others have emphasized the possibilities of virtual spaces for children’s agency and participation (Livingstone & Haddon, 2009).

Altogether, there has been growing interest in developing virtual worlds that could enhance children’s participation and contribute to better learning by motivating, inspiring and supporting while having fun. Stranius (2009) has argued that the huge potential of collective participation is accumulated in online communities and it is only a matter of time as this power is extensively launched. Virtual spaces have been seen as new arenas for children’s participation because traditional ways of participating, such as voting or organizational activities, do not encourage young people to participate anymore (Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001; Bennett, 2008; Loader, 2007). The potential of virtual spaces has been related to their competence in allowing children to express their opinions and in offering children opportunities to construct their identities as well as learn civic skills such as deliberation and decision making (Bers, 2008; Stern, 2008; Kotilainen & Rantala, 2008). At the same time, the viewpoint of children as passive consumers of technology and media has changed (Jenkins, 2006) and they are now seen as active content producers and participants of virtual communities.

Although the potential of virtual spaces has been recognized, the focus of previous research has not been on virtual participation. Research on virtual participation has been in its infancy and for example internet access, use, interests and activities have received more research attention than participation in virtual worlds. According to Donoso, Ólafsson and Broddason (2009), only eight percent of studies related to children and their online practices

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have focused for example on civic or political participation while 83 percent of the studies include information about online usage. Research on children’s online practices and their media use in general has dwelt on how children are at risk online and are thus in need of protection, instead of considering them as active participants who have some autonomy in developing their own online experiences and practices (Ponte, Bauwens, & Mascheroni, 2009).

Given the current research landscape, our aim in this article is to establish a framework for participation in virtual worlds and to test the framework by looking at current participatory practices in virtual worlds. Additionally, we look at how these participatory practices can be used to enhance civic participatory skills.

Framework of virtual participation The research field of virtual participation is quite young and the concepts related to virtual participation are not yet established among researchers (Pessala, 2009). Different concepts such as participation, civic engagement and influence are used in the research field.

Virtual participation also refers to participation in different contexts, for example virtual worlds, net pages or social media. In this paper, we focus specifically on children’s participation in virtual worlds. Use of virtual worlds is very popular among children but research on virtual participation has focused more on websites and other technologies than on virtual worlds. A lot of research has been conducted on children’s participation as well, mainly focusing on methods for enhancing children’s participation in different environments.

However, the focus on virtual worlds has been missing. In this article, we seek to fill this lacuna by proposing our framework of virtual participation.

Virtual worlds as arenas of participation Theis (2010) observes that the concept of participation has been criticized as it does not specify the meaning or forms of participation. Participation simply means “taking part” but the definition leaves open an essential question “taking part in what?”. As participation does not take place inside a vacuum (Polat, 2005), we have to define the context of participation. One way to approach the concept is to recognize the distinction between participation as social activity and participation as influencing or creating change in political

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or societal processes (Sotkasiira, Haikkola, & Horelli, 2010). Considering virtual worlds, both of these viewpoints are important and useful. Use of virtual worlds is usually social action and can thus be considered as participation. On the other hand, use of virtual worlds may have effects for example on users’ opinions, attitudes and behavior, when the concept of participation refers to the effects which emerge as a consequence of the social activity. If participation refers to a process of influencing which is focused on a group of people or on a community, we may talk about civic participation (see Montgomery, Gottlieb-Robles, & Larson, 2004). In this section, we will look more into these two viewpoints that form a basis for our framework of children’s virtual participation. We will first present a figure of the framework and then explain it.

The framework consists of four levels (Figure 1). The first level describes the two above-mentioned forms of participation: participation as social activity and as a process of influencing. The second level represents the child’s roles as participant in virtual worlds which will be considered more closely in the next section. The third level describes the roles of virtual worlds in the process of participation and the fourth level illustrates the affordances of virtual worlds for children’s participation. By affordances we refer to intrinsic features of technologies that support actions people intend to take with the technology (Gibson, 1986; Nardi & O’Day, 1999). Affordances may be intentional, for example virtual worlds’ affordance is to provide people a place for social interaction and playing games. On the other hand, some of a tool’s affordances emerge during use, unanticipated by designers (Nardi & O’Day, 1999). Considering virtual worlds, unintentional affordances may refer, for example, to participatory features. Intrinsically virtual worlds were not designed to enhance user’s civic participation or their civic skills but today we may see that virtual worlds have great potential for civic participation as well.

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Children’s virtual participation as competent actors

LEVELS

FORMS OF PARTICIPATION

Participation as social activity

CHILD’S ROLE AS PARTICIPANT

THE ROLE OF VIRTUAL WORLDS IN THE PROCESS OF PARTICIPATION

AFFORDANCES OF VIRTUAL WORLDS FOR CHILDREN’S PARTICIPATION

Participation as a process of influence

Child as social actor

Child as learner of civic participation

Virtual world as a social community

Virtual world as an arena for civic education

Child as citizen

Virtual world as a public sphere

STRUCTURE: EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL FACTORS • Interaction with others • Participation in common activities • Building new virtual lives

• Action in the role of producer • Creating a persona

• Action of interest groups • Expressing views

Figure 1. Framework of children’s virtual participation.

The significance of virtual worlds as arenas of participation lies in their intrinsically social nature. Virtual worlds are conducive to groups coming together and spending time together, with people going to virtual worlds to seek sociability, interact with others and participate in a common activity of play or work (Noveck, 2006). Virtual worlds stimulate social experimentation and encourage people to create new virtual lives and to build new virtual cultures and identities. They are full of social cooperation but also social conflicts at the same time – in this respect virtual worlds present all the opportunities and risks of social order we find in real space (Balkin & Noveck, 2006). According to earlier surveys, social activity is one of the main reasons for using the virtual worlds (KZero, 2009b). Most of the Habbo users, for example, use the virtual world to meet and discuss with friends or to help others. In addition, the virtual world holds a specific social value for those people who may otherwise be passive, insecure and shy: virtual worlds as well as the Internet in general are important for fulfilling their social needs. (Global Habbo Youth Survey, 2006.)

A process of influence always demands that other people are involved (Kiilakoski, 2008). Thus the view of virtual participation as a social activity creates a basis for

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considering virtual participation as a process of influencing. However, if the definition of participation as social activity is fairly unambiguous, defining the concept of influence is not so simple. Influence may refer to achieving certain transformations in the social or political processes or through decision making (Sotkasiira et al., 2010; Anttiroiko, 2003). In this regard, virtual worlds may be considered “public spheres”. Participation takes place within a public realm (Polat, 2005) and virtual worlds have been seen as arenas for interest groups and activists to act in public. They organize meetings and events to engender public debate and in this way, seek to accomplish something together (Noveck, 2006). These meetings and events may be organized for the community of practice interested in issues ranging from transportation to clean air (Noveck, 2006). As civic engagement is understood as expressing one’s views in order to participate and influence public life (Bachen, Raphael, Lynn, McKee, & Philippi, 2008), virtual worlds may be seen as arenas of civic participation as well.

It has been argued that the significance of new media for participatory activities lies in the shift from the “traditional” public sphere to everyday active participation in a networked, highly heterogeneous and open cultural public sphere (Burgess, 2007; Kalmus, Runnel, & Siibak, 2009). Since ‘public sphere’ has traditionally referred to the places of formal politics, such as elections and party activities, interactive net environments have expanded this sphere to everyday life and practices (Burgess, 2007; Rinne, 2008; Bennett, 2008). At the same time, forms of participation have become more personal and open: people can express their personality, values and lifestyles in a way they want (Rinne, 2008). This refers to opportunities of technology and virtual worlds as well. Virtual worlds have expanded children’s environments, like other online participatory spaces, from school, home and hobbies to an extensive, world-wide virtual community and public sphere.

On the other hand, a process of influence may point to more abstract transformations in skills, attitudes and identities. According to Bers (2008), children may learn new concepts and ways of thinking about identity and civic life by using the virtual world. This is based on the ways in which the virtual world works. For example in Zora, which is a three-dimensional multiuser environment, children are put in the role of producers instead of consumers: children are engaged in thinking about issues of identity by inviting them to construct their own virtual homes and populate them with their most cherished objects, characters, pictures, stories, and personal and moral values (Bers, 2008). Another important characteristic of virtual worlds for identity construction is the avatar, the simulacrum of self within the game space. Creating a persona to represent oneself realizes the idea of freedom and autonomy and

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on the other hand, forces users to think about how they want to appear as a member of a community. Thus creating an avatar is akin to assuming the role of citizens: avatars think and act as members of a game community rather than as private individuals (Noveck, 2006). In this case the significance of virtual worlds lies in their potential as arenas of civic education: virtual worlds are seen as a context for learning civic skills.

As we talk about public sphere and learning civic skills in virtual worlds, we come close to the concept of “civic participation” which can be defined in many ways. From the narrow viewpoint, civic participation refers to formal and traditional forms of participation, such as voting and taking part in demonstrations. The broad viewpoint extends the definition to active participation by community members, their interaction with others and their rights and responsibilities as community members (Montgomery et al., 2004). According to Levine (2008), civic engagement comprises even participation in shaping a culture which can mean many kinds of activities. In our study, civic participation is considered rather from the broad viewpoint though we will also look at the traditional forms of participation in virtual worlds.

The viewpoints of virtual participation as a social activity, and as a process of influence also define the roles of children as participants. Children can thus be considered as social actors, citizens or learners, depending on the context of their participation. If participation is defined as a social activity, participants may be seen as social actors in the first place. Children are social beings (Smart, Neale, & Wade, 2001) and technology, including virtual worlds, is one of the contexts in which many children fulfill their social needs. Defining participation as a process of influence, for one, sets children in the role of citizens. Children may be seen as citizens at this moment and thus virtual worlds are seen as public spheres and arenas for bringing out their own views and experiences. On the other hand, children may be seen as citizens in the future when the emphasis is on learning civic skills for the future. Thus, children are seen as learners. In the next section, we focus more on children’s roles as participants in virtual worlds.

Children as participants in virtual worlds Our examination of virtual participation is focused on children which entails some specific aspects. Children are always slightly special related to adults and hence things connected to children’s well-being generate a lot of discussion, sometimes laden with moral panics. In recent years, discussions of children’s use of technology, including virtual worlds,

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have been intensifying. According to Ponte et al. (2009), the discussion has oscillated between two contradictory approaches to children’s competence. Children have been seen as autonomous and fully-developed social actors on the one hand and as immature and incompetent agents on the other. Children’s autonomous and social character has been emphasized especially in political and academic circles. Ponte et al. (2009) have recognized children’s use of technology as part of their own culture and everyday life and based their argument on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which entitles every child to participate in their own culture and in all matters affecting the child. The traditional discourse, on the other hand, has been based on a view of children as incompetent beings.

People using this discourse have associated children’s online activities with negative feelings, problems and risks and thus brought out a critical view of effects of technology on children’s well-being (Ponte et al., 2009).

The view of children’s competence forms a basis for understanding their roles as participants in virtual worlds. Our basic argument is that a starting point for considering children as participants is the view of children as competent agents. We found this argument in one of the main theses of sociological childhood studies whereby children’s competence justifies their roles as social actors and citizens. According to this thesis, children have the competence to be involved in the construction of their own social lives as well as of the societies in which they live (James & Prout, 1997; Smart et al., 2001). Thus, children are seen as social actors and as actual citizens here and now, not only in the future (Roche, 1999; Jans, 2004). According to Jans (2004), for example, children are strikingly sensitive about global social themes like the environment and peace. Children have a lot of thoughts and experiences and virtual worlds may provide an arena for bringing out these views. On the other hand, considering children as competent participants do not mean that adults give all the power and responsibilities to children. The fact of adult power is and will be inescapable as children always need protection from adults (Roche, 1999; Jans, 2004). What is being argued, however, is that the definitions of participation as social activity and as a process of influence intrinsically involve the view of children as somewhat competent agents.

The question about children’s competence and their roles as participants can be contextualized by Giddens’ notions of structure, which refers to rules and resources, and agency, which refers to people’s capability of doing things (Giddens, 1984). Children have traditionally been considered as passive agents, first because they were seen as vulnerable and incompetent people (Smart et al., 2001) and second, because they have not been very

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active for example in organizational activities (Myllyniemi, 2009). However, current research is beginning to indicate that today’s children are indeed engaged in civic life and interested in participation, but in different ways than previous generations. Children tend to choose activism, volunteerism and virtual participation, as opposed to formal forms of participation such as participating in organizational activities (Bers, 2008). This means that children may also need new kinds of structures in the process of participation. Nevertheless, the potential of virtual worlds, for example, has not been fully realised. The potential of virtual spaces for enhancing children’s participation has been noted and emphasized in many agendas (for example Lansdown, 2001; Inter-Agency Working Group on Children’s Participation, 2008) and some preliminary studies have also shown the potential of new technologies to engage young people in online civic life. However, there is still a need for more research looking at how technology-based interventions, virtual worlds for example, can promote participation (Bers, 2008).

On the other hand, the notion of structure and agency can be considered as a viewpoint on virtual worlds. In virtual worlds, the structure may point to the external factors such as parental guidance, rules and restrictions on the one hand (Kalmus et al., 2009) and to the written rules of the virtual world on the other (Bartle 2006). Agency, for one, may refer to children’s competence to participate in virtual worlds. Crucial to the children’s participation in virtual worlds is the relationship between structure and agency. To what extent are children allowed to freely express themselves and discuss their opinions and experiences, for example? As we consider virtual participation from children’s viewpoints, we base our framework on the view of children as competent actors. The way children’s agency can be enacted relies, however, on the internal and external structures of the virtual world. It is crucial how the virtual world is constructed, the rules and restrictions which are set for their participation and the external factors which may have an impact on children’s use of virtual worlds. At its best, the relationship of structure to agency is in balance so that the structure of the virtual world supports children’s agency.

Defining clear bounds of virtual participation is not possible as the concept of participation is so fuzzy itself. However, we have now constructed our four-level framework of children’s participation in virtual worlds, based on research literature on participation, virtual worlds and childhood. We will next present the study which sought to test the framework.

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Methods The aim of this study was to test the framework by looking at children’s current participatory practices in virtual worlds. The study was carried out as an empirical survey study. A survey was conducted online at two Finnish schools in February 2010. It was distributed to schools through email with clear instructions for teachers and participants and a letter for parents. Most of the participants filled the survey in the computer labs of their schools with a teacher available for assistance. The total number of participants was 126.

The aim of the survey was to find out children’s participatory practices in virtual worlds. The survey consisted of three parts: the first part asked the children about their background, the second part about their virtual world usage and the third part about their participation in virtual worlds. The first part included six questions related to name, gender, age, municipality, parents’ education and leisure activities. It was followed by a question in which participants were asked about their knowledge, use and experiences of virtual worlds.

We asked whether participants knew what virtual worlds were; whether they had used virtual worlds or not; and if they were currently using virtual worlds. Based on the answers to these questions the participants were directed to other parts of the survey. Those who were still using virtual worlds were asked to identify the virtual worlds they were using and answer different questions related to participation in those virtual worlds. Those who had stopped using virtual worlds were asked to identify the virtual worlds that they were using and give reasons for abandoning virtual worlds. We asked these questions in order to understand what contributes to the lack of participation in virtual worlds.

The main aim of the survey was to find out what participants are interested in within virtual worlds and what participants do in virtual worlds. The third part of the survey was designed from this point of view. We constructed the questions using earlier studies on motivations and experiences of using games and virtual worlds as a basis. For example Yee (2005), Schuurman, De Moor, De Marez and Van Looy (2008) and Tychsen, Hitchens and Brolund (2008) have studied motivational factors of games and listed the features and activities such as competition, socializing, creating and customizing character, group achievements, exploration, role-playing, game mechanics and freedom as motivational factors in games. Also Iqbal, Kankaanranta and Neittaanmäki (2010) have studied the motivational features and activities of virtual worlds and listed socializing with friends, developing the character, playing games and exploring new places as the most popular and

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interesting activities in virtual worlds. As these earlier studies have not focused especially on participation, we also used our framework to get the viewpoint of participation in the questions. We listed the features and activities based on the affordances of virtual worlds for children’s participation, for example expressing views refers to voting and action of interest groups refers to taking part in demonstrations in virtual worlds. As we did not want to confine participants’ thinking to the features and activities that we chose, we also gave them a possibility to write on an open field about interesting things and their activities in virtual worlds.

Eventually, the third part contained four main questions. First of all, participants were asked which features of virtual worlds they were interested in. The participants were presented with 13 features and given three options (not interested, a little interested, very interested) for each feature. Secondly, the participants were asked about the activities they perform in virtual worlds through a series of three questions. There were three options, ‘never’, ‘sometimes’ and ‘often’, for each of the 15 activities. The features selected in this survey were not exactly the same as the activities, for example role playing was listed as a feature but not as an activity. This was done because we understand that the features and the activities have slightly different meanings. ‘Feature’ refers to the capacity of virtual worlds to make it possible to execute or facilitate an activity, whereas ‘activity’ refers to the practical process of doing things in virtual worlds. Thus every activity is facilitated by a feature but not every feature can be transformed into an activity. In this part of the survey, we also asked the participants about what kind of benefits they had perceived in using virtual worlds and what kinds of virtual worlds they would like to use.

The survey data was analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. SPSS was used to collate descriptive information about participants’ background, virtual world usage and participatory practices in virtual worlds. In order to deepen the understanding of participatory practices in virtual worlds, we also used qualitative classification method in analyzing participants’ answers to the open form questions.

Results General information about participants

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As earlier studies have shown that certain background factors such as age and gender have an effect on virtual world usage and children’s roles as participants in virtual worlds (Global Habbo Youth Survey, 2006; Johnson & Toiskallio, 2007), we also inquired about the childrens’ background information. Roughly one third of the participants were studying in primary school and most of the participants were at the upper level of comprehensive school.

Some of the participants who answered the survey were from higher secondary. However, these participants were very few in numbers and their impact on results is negligible. Gender distribution among the participants was even. There were almost equal numbers of boys (52%) and girls (48%). Most of the participants (84%) were 11-15 years old. In order to find out if the educational level of children’s parents has an effect on virtual world usage, we also asked the children about this. Most of the participants’ parents (60%) had passed either vocational school or upper secondary school and a third of the parents had graduated from university or polytechnic.

The most popular leisure activities among participants were outdoor activities and spending time with friends. A clear majority of the participants reported doing those activities more than four hours a week. More than half of the participants also reported watching television, spending time with hobbies and playing with computers or consoles more than four hours in a week. Considering leisure activities, there were no significant gender differences except that markedly more boys (71% of all boys) than girls (31% of all girls) reported playing with computers or consoles more than four hours in a week.

In order to find out if some background factors have an influence on virtual world usage in our data, we also conducted cross tabulations. They showed that participants who use virtual worlds at the moment tend to be predominantly 11-14 year olds. This is in accordance with the KZero (2009a) report which reveals that 10-15 year old children constitute the biggest age group of virtual world users. Secondly, we wanted to examine if the educational of participant’s parents has an effect on use of virtual worlds. However, we were not able to find any conclusive or significant results based on this factor.

Virtual world usage The results of the survey showed that 25% of the 126 participants use virtual worlds at the moment. Furthermore, 41% of the participants reported that they have used virtual worlds but stopped utilized them. There were also participants who reported that they know

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what virtual worlds are but they have not used them (27%) and participants who did not know what virtual worlds are (6%)1. The most popular virtual worlds among the participants who use virtual worlds at the moment were Runescape, Habbo, Club Penguin and Aapeli. Other virtual spaces that were named but which are less popular were GoSupermodel, World of Warcraft, Travian, PollyPocket, Atlantica Online, Fishville, Farmville, MoiPal and Stardoll.

Interestingly, many worldwide popular virtual worlds such as Poptropica, Neopets, Barbie Girls, Girl Sense and Weeworld were not used by the participants of our survey.

The most common reason for not using virtual worlds seems to be a lack of interest.

Two-thirds of the participants who have not used virtual worlds mentioned this reason. In addition, slightly less than one-third of the participants reported that they want to be in contact with others, for example friends in other ways. The same reasons were mentioned when we asked participants who had stopped using virtual worlds to explain their reasons for doing so. The most common reason was that they were not interested in the virtual world anymore, mentioned by 62% of these participants.

There may be several reasons for the lack of interest in virtual worlds and the other reasons mentioned by the participants, for example, the need for money in order to enjoy the virtual world and a lack of understanding of how the virtual world works, may account for their lack of interest in virtual worlds. One fairly natural explanation for the lack of interest is that some young people have just grown out of the children’s virtual worlds. For example, some participants mentioned the childish appearance of some virtual worlds as one reason for abandoning them. The most common virtual worlds which participants had stopped using were Habbo, Stardoll and Club Penguin. Habbo is a virtual world aimed at 13-year-olds or older but Stardoll and Club Penguin are virtual worlds aimed at 6-7-year-old children. This may not motivate all 11-15-year-olds to use the virtual worlds.

Participation in virtual worlds The questions related to interests in different features and frequency of activities in a particular virtual world received 54 answers for each feature or activity. This is higher than the number of participants who answered these questions (32 participants) because each 1

Percentages are rounded off to the nearest whole number due to the removal of decimals. Therefore these numbers add up to 99 %, instead of 100 %.

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participant was allowed to provide answers for more than one virtual world. The percentages for each feature and activity were calculated based on 54 answers.

The results indicate that the participants are very interested in socializing with friends in virtual worlds. Chatting and doing things with friends was shown as a very interesting feature in two-thirds of the answers. Another interesting feature in virtual worlds seems to be creating one’s own avatar which was considered as a very interesting feature in 60% of the answers. In slightly less than half of the answers, features such as the sense of being there or being part of, and competing and challenges were considered very interesting. One interesting result is that the participants are not very interested in expressing opinions which is one of the most essential features of civic participation.

Chatting and doing things with friends Creating own avatar Sense of being there or sense of being part of Competing and challenges Freedom to do things The way virtual worlds work Role playing or taking on other identity Exploring new places Chatting with different people of different culture Possibility to succeed or get better status than in real life Expressing opinions Observing other avatars Sense of reality 0

10

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100

Figure 2. Percentages of features which participants were interested in.

The results related to activities that participants frequently perform often in virtual worlds are quite similar to the results of interesting features. Chatting and doing things with friends is clearly the most popular activity in virtual worlds as it was reported in nearly 60% of the answers as an activity that is performed often. Playing games, changing the appearance of the avatar or exploring new places were mentioned in about 40% of the answers. The interesting result is that again, the participants do not either perform activities that are related to the public sphere and which can be regarded as formal forms of civic participation in real life. Indeed, most participants do not participate in group activities or in voting often and

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even fewer participants organize events or participate in demonstrations frequently in virtual worlds.

Chat and do things with my friends Play games Change appearance of my avatar Explore new places Decorate my space Do shopping or exchange things Observe what other avatars are doing Chat and do things with strangers Participate in competitions Participate in group activities Participate in voting Organize events for example games and competitions Participate in demonstrations Celebrate Take part when famous people visit 0

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Figure 3. Percentages of activities which were performed frequently.

In order to deepen our understanding of interests and activities in virtual worlds, participants were given the opportunity to talk about their interests and activities freely in an open form question. The answers did not, however, differ much from the results presented earlier. Socializing and chatting with other people (14) and playing games (11) were clearly the most oft-mentioned features among the 32 respondents. The same answers were given when we asked about the activities that participants perform in virtual worlds. Playing games was mentioned by 22 participants and socializing or chatting with others by 17 participants.

Other features and activities were mentioned only one to three times. In this respect, answers given to open form question resonate with the findings presented earlier.

The affordances of virtual worlds for children’s participation were explored more closely with a question on the benefits of using virtual worlds. The participants who were currently using virtual worlds were asked about their perceived benefits for a particular virtual world and they were allowed to choose multiple benefits for a virtual world. A total of 167 answers were received pertaining to benefits of different virtual worlds and the percentages are calculated based on that. In this analysis, we did not consider the benefits for each virtual world. The results show that the participants have derived many learning benefits from using virtual worlds though the most commonly mentioned benefit is entertainment.

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The participants reported that being entertained (23%); learning to use computers and the internet (14%); making new friends (12%); and learning new languages (13%) were the most important benefits they had gained from virtual worlds. Some of the participants also reported benefits that can be related to civic participation, for example participants had the opportunity to express themselves (10%), learn new things about themselves (9%) and learn new cultures (8%). Thus, whether intentionally or otherwise, some of the participants were engaging in civic participation or in activities that can teach them civic skills.

Conclusion The aim of the study was to test the framework by looking at children’s participatory practices in virtual worlds. Figure 4 presents the three roles of virtual world in a process of participation and the affordances of virtual worlds for children’s participation which have been specified with the lists of features and activities that children perform in virtual worlds.

As we now reflect on our results on the framework of virtual participation, we may make three main conclusions.

The survey results related to interesting features and often performed activities in virtual worlds show that the participants are very interested in many features and engage in many activities relating to virtual worlds as social community. For example chatting and doing things with others and creating or changing the appearance of one’s own avatar were in the top of the list as participants were asked about the features they found interesting and the activities they performed frequently . The finding is in accordance with earlier studies which have revealed that sociability, interaction with others and participating in common activities are the most interesting activities and features in virtual worlds (Noveck, 2006; KZero, 2009b). Thus, our first conclusion is that virtual worlds can be considered as arenas of participation, as far as participation is seen as social activity. Affordances of virtual worlds for children’s social activity are clearly intentional, which means that children were intentionally looking for social activities..

On the other hand, the participants were not very interested in features and did not often engage in activities related to the virtual world as a public sphere, for example participating in demonstrations or expressing opinions. In this sense, our results support earlier examinations which have revealed that traditional ways of participating do not encourage children and young people to participate (Torney-Purta et al., 2001; Bennett, 2008;

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Loader, 2007). Virtual worlds may not be seen as public spheres in a traditional sense which is our second main conclusion. This does not mean, however, that virtual worlds would not serve as public spheres for children for example to express their opinions. Children may fulfill these affordances unintentionally, by chatting or being in social interaction with other people, both of which are popular activities in virtual worlds.

VIRTUAL WORLD AS SOCIAL COMMUNITY

VIRTUAL WORLD AS ARENA FOR CIVIC EDUCATION

VIRTUAL WORLD AS PUBLIC SPHERE

Interaction with others • Chatting and doing things with others

Action in the role of producer • Creating/changing appearance of own avatar • Decorating own space • Organizing events

Action of interest groups • Participating in demonstrations • Organizing events

Participation in common activities • Participating in group activities • Celebrating • Participating in competitions Building new virtual lives • Creating/changing appearance of own avatar • Decorating own space

Creating a persona • Role playing or taking on other identity • Creating/changing appearance of own avatar • Possibility to succeed or get better status than in real life

Expressing views • Expressing opinions • Participating in voting

Affordances related to all three roles of virtual worlds in the process of participation • Playing games • Sense of reality • Observing other avatars • Competing and challenges

• Sense of being there/being part of • Freedom to do things • The way the virtual world works • Shopping or exchanging things

• Exploring new places • Taking part when famous people visit

Figure 4. The affordances of virtual worlds for children’s participation, according to the three roles of virtual world in a process of participation.

Participants’ interest in the features and activities related to virtual world as arenas for civic education varied according to the feature or activity. Creating or changing the

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appearance of one’s avatar was one of the features participants found most interesting and that they performed most often but participants were not very interested in possibility to succeed or in role playing, both of which can be classified into features related to civic education. Interestingly, the potential of virtual worlds as arenas for civic education was also raised by some participants when we asked them about the benefits of using virtual worlds.

The most often mentioned benefit was entertainment but some participants also mentioned the opportunity to express themselves and learn new things about other cultures. Some children mentioned that they have learnt new things about themselves as well. This may be due to social interaction but it may also derive from developing one’s identity as a member of a community by through managing the appearance of one’s own avatar. According to Noveck (2006), creating a persona to represent oneself in virtual worlds forces users to think and act as citizens and members of a community. Based on these results, we may argue that virtual worlds indeed have the potential to serve as an arena for civic education though the main aim of using virtual worlds is not to learn civic skills and not all children may be aware of this potential. This is our third conclusion.

Discussion Hitherto, virtual worlds have not been extensively researched from the viewpoint of children. Also the focus on participation has been missing from studies related to virtual worlds. This has been problematic because the use of virtual worlds is growing rapidly among children and more information is needed about activities that children perform in virtual worlds. There is also a growing interest in the potential of virtual worlds to enhance children’s participation as research has shown that children do not engage in traditional forms of participation in real life (Torney-Purta et al., 2001; Bennett, 2008; Loader, 2007).

According to Kirby, Lanyon, Cronin and Sinclair (2003) and Kiilakoski (2008), many negative trends such as isolation from society can be prevented by promoting children’s participation. The Convention on the Rights of the Child also obligates adults to take into account the interests of the children and listen to their opinions. The first step in promoting children’s participation is to go where children spend their time, for example virtual worlds,

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find out what is happening there and then consider what could be done to enhance children’s participation in virtual worlds.

Our study has shown that virtual spaces have the potential to serve a place for children to fulfill their child-sized citizenship and acquire civic skills. This should, however, be made more concrete and noticeable in virtual worlds. As chats and games are the most interesting activities in virtual worlds, they could be utilized for example by creating games about civic skills and organizing public chats about matters that are closely related to children’s own lives. Also adults could take part in these chats. Sometimes the obstacles to children’s participation can be, however, in structures of virtual worlds which limit users’ agency and their behavior (Bartle, 2006). This is probably one reason why children do not utilize the affordances of virtual worlds as public spheres: it is not even possible in all virtual worlds for example to vote or take part in demonstrations. Hence it is important in the future to conduct research about structures of virtual worlds and how they limit users’ behavior.

On the other hand, the result of children not utilizing the affordances of virtual worlds as public spheres may be taken as a reminder of the fact that children are always somewhat incompetent and immature agents and citizens when viewed in relation to adults.

Children do not have the right for example to vote in real life and thus, these traditional ways of participating are not familiar to children in virtual worlds either. Instead, children seem to be more interested in expressing themselves in chatting and other social activities. On the other hand, it has to be remembered that there are always differences between children as well. There were children in our study who reported being interested in expressing opinions and taking part in voting and demonstrations often in virtual worlds. We also have to accept that all children are not interested in virtual worlds at the moment. In many cases, the reason for abandoning virtual worlds is natural: they have grown out of them. Thus, the task of researchers and developers of virtual worlds is to consider how virtual worlds could be developed so that young people’s interest in them can be preserved and virtual worlds would serve as an arena for young people to participate.

Our aim in this first phase of the study was to establish a framework for children’s participation in virtual worlds and to test the framework by looking at current participatory practices in virtual worlds. In this article, we have presented one way to look at children’s virtual participation and our study still continues. Based on this first phase of our study, we may argue that children are socially active in virtual worlds, which creates many opportunities to educate children about civic participation and to prepare them as citizens of

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – A Framework for Children’s Participatory Practices in Virtual Worlds 22

real world by enhancing citizenship in virtual worlds. However, these opportunities can only be realized when the activities and features for civic participation and education are social in nature and have a fun element to it. Thus, there is a need to carry out further research in order to enhance civic education and participation in virtual worlds.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Terhi-Anna Wilska from University of Jyväskylä for commenting the framework and the survey. The authors are also thankful to the schools, their principals, teachers and students in conducting the survey.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – A Framework for Children’s Participatory Practices in Virtual Worlds 23

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Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

Who’s Watching Your Kids?

Safety and Surveillance in Virtual Worlds for Children

By Eric M. Meyers School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia Lisa P. Nathan School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia Kristene Unsworth The Information School, Drexel University

Abstract Virtual playgrounds designed for children 4-12 years-old are among the fastest growing segments of the Internet. These spaces offer the promise of new social, educational, and creative opportunities for young people. These opportunities, however, are associated with new risks due to the nature of online interactions. This article presents a socio-technical investigation of two virtual worlds for children. Informed by Value Sensitive Design, the work highlights the tensions between supporting age appropriate, developmental play and constraining inappropriate behavior to ensure “safety.” This article concludes with implications for the design of virtual spaces for young people. We note in particular that the features of children’s worlds are affected by their framing, specifically by the language and practices that are encouraged by the interaction design. We challenge designers to consider how children may interpret technical feature in practice, and the long-term implications of features intended to keep children safe.

Keywords: children’s virtual worlds, values, value sensitive design, socio-technical

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 4

Who’s Watching Your Kids?

Safety and Surveillance in Virtual Worlds for Children “The avatar seemed for awhile the very apotheosis of the American dream, and the antithesis of the panopticon: it embodied the fantasy that we can refashion our selves in any manner we wish. We can't be under surveillance if no one knows who we are: what we look like, what color we are, what religion and ethnicity, what sex.”

(Winokur, 2003) Cyber-stalking. Cyber-bullying. Cyber-tattling. These anxiety-inducing terms have become part of the conversation around children’s online interactions. As children increasingly move toward immersive spaces online, the promise of the avatar as emancipating technology has not been fulfilled. In contrast to this utopian vision of perfect privacy and refashionable identity, youth-focused virtual worlds have been received with a mixture of optimism and moral panic. Scholars have identified the potential of these spaces for literacy (Merchant, 2009), learning (Beals & Bers, 2009) social interaction and creativity (Thomas & Brown, 2009); others have guardedly observed that these spaces carry opportunities as well as risks (Harwood & Asal, 2007; Livingstone, 2009; Livingstone & Brake, 2010; Palfrey & Gasser, 2008). Articles in the popular press, particularly when these spaces first emerged, tended to focus on risks: challenges of child safety and privacy (e.g. Flanagan, 2007), pro-social development and consumerism (e.g. Slatalla, 2007), cheating and deviant behavior (e.g.

Benderoff, 2007).

And yet, despite a mixed reception among parents, educators, and service providers; virtual worlds for children continue to grow in number and popularity. While adult virtual world use has stagnated, there are dozens of virtual worlds for kids ages 5-18, and as many more under development (KZero, 2009). It is estimated that 10 million children use virtual worlds on a regular basis, and it is estimated that 54% of children online in the U.S. will visit a virtual world every month by 2013 (Virtual World News, 2009). One factor that may hinder the development of youth-focused virtual worlds is the challenge and expense of monitoring them, both to safeguard their users and to enforce behavioral norms (Economist, 2009).

To date, little research has investigated how virtual worlds for children manage the inherent tension between supporting age-appropriate play and constraining inappropriate behavior to keep children “safe”. Nascent empirical work in this area (Marsh, 2010; Meyers, 2009)

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 5

suggests that sites like Club Penguin, Woogi World, BarbieGirls and Pixie Hollow are designed to be safe places for children to play, but each site in this genre appears to have different interpretations of what is necessary to keep a child safe online.

These

interpretations are instantiated in specific design features, such as monitored chat systems, typically targeted to the concerns of parents rather than the intended users of the technology, the children. In some cases, children are recruited to monitor each other to enforce the site’s terms of service.

Such design decisions have both social and moral development

implications.

This paper presents a values-oriented, socio-technical analysis of these hugely popular virtual spaces and how they support and constrain the values of different stakeholders. Specifically, we investigate two virtual worlds (Woogi World and Club Penguin) with a focus on the sites’ technical features and behavioral cues designed to support value concerns (e.g. privacy, safety, security) and critically examine the potential influence of these features from different stakeholder perspectives. The worlds discussed above were selected as they represent two different approaches to managing the safety of children, as will be explained later in the paper.

We address the following questions in our work: • How do virtual worlds for children (explicitly and implicitly) define safety?

• How is this definition of safety instantiated in technical features and behavioral cues that scaffold children’s socio-technical practice?

• What is the role of surveillance in the design of safe virtual environments for children?

The work reported here draws on the tripartite methodology of Value Sensitive Design (VSD) (Friedman, Kahn, & Borning, 2006) to conduct investigations of two children’s virtual worlds: Club Penguin and Woogi World. Our process involves two integral investigations: 1) a conceptual investigation, where we analyze different stakeholders such as children, adults, and designers, their roles in using the virtual world, and tensions that might emerge in use; and 2) a technical investigation, in which we focus on specific technical features these worlds employ, such as moderated chat systems, and the practices associated with those features. Taken together, the analysis from the conceptual and technical investigations informs the development of brief case studies that synthesize the findings from the VSD-informed investigations.

The following discussion teases apart how subtle

differences in design result in a different ethos and experience for the site user. The article

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 6

concludes by outlining an empirical investigation informed by the findings and a discussion of potential implications for the designers of children’s virtual worlds.

The project follows in the tradition of earlier conceptual explorations of values in teen game design (Flanagan, Howe, & Nissenbaum, 2005; Flanagan, Belman, Nissenbaum, & Diamond, 2007). Although the analysis is influenced by contemporary critiques of privacy and surveillance (Andrejevic, 2007; Lyon, 2001), its primary aim is to scaffold future empirical research into the long-term, systemic influence of virtual world engagement on children’s development (Nathan, Friedman, Klasnja, Kane, & Miller, 2008). The values orientation of the work distinguishes this project from others rooted in literacy and communication theory.

Motivation While virtual worlds for young people have been available since the 1990s, their popularity and use in the home environment has exploded only in recent years. To date, there are few research programs examining virtual worlds for children less than twelve years of age. The existing published research has focused on developing frameworks to understand children’s experiences in these spaces from the standpoint of play (Marsh, 2010), learning and cognitive development (Beals & Bers, 2009), and information seeking and use (Meyers, 2009). Marsh’s interviews with ten young people examine the relationship between online and offline play in virtual worlds, identifying that sites like Club Penguin and Barbie Girls constitute “friendship-driven” rather than “interest driven” spaces (Ito, Baumer, Bittanti, boyd, Cody, Herr et al., 2008). Beals and Bers describe how developmental theory might inform the design of children’s worlds, but offer only high-level guidance for the creation of these spaces, noting for example that children’s spaces need rules, creative outlets, and facilities that permit communication. Meyers identifies the “information work” associated with virtual worlds, and suggests that the most creative practices may be found outside these worlds in affinity spaces. These framings are valuable contributions to the conversation about children’s immersive technologies, and all conclude that these spaces represent an emerging research area with potential benefits for young people. Thus far the research literature has focused more on the use and mediation of these sites than on the design and evaluation of technical features, or how these sites instantiate stakeholder values.

Virtual worlds offer the promise of new social, educational, and creative opportunities

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 7

for young people. These opportunities, however, are associated with new risks due to the nature of online interactions (Livingstone & Brake, 2010). The Federal Trade Commission (2009) recently released its report to the United States Congress, documenting that a number of youth-oriented virtual worlds contained violent or sexually explicit materials, predominantly in the form of text chat. The report suggests that a combination of technical features, parent oversight, and user education is necessary to manage the risks of virtual worlds for youth. The challenge in our current childhood landscape is that any risk is perceived as unacceptable. We appear to live in a risk-averse culture that works not just to reduce unnecessary risk, but also to eliminate the slightest possibility of harm to children (Byron, 2010).

The ability to identify and manage harmful or threatening situations,

however, is a key developmental capacity, and allows youth to manage uncertainty as they mature (Christensen & Mikkelsen, 2008). Efforts to eliminate exposure to risk may limit opportunities for young people to develop essential cognitive and metacognitive strategies (Livingstone, 2009). Donovan and Katz (2009) argue that children are informed social actors and that attempts by adults to monitor their online behavior and filter their websites has a chilling effect on children’s and youth’s privacy and free speech.

Speaking more broadly, there are important societal motivations for better understanding the competing values on digital playgrounds. First, as these sites grow in popularity and number, designers, policy makers, and parents need guidance in creating, regulating, and facilitating children’s online environments.

The adults mediating these

worlds did not grow up in immersive spaces; children are venturing into largely uncharted territory. Second, these worlds provide us an opportunity to think critically about societal expectations of online environments. Is Club Penguin (owned by Disney Interactive) the equivalent of a sandbox at a public park, where parents and other caregivers are expected to mediate children’s interactions to teach socially appropriate and “safe” behaviors? In this framing, some level of risk is assumed by those who take their children to the sandbox.

Alternatively are these sites like a ride at Disneyland, where movements and interactions are tightly constrained and monitored. In this framing, the parents, who watch as their child is buckled into the ride, assume almost no risk and the Disney Corporation is expected to prevent any harm from happening to the children. These issues deserve explicit attention and deliberation. The answers that emerge will affect the future of digital play.

Value Sensitive Design

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 8

Developed by Batya Friedman’s research team at the University of Washington, Value Sensitive Design (VSD) provides a principled approach to the analysis of interactive system design (Friedman, 2004; Friedman & Kahn, 2003; Friedman et al., 2006). Value sensitive design (VSD) represents a methodological practice based upon an interactional theory which together provide a framework for scaffolding the critical examination of human values during the design, use and evaluation of such systems. The VSD approach has been successfully used in diverse projects including computer simulations in urban planning (Borning, Friedman, Davis, & Lin, 2005), the design of code sharing software (Miller, Friedman, Jancke, & Gill, 2007), the creation of end-user license agreements (Friedman, Smith, Kahn, Consalvo, & Selawski, 2006), and the analysis of technology practices in intentional communities (Nathan, 2009).

Friedman and her colleagues contend that through interactions with information systems, values can be reinforced and/or destabilized. The values that VSD research focuses upon are those that are asserted to be of moral weight. However throughout the broad range of VSD investigations, other values such as democratic fairness and usability have been investigated (Friedman, 2004). Explications of VSD state that they define a value as “what a person or group of people consider important in life” (Friedman et al., 2006, p. 2). Examples of human values that may be integral to understanding the relationship between youth and interactive systems like a virtual world include self-actualization, privacy, autonomy, community, safety, and anonymity.

Values are uncovered and conceptualized through three types of rigorous, iterative and integrative investigations that are labeled conceptual, empirical, and technical. There is no strict ordering of these investigations and they can be undergone simultaneously. In the ideal manifestation of a VSD project, the investigations happen in such a way that they are able to inform each other, making each investigation more robust. However, it can be unmanageable, especially within the time and resource constraints of most research projects, to conduct all three investigations concurrently. A brief description of each type of investigation is provided below.

•

Conceptual investigations typically begin by identifying the stakeholders who will be affected by the design under study. This would include both the direct stakeholders, those who will actually use the device and indirect stakeholders, those who may not physically touch the technology, but whose lives will be influenced through a direct

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 9

stakeholder’s use of the technology. For example, a conceptual investigation of a satellite monitoring system designed to assist law enforcement personnel of a small community would identify the community’s police officers as direct stakeholders and individuals living in the community, but without direct access to the system, as indirect stakeholders. Identifying and defining the values implicated by a technology is the second key component of a conceptual investigation. The example of the satellite monitoring system may implicate values such as privacy and personal safety.

In a conceptual investigation, the work of philosophers and other scholars is drawn upon to develop robust understandings of the values under scrutiny.

•

Technical investigations are primarily concerned with the features of the technology under investigation and may include actually designing a technology or investigating how specific features implicate certain values. A technical investigation focuses on the technology itself. However, we recognize that what a technical feature “does” is socially constructed and negotiated between site users and site developers. Thus, the technical investigation reported on here takes an explicit look at the practices that develop to help direct stakeholders understand and manage technical features.

•

Empirical investigations serve to expand the conceptual investigations by using both language and observable actions (through surveys, questionnaires, interviews, participant observations, experiments) to deepen the investigators’ understanding of both the context and the values implicated through the interactions with a design. An empirical investigation focuses on the actions of human actors.

Methodology and Findings To deepen our understanding of children’s virtual worlds we conducted VSD-

informed conceptual and technical investigations of two such sites: Club Penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com) and Woogi World (http://www.woogiworld.com). Both spaces are designed expressly for youth, but each approaches the values of safety and surveillance differently. These two sites were selected from a range of virtual worlds examined (others include EcoBuddies, BarbieGirls, Webkinz, and HandiPoints, along with several worlds aimed at older children, such as Gaia, Habbo, Millberry), and identified by their characteristics as contrasting cases. Material for both investigations was drawn from technical and documentary features of the sites, as well as investigators’ interactions with the

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 10

sites as users (2007-2010). Investigators also identified and interacted with supplementary online materials related to these virtual worlds including user-generated content (e.g. blogs and websites, YouTube channels), review sites (e.g. Commonsensemedia.org), and website analytics. To be clear, the analyses presented below are illustrative not exhaustive. There are myriad technical features and practices that could be presented in depth, but this analysis emphasizes those features that support or constrain stakeholders’ perceptions of safety and surveillance.

The findings within this section are organized as follows: first, we provide highlights related to stakeholders, values and interaction that arose from the conceptual investigations of both sites. We follow-up the highlights from the conceptual work with findings of note from the technical investigation. An organizational table helps to draw apart technical features from the behavioral cues that the sites put in place to frame how users interpret and interact with the technical features. To assist in synthesizing the findings from the two investigations, the section concludes with two case studies that demonstrate how surprisingly similar technical features are interpreted through the different behavioral expectations of the sites to create two disparate interpretations of a “safe” virtual playground.

Conceptual Investigation Due to space constraints we focus on specific insights afforded by four elements of our conceptual investigation into children’s virtual worlds, namely: 1) Multiple stakeholders; 2) implicated values; 3) value tensions; and 4) systemic interactions.

Multiple Stakeholder Roles While virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Woogi World are designed expressly for younger users, there are often multiple stakeholder roles, direct and indirect, which are affected by use of these technologies. In the VSD tradition, direct stakeholders are those who interact with the technology, such as the children who login to the world of Club Penguin.

The parents of these children fall into the role of indirect stakeholders if they never login to the system themselves. Indirect stakeholders do not interact with a technology, but they are still influenced by others’ use of the system. Even though a parent does not login to Club Penguin, he may be affected by the time his daughter spends on the computer caring for her

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 11

penguin and socializing with friends.

The VSD methodology also recognizes that

stakeholders may take on more than one role with regard to a given technology. Parents may begin as direct stakeholders, initially logging in to a site to “check it out”. However, after that initial foray, parents may passively slide into the role of indirect stakeholder if they never log in to the site again. VSD work also reminds us to be aware of nefarious roles that users may take on (Nathan et al., 2008). Kids may be users and beneficiaries of a virtual world; at the same time acting maliciously or subversively to undermine the experience for other users through hacks or cheats. The boundaries between these roles (user vs. hacker, player vs. cheat) may be fluid and dependent on the norms of behavior in a technological space, or the expectations of other direct and indirect stakeholders.

Implicated Values: Safety, Surveillance and Privacy Safety, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is a term that defines “the condition of being safe,” and safe, “protected from or not exposed to danger or risk” (OED, pp. 1264, 1265). Safety awareness initiatives and security policies that aim to provide some type of monitoring for children’s online behavior echo concerns regarding risk in childhood in general (Staksrud & Livingstone, 2009). Monitoring children with technology throughout their day has become commonplace in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world.

Children are watched in the crib via “baby monitors” and teddy bear cameras, in the hallways of schools and shopping malls through closed-circuit television systems, and online with the assistance of software applications such as Net Nanny and CyberPatrol. Such monitoring is rooted in adult concerns for the safety of children, whose sense of danger and appropriate behavior is still developing.

Beyond managing the risks of growing up, the everyday behaviors of adults and children are coming under increased surveillance under the auspices of personal safety, corporate risk management, and national security. Such moves increasingly equate “safety” with reduced personal privacy and increased surveillance, either by corporations, the state, or organizations acting on the state’s behalf. We can define surveillance as the “collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purpose of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered” (Lyon, 2001, p. 2). In the United States, the surveillance of activity through data collection comes with the limited right of the user or citizen to know what data is gathered, and how it is used to safeguard the individual

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 12

(Andrejevic, 2007). In virtual worlds and other social software, end-user license agreements (EULAs) or Terms of Service (ToS) are written broadly to permit the hosting company to gather and save chat transcripts and other user information indefinitely to improve “the Service” (e.g. Linden Research, 2010), ostensibly for the benefit of the user.

Lyon (2001) writes that there are two faces to surveillance: care and control. When we use technology to watch over children, we may have the primary instinct to reduce their privacy in order to keep them from physical or psychological harm. We may also wish to observe children’s activities to ensure that they do not get into mischief. This latter purpose, though not always in conflict with the former, applies a different set of criteria to the situation. A different set of values is at play when we prioritize behavioral outcomes through surveillance. The developers of virtual worlds for children appear to have several different goals in mind when designing features to keep children “safe”:

providing fun and

entertainment for children, pleasing adult gatekeepers, avoiding litigious situations that may emerge through use, and gaining (and maintaining) profitability. While these goals are not necessarily at odds with each other, an emphasis on one may constrain the ability of the virtual world to fulfill another.

This begs the question of whether monitoring and

surveillance activities in virtual worlds for children privilege control over care.

Value Tensions Previous VSD investigations call attention to the design challenges that emerge when values are in tension with each other (e.g., Miller et al., 2007). Sensitivity to value tensions helps us identify when different stakeholder roles bring different views and values to their interactions with a given system. A system may actively support a value of a key indirect stakeholder (e.g., parents and safety) while constraining a value of a direct stakeholder (children and self expression). We can see how this plays out in the different interpretations children and their parents bring to virtual worlds. The features of children’s virtual worlds, like chat systems with limited dictionaries or active monitoring, can impact different stakeholders in different ways. Limited chat supports the values of one key stakeholder (e.g. parents who value safe, appropriate conversations among youth) for the purpose of constraining the values of another stakeholder (e.g. pedophiles who seek freedom of expression to groom young children) while limiting the activities of another stakeholder (children who wish for freedom of expression to try on different identities). These tensions

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 13

often represent design trade-offs, where supporting a range of values may be contradictory or impossible. By uncovering these tensions, designers can envision the long-term effect of design decisions, and recognize when supporting one set of values over another (e.g. supporting parents’ concern for safety and appropriate communication over children’s communicative rights) may result in unintended use scenarios, user work-arounds and hacks, or undesirable activity in other aspects of the system (Nathan et al., 2008).

Systemic Interactions Recent VSD work highlights the systemic and emergent effects of interactions with interactive information systems (Friedman & Nathan, 2010). Similar to offline geographically placed environmental ecologies, online virtual world ecologies are made up of countless features that interact and influence each other over time. A feature of a virtual space does not exist in isolation; it influences other system features, users, and activities outside the system.

Participation in virtual spaces is consequential: the user’s presence is part of the experience, and consequential to the way other users experience the space (Pearce, 2009). As a result, virtual worlds for children, through wide-scale participatory structures, have systemic effects and emergent qualities that support or contradict the intentions of the system designers. The communicative limits of children’s virtual worlds, for example, have effects within the virtual world and outside of it: children incorporate alternate chat vocabularies to circumvent word lists, construct blogs and videos to convey hacks and cheats, and actively disseminate information about the world that affects the way other users experience and perceive it.

Technical Investigation The conceptual investigation highlighted the issues that emerge in children’s virtual worlds surrounding safety and surveillance. The technical investigation illustrates these tensions and effects by examining two example virtual worlds in-depth. These two spaces were chosen to provide two contrasting cases of safety and surveillance. The two worlds have instantiated different choices in terms of technical features and behavioral cues that in turn shape and illuminate the ethos of the sites themselves. Table 1 highlights just a few differences and similarities between these two virtual worlds in terms of these choices. For each world we identify the premise that guides user interactions, how the site defines safety

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 14

in its information materials, technical and supporting features.

CLUB PENGUIN

WOOGI WORLD

“Waddle around and meet new

“Teaching kids Internet safety, life

friends”

values, and fun!”

Anthropomorphic penguins populate

The Woogis are an alien race

an animated snow-covered

corrupted by excessive online time.

community of shops, games, and

The children of Earth help the

activity spaces. Children register with

Woogis by adopting them and

the site to engage in activities using

teaching them appropriate activities

the penguins as avatars. Children are

and limits. Children control a Woogi

encouraged to “waddle around” and

character, perform tasks, play games,

play independently or with others.

and earn virtual currency.

Definition of

Club Penguin explicitly and

Woogi World includes a definition of

Safety

prominently addresses safety concerns

safety in its parents’ section: “A

with a description on the parent page

combination of appropriate mindset

of chat limitations. “Ultimate Safe

and behavior validated by a

Chat limits what users can say to a

community of like-minded people.”

Slogan Premise

predefined menu of greetings, questions and statements, as well as emotes, actions and greeting cards.”

Technical Feature:

Email address required to activate

Email address required to activate

Account creation

account; No personal information

account; No personal information

required to create user ID aside from

required to create user ID aside from

email address; Accounts require

email address.

regular use to remain active.

Technical Feature:

Multi-level chat including “ultimate

Users must complete a training

Chat

safe chat” option; can chat with or

program on appropriate and

“friend” anyone in the “room”; Chat

inappropriate chat behavior; Honors

does not support distribution of files

users have special chat privileges;

or hyperlinks; Sharing personal

Multi-level chat including “safe”

information (age, phone number,

chat; can chat with or “friend” anyone

address) is not permitted.

in the “room”; Chat does not support distribution of files or hyperlinks; Sharing personal information (age, phone number, address) is not

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 15

permitted .

Technical Feature:

User profiles contain no personal information aside from login name.

User Profile Technical Feature:

All content is generated in-world or by site designers.

User-generated content Technical Feature:

Automated monitoring of chat1;

Automated monitoring of chat; Active

Activity Monitoring

Active adult & peer monitoring of

adult & peer monitoring of behavior;

behavior; Ability to report other users

Ability to report other users for

for inappropriate behavior.

inappropriate behavior.

Other Supporting

Parent Section; Parent reporting

Parent section; Big Wig blog;

Features

options (for time on site, but not

Premise supports limited online time;

activities); Special socialization

Special socialization features limited

features limited to paying members

to paying members

Table 1. Site comparison.

Through our technical analysis, we identified a series of site features that potentially affect the safety and privacy of users, either explicitly or implicitly. Explicit technical features include the account creation and user profile, chat features, user content generation, and activity monitoring. Implicit features include the site slogan and premise, as well as how the site defines safety, explicitly or implicitly. The slogan and premise of each world, although not obvious technical features of the site, set the tone of the site, and perhaps more importantly, frame the technical features for child and adult stakeholders. This provides an ethos that shapes stakeholders’ emergent practice. For example, the Woogi World slogan, “Teaching kids life values, Internet safety, and fun,” makes explicit that educating users in safe Internet practices is a goal of system. It arguably addresses parents or adult guardians rather than youth in that it speaks of “kids” in the third person.

Many of the site features are held in common, suggesting that different sites use a common template of technical features for user safety and privacy (“safety by design”). Both sites analyzed here require users to provide a valid email address, but do not validate the age of the user. Instead, nearly all personal information, including age and location, are kept from other users. In the absence of being able to confirm that all users are children, these !

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 16

sites keep all users at the same high level of anonymity.

Differences largely reside in the ethos of the virtual world, the textual and pictorial framing the sites use to balance the technical features with certain social interactions and practice. Both regard inappropriate text chat as a key danger to users; this is consistent with other virtual worlds and social networks designed for younger users. Most of the textual information about the spaces is directed at adults in the roles of parents, teachers, or caregivers as key stakeholders in the success of these playgrounds. Club Penguin relies heavily on its technical affordances to police chat, relying less on human monitoring, either through adults or peers, to eliminate inappropriate sharing of personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers) or sexually explicit and crude/mean/harassing language. This may be due to the enormous traffic through this space, which would be difficult to monitor effectively through human moderation. Woogi World, on the other hand, employs significant user education and social pressure to encourage users to conform to conduct expectations, in addition to many of the same technical features, as a first line of defense against inappropriate content. Other virtual worlds employ different blends of these two mechanisms to achieve a “safe” environment. All the virtual worlds these authors are aware of in this genre include some kind of surveillance mechanism that is beyond the oversight children would experience on a physical playground, and their privacy in these spaces is significantly curtailed at the expense of regulating speech and behavior.

“Safety” in children’s virtual worlds never means freedom from commercial inducements and hard-sell advertising, however. Subscription levels – paying members vs. registered users – strongly affect how users interact in these spaces. The degree of freedom permitted to paying members of these and other virtual playgrounds, including chat privileges, social organizations, and displays of status and belonging, is at a significantly higher level. Membership has its privileges, and virtual worlds are designed to showcase this disparity: the haves and have-nots are identifiable at a glance by the appearance of their avatars. In some ways, this makes the non-paying members not only inferior but also suspect, and adds to the ethos of lateral (peer-to-peer) surveillance that is layered on top of the constant adult monitoring.

Emergent Interactions: Case Example of Children’s Virtual Worlds We present the following case examples to illustrate how these two virtual worlds

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 17

frame parent and child expectations of safe behavior in online virtual environments. The two cases explore the interactions that emerge as users interact with the technical features and the narratives that surround these features.

Case 1: Club Penguin Club Penguin is a virtual playground employing the metaphor of the Antarctic where children are encouraged to “waddle around and make new friends.” Users register with the site to engage in activities as anthropomorphic penguins in an animated snow-covered community of shops, games, and activity spaces. Users can perform tasks in the community (making pizzas at the pizzeria, unloading coffee beans at the café, and of course, rounding up puffles) in order to earn virtual currency (“coins”). They use this currency to purchase clothing, pets, and accessories for their penguin avatars and to decorate their “igloo” or private online space. A large number of features, including the ability to buy most clothing items, are reserved for subscription users who pay $5.95 per month (as of August 30, 2010).

Users can create friend lists and chat with other penguins via a simple dashboard interface.

Adult moderators monitor chat, and can penalize through temporary or permanent banishment users who violate the chat guidelines, namely “mean” or age-inappropriate talk, such as sex or drug references.

Although an explicit definition of safety is not provided, Club Penguin prominently addresses safety concerns with a description on the parent page of chat limitations. “Ultimate Safe Chat limits what users can say to a predefined menu of greetings, questions and statements, as well as emotes, actions and greeting cards. When it comes to chatting, these users can only see other Ultimate Safe Chat messages” (Club Penguin, 2009). Thus, within Club Penguin’s Ultimate Safe Chat, the value of safety is threatened by conversations in which either children or adults reveal inappropriate information. Club Penguin is an all-ages site, even if it is designed for children.

There is no age verification, and parents are

encouraged to interact with their children on the site. This suggests the space is open to the possibility of contact between and among users of any age, albeit anonymously and in the form of a penguin avatar. Unable to truly control who is in the space, safety is “realized” through technical features that restrict conversation among users.

This is not to suggest that inappropriate behavior cannot happen in these spaces.

Users are constantly testing the bounds of what can and cannot be said and done, despite (or

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 18

perhaps because of) the technical features. The restriction on sharing phone numbers and addresses is easily circumvented with alternate words considered “safe” by the chat filter (e.g. won too tree for fakes tweet = 1234 Fake Street). Witness the plethora of YouTube videos

documenting

cussing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHO6BTUbmYw).

hacks

(e.g.

“fuckity”

Users also engage in explicit

pseudo-sexual play (“pseudo” in that there is only so much one can do with an asexual cartoon penguin) using code phrases developed outside the restrictions of the space, such as the proposition “wanna”. Contributors on CommonSenseMedia.org, a site that provides usergenerated reviews of popular children’s movies, games, and television shows, describe the various work-arounds they have used or witnessed, despite generally positive ratings.

To buttress the technical limitations of the safety features, users are recruited to aid in making Club Penguin safe through active peer monitoring. Young children often engage in gender policing (“boys don’t wear pink”), and this tendency is leveraged to police conversation in virtual spaces as well. After 30 days in Club Penguin, users may apply for Secret Agent status, which permits a user to tattle on offensive peers. Innocuous schoolyard taunts (“Boys rule, girls drool!”) may be treated with a barrage of text rebukes and entreaties to the monitor to censure the offending penguin. By assigning the coveted title of Secret Agent to tattlers, paired with the anonymous nature of monitoring and peer surveillance in this space, Club Penguin has established a system through which any conversation that offends or is interpreted as “mean” by another user may be reported and penalized.

Case 2: Woogi World According to the storyline behind Woogi World, the Woogis are an advanced alien race corrupted by excessive online time without careful monitoring. The children of Earth can help the Woogis by adopting them, and teaching them appropriate online activities and behavioral limits. In Woogi World, children adopt a Woogi character (control its movements), perform tasks, play games, and earn virtual currency (“Woogi Watts”), which they can use to decorate their “wigwams” or accessorize their adopted Woogi avatars. Virtual activity spaces are learning oriented, and include a science lab, savings bank, and a library.

Children are also provided incentives for off-line activities (e.g., helping with chores, playing board games with family members). A simple, adult monitored chat interface is provided, and several games are designed as social, multiplayer experiences. Woogi World describes its goals on the site’s front page: “teaching kids Internet safety, life values, and fun.”

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 19

Woogi World includes a definition of safety in its parents section: “A combination of appropriate mindset and behavior validated by a community of like-minded people” (Clare, 2008). Woogi World, however, does not describe specific technical features that promote safety. Instead it describes to parents how the site’s rules, standards, and regulations are embodied by the children who are now serving as their own moderators, in addition to the site’s adult moderators. In order to enable chat features, Woogis (users) have to go through a short, intense training program that asks them to correctly distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate chat phrases. In Woogi World, as in Club Penguin, the value of safety is threatened by conversations in which inappropriate information is shared. Woogi World is also an open, all-ages space. However, Woogi World promotes habits of mind in games and activities. For example, in the “Service Station”, which looks like a gasoline pump, users document the good deeds they have done for others in order to advance their status in the system. Thus, in addition to technical features, Woogi World addresses parents’ concerns for safety through developing a strong ethos of “appropriate” interactions.

Figure 1. The Big Wig.

While Club Penguin includes several non-player characters that appear from time to time for the purpose of introducing new activities (Rockhopper the Pirate, Aunt Arctic, the dojo Sensei), the key non-player in Woogi World, the Big Wig, acts as a boss character or

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 20

leader, actively promoting the site’s value system, cautioning users, and providing information that helps mediate play. The Big Wig (see Figure 1) looks remarkably like a cartoonish Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984, appearing as a giant head with a prominent mustache. He extorts users to sign-up for Woogi Honors, the fee-based aspect of the virtual world that bestows users with additional rights and privileges – “get COOL things that regular Woogis don’t” – such as more advanced vocabulary in chat, pet ownership, clothing options, and the ability to create and join social groups. In addition, by joining Woogi Honors, users may join clubs and groups that provide another level of socialization within the space. One such club, the WW Police, has as its motto: “we are going to find all bad woogis in woogi world [sic]”.

The Big Wig regularly reminds users that their

subscriptions will make Woogi World even better.

Discussion: Implications for Design How do we keep young Internet users safe? Whose responsibility is it to keep these children safe? As many scholars and policy makers suggest, it requires a mix of user education, improved technology, and parental oversight. One of the challenges is finding the right mix of these elements, and how to balance social and technical features while envisioning their systemic effects.

Rather than responding to moral panics or isolated

breakdowns, designers and policy makers need to think holistically about how virtual worlds – virtual communities of impressionable users in this case – and design decisions influence both specific behaviors as well as perceptions of how online interactions work. If a virtual world like Club Penguin is a child’s first foray into online social networking and communication, these perceptions may have lasting impact.

A key issue identified through this analysis exists between children as direct stakeholders, who value fun, sociality and communication, and the adult stakeholders who provide access to these spaces, who value safety.

The designers of Woogi World,

recognizing parents as a key gatekeeper, have emphasized the parents’ values over that of the children, and instantiated this value in features and social practices that emphasize limited communication and a culture of tattling. Club Penguin has similar technical features, but is geared more for children, but the social pressures focus on children as consumers.

Although they take a different orientation to these two stakeholder groups, both worlds use surveillance as both a protective as well as a disciplinary tool . Teaching children

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 21

moral and ethical behavior is important whether they are citizens of virtual or physical worlds. Virtual worlds for children provide diverse means of modeling appropriate behavior, but some of the systemic effects of an emphasis on safety can be troubling. Encouraging an anonymous, politically correct tattle-tale culture and permitting hyper-vigilance to evolve into vigilantism to enforce social norms sends an unfortunate message to young users.

Furthermore, wrapping model behavior in an aggressive commercialism suggests to users that purchasing citizenship is an effective and rewarding form of participation.

From this analysis, we propose three implications for the design of virtual worlds for children. First, we suggest that designers need to be cognizant of the way their decisions around the social framing of technical features create value tensions in a virtual space (e.g., safety vs. surveillance). Second, designers should consider adjusting the blend of technical and social features to place more responsibility for safety on direct stakeholders, namely children and their adult caregivers and less on the site itself. Third, site designers should increase the transparency of technical features and surveillance practices to facilitate user education. These implications are elaborated upon below.

Features of children’s worlds are affected by their framing, specifically by the language and practices that are encouraged by the interaction design. In Woogi World, for example, there might not be a self-organized “WWPolice” of users seeking to identify “all the bad Woogis” if there was not implicit support for this activity. This support comes in the form of 1) framing the Internet as a potentially harmful place that requires user vigilance; 2) rewarding peer monitoring by making this part of the user’s advancement structure; 3) setting apart the users who purchase memberships, creating a stratified user community (those who “make Woogi World even better” in contrast to non-paying users). While the technical feature—the ability to report violations of the rules to a site monitor—is common in children’s virtual worlds, the affect it has on user behavior may be different when it is not supported by these behavioral incentives.

In this light, separating technical from social features in discussions of children’s technology may be impossible. The argument of “safety by design” is to some extent one which employs a technological determinist framing. Safety cannot be ensured through a set of predetermined features. Instead, safety is realized through a combination of technical and behavioral interactions. Virtual worlds in their current instantiation emphasize one vision of a safe world for children, namely where they are free from “inappropriate” language.

Designers should be cognizant of the way this design decision (highly constrained chat

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 22

systems) creates value tensions: while it may appeal to parent stakeholders, it comes largely at the expense of younger users’ communicative rights. It also has systemic effects: kids develop chat hacks and work-arounds, which are addressed through increased monitoring and the imposition of user penalties.

Reports from researchers (Livingstone, 2009) and government agencies (Byron, 2010; Federal Trade Commission, 2010) agree that a combination of technology, user education, and parental oversight is necessary to fulfill societal expectations of safe online play. Our analysis, however, reveals that there are different blends of these factors in children’s virtual worlds. In many virtual worlds, the technology shoulders most the safety burden, passing some responsibility to child users through peer monitoring, and almost none to the adult/ parent stakeholder.

Would most parents feel comfortable dropping off a preteen at an

amusement park with only the park staff for oversight? The designers of children’s online worlds should experiment with the blend of technical features and stakeholder responsibility, perhaps in virtual “sandboxes”, where the level and ownership of safety features can be shifted and the effects analyzed.

Virtual worlds for children are easy to join and use, with a shallow learning curve designed to match the developmental capacity of young people. They are also opaque in the way they function, providing little guidance for users in terms of how the technical features protect their interests and keep them “safe”. For example, while all the systems we observed have limited (and evolving) chat dictionaries, users are not able to see what words are permitted or why certain, seemingly innocuous terms, are restricted. As a result of this lack of structure, the boundaries of appropriate behavior are constantly (re)discovered and contested by users. Designers should consider a balance of child agency with opportunities for teachable moments and instruction in what it means to be a good “cyber-citizen”.

Limitations and Future Research The work presented here relies upon observational data from the investigators using the sites themselves and documenting features of the sites that they encountered during those interactions. Thus, the primary limitation of the work is that key voices are missing. There is much to be learned from site designers, children who use the sites, and their parents, educators, and other caregivers of these children. The findings from the conceptual and technical investigations presented in this work, raise pointed questions concerning the

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 23

systemic nature of virtual world interactions. Although the current work provides recommendations, these recommendations need to be bolstered by further empirical, longitudinal research. Two key questions that should be addressed through this longitudinal work with parents, caregivers, children and designers include: •

What are the implications for children’s development of self, refashionable identity within these environments?

•

Can we design sites that encourage and support active parental and caregiver mediation?

Conclusion Through this values-oriented examination of virtual worlds for children we have taken

the first steps toward addressing the design tensions present in “safe” virtual spaces. While both of these worlds are “opt-in” environments – children choose to engage with these spaces – the approaches to safety and communication severely limit the creative potential within these spaces. If the hopes regarding children’s virtual spaces are to be fulfilled, the creative work will more likely be done outside these playgrounds (in affinity spaces --blogs, wikis -and in physical spaces). Also of concern is the message these spaces may send to children about communication and interaction online: that their actions and messages are under constant surveillance by other users and anonymous, hidden site moderators. Is this an appropriate balance between parental anxiety over safety and children’s privacy?

It is

unclear how children perceive these safety features in use, and to what extent these features may have a “chilling effect” on interaction and communication. Additional work is planned to fill this gap in our understanding.

There is tremendous opportunity for future research in virtual worlds from a design perspective. Little is known about the lifecycle of virtual world adoption among young people, in part because these spaces are relatively new and researchers are just beginning to grasp the importance of understanding how children and virtual worlds interact. Marketers who track virtual worlds feel that these spaces are a “training ground” for next generation 3D web interfaces. As such, the social and philosophical implications should be addressed so that the systemic interactions are understood. We need to move beyond descriptions of these spaces to developing an understanding of the long-term implications of design decisions that affect children’s understanding of human values, including privacy, safety, and

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 24

communication rights. Virtual play may have real consequences.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 25

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Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

Beyond Being There:

A Grounded Investigation of the Value of Virtual Worlds for Remote Family Interaction

By Lizzy Bleumers IBBT-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel An Jacobs IBBT-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Abstract In our interdisciplinary project, HI-Masquerade, we investigated the potential of virtual worlds for remote interaction between family members of different generations. In this paper, we report on this study. Our methodological approach consisted of two components. We presented storyboards, visualizing use scenarios, to family members. In addition, we let these family members use a virtual world application at home. By doing so, we triggered both assumption- and experience-based reflection on the sense of using virtual worlds for family interaction. Our findings show that while family members have concerns about virtual worlds (e.g., possible replacement of real life activities), they also see opportunities (e.g., learning together). Family members felt that the virtual world that they had used was not a suitable platform for remote family interaction.

Nevertheless, they appreciated the increased offline interaction that it generated because it helped to bridge the children’s and adults' worlds.

Keywords: storyboards, Proxy Technology Assessment, virtual worlds, family, remote communication, mediated interaction

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 4

Beyond Being There:

A Grounded Investigation of the Value of Virtual Worlds for Remote Family Interaction

By Lizzy Bleumers IBBT-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel An Jacobs IBBT-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel The ability to generate a strong sense of presence is often put forward as a distinctive affordance of virtual worlds. For instance, Bronack, Cheney, Riedl and Tashner (2008) state that this characteristic is one of the main reasons why virtual worlds have the potential to enable more effective communication than other online media. Whether this potential is realised, however, is determined by who uses it and what they want to use it for. In the IBBT project, HI-Masquerade, we investigated whether virtual worlds could be an appropriate medium for communication between children and grandparents, and if so, what the requirements for such applications are.

Several authors have pointed to factors other than presence that may be relevant for the design of family communication technology. In their view, it has to support generations possessing different skills and values (Hutchinson et al., 2003). It needs to strike a balance between providing meaningful interaction and ease of use (Tee, Brush, & Inkpen, 2009). It has to provide a balance between the need to be connected with their relatives and that for privacy (Kahn & Markopoulos, 2009). Finally, it should take into account families’ needs for play (Vetere, Davis, Gibbs, & Howard, 2009) and emotional contact (Olivier & Wallace, 2009).

Our work is situated within the domestication framework that considers “what the technologies and services mean to people, how they experience them and the roles that these technologies can come to play in their lives” (Haddon, 2006, p. 195). According to this perspective, ICT use is constrained by the spatiotemporal context (and associated social norms). Thus, what constitutes appropriate and meaningful ICT use can only be understood properly by capturing that context.

In this article, we will describe a qualitative study conducted to understand how children and their grandparents perceive and experience virtual worlds. The perceptions and experiences of three child-grandparent pairs were captured through storyboarding (van der Lelie, 2006) and Proxy Technology Assessment (Pierson et al., 2006). We will report problems and opportunities foreseen by them, as well as how they experienced interaction in a virtual world. We end with a discussion on how these results relate to previous work and design advice for developing a virtual world that is suitable for family interaction.

Methodology Participants We recruited three groups including a child between 8 and 12 years old, one of the parents and one of the grandparents. We recruited via the grandparents through various channels including institutions offering adult education, a public library and websites for senior citizens. Although our focus was on children and grandparents, we included parents in our study for several reasons. Besides an important role in the relationship between children

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 5

and grandparents, parents also have a considerable impact on their children’s media use (Horst, 2009). Finally, we believed they would have a positive influence on their child’s compliance.

We selected people with home Internet access and basic competencies in Internet use (e-mail, browsing and so on). We wanted to establish whether and how families that have the means to use a virtual world application for remote communication would appropriate it.

Eventually, we found three families who met our criteria. In line with the domestication framework, we first captured families’ backgrounds by collecting basic demographic information and establishing their access to and familiarity with related technologies.

Family demographics The families involved were traditional Belgian middle class households. The tables below show birth year and gender of all family members and the adults’ education level (i.e. the highest degree obtained) and professional status. Family members’ relationships are also indicated. As can be seen in the tables, the adults were highly educated. While we did not intend to single out this particular socio-economic group, this is likely tied to self-selection.

Families with a lower socio-economic status and/or non-traditional family structure may not have seen themselves fit to participate in an in-depth qualitative study.

Mother of Family 1 Birth year Gender Education level Professional status

Child* 2000 Female

Mother-in-law of

Parent 1974 Female College Employed

Grandparent 1954 Female College Employed

* 8 years old at the start of our study. Has one younger sister (°2003) and one younger brother (°2001).

Father of Family 2 Birth year Gender Education level Professional status

Child* 1998 Male

Parent 1961 Male University (Phd) Employed

Father of Grandparent 1936 Male University Retired

* 10 years old at the start of our study. Has one older sister (°1995) and one older brother (°1993).

Mother of Family 3 Birth year Gender Education level Professional status

Child* 1999 Female

Parent 1969 Female University Self-employed

* 9 years old at the start of our study. Has one older brother (°1995).

Father of Grandparent 1943 Male University Retired

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 6

Technology at the families’ homes Overall, participants had access to a myriad of technologies in their household. At the start of our study (at the end of 2008), all households (parental and grandparental; six in total) had at least one computer with Internet connection, television and phone at their disposal. All parents and grandparents had access to a fixed and mobile phone. While none of the participating children owned a mobile phone, they all had access to a computer that was dedicated to the children in the household. For instance, the girl in Family 1 had her own computer, which her younger siblings could also play with. She also shared an e-mail address with them, although in practice it was hers. The participating children in Family 2 and 3 had their own e-mail addresses.

The grandparental households were relatively less media rich. In part, this is a consequence of them being smaller, but a notable difference between the two types of households is the absence of a game console in the grandparental households. Game consoles were present in the parental household of Family 2 (portable: Nintendo DS) and of Family 3 (fixed: Wii) and used by the children.

Use of and familiarity with communication technologies For mediated contact between grandparental and parental homes, traditional tools are used to stay in touch: mainly calls and e-mails. E-mail is also the preferred medium for sharing pictorial material between households. Grandparents are the main initiators of remote contact with their grandchild and often this contact is established indirectly. For instance, grandparents end up having a chat with their grandchild on the phone, while they called to arrange something with their son or daughter. Another example of indirect contact is that they would send an e-mail to one of the older grandchildren expecting that they in turn would share it with their siblings.

Although participants had some notion of Skype and chat, most of them had little or no experience with these technologies. Almost none of them had used Skype to communicate with each other, despite the perceived advantages of enabling people to hear and see each other and its inexpensiveness. The grandmother of Family 1 is the notable exception. She regularly uses Skype both professionally and for communicating with friends abroad.

Methods To investigate whether and how virtual worlds can be an appropriate means for family communication is as challenging as their development. The research question has to be addressed in such a way that family members are engaged together and that their age differences and strong ties are accounted for.

We selected two methods to let family members reflect on whether virtual worlds could be suitable family interaction tools. We used storyboards to trigger family members’ attitudes and expectations about family communication through virtual worlds. In addition, we let them use a virtual world application at home so that they could reflect on this particular experience. Two use scenarios, written together with our project partners, guided the selection of the storyboards’ content and the application.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 7

Delineating the subject of reflection by means of scenarios To make the subject of reflection more concrete, we collaboratively wrote two scenarios describing the use of two future virtual world applications by family members. In both, a ten-year old boy and his grandmother use a virtual world application for remote communication. The boy’s parents also appear in the story. The first scenario focuses on virtual world use for sharing and reliving past experiences together. This application features multi-touch control and 2D visualization. The second scenario focuses on creative, cooperative play and features gesture control combined with 3D visualization.

Excerpt from the first scenario (translated from Dutch): “Casper lets his avatar walk towards the reptile cave in the Zoo scene. He places his favorite picture from the Multimedia window into the Zoo scene, next to the cave.

Casper: ‘Look grandma, here you can see a very funny animal I saw in the zoo. I learned it’s a reptile! Did you know they have many sorts of animals like that in the zoo, like snakes, crocodiles, lizards,… They all have so many colors and skins…’

Grandma: ‘Ooh, it looks a bit creepy, weren’t you scared?’

Casper: ‘No, I think it looked cool. I saw its eggs too, they are very strange.’

Casper selects a picture of the eggs from the Multimedia folder. And shows it to Grandma.

Casper: ‘This is an egg of a real snake. I held a real one when I was there.

Grandma takes a close look at the picture by walking towards it’.”

Excerpt from the second scenario (translated from Dutch): “ ‘I want to show you something else, grandma!’, Casper says. ‘A bit further on there are very special birds; you can fly along with them. Follow me and you’ll see!’ Together they walk towards the birds, King Casper takes the lead. The birds look funny. They have fluorescent colors and they have four legs instead of two! Casper explains how you can fly them and in no time they’re up in the air: King Casper, LilRose and Dixie. It’s like they’re on a roller coaster, that they can control themselves.

While flying, grandma Rose asks Casper to come and see her garden. The sunflowers she planted are in bloom. Casper agrees, he loves helping his grandmother in her virtual garden.”

Eliciting attitudes by means of scenario-based storyboards To elicit attitudes towards virtual worlds as a means for remote family communication, we showed two storyboards visualizing the written scenarios in which virtual world applications are used. By presenting the scenarios in this format, participants can put themselves in the shoes of the story characters and reflect on what the functionality could mean in their own lives (van der Lelie, 2006).

We experimented with two formats: a story booklet and a picture leaflet. In one session, family members read a booklet out loud that visualizes the first scenario by means of both drawings and text fragments (see Figure 1). We captured family members’ comments during reading. Afterwards, we asked whether and how the family members would use this application themselves, as well as what they did or did not like about it.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 8

Figure 1. Story booklet that visualized the first scenario.

The picture leaflet visualizes the second scenario by a logical series of computermodified photographs (see Figure 2). During a second contact with the family members, we asked them to go through the leaflet and mark with post-its in different colors what they liked, disliked and what they found confusing, In contrast to the booklet, the leaflet shows great detail and realism. This is generally discouraged in storyboards, to prevent participants from losing themselves in details (Truong, Hayes, & Abowd, 2006). We deliberately chose this format because we believed that showing photographs of a home setting might enhance family members’ capacity to envision their own use of the application. Our findings suggest that this is indeed the case.

Figure 2. Picture leaflet that visualized the second scenario.

Eliciting experienced-based reflection by the means of proxy technology use To allow participants to reflect on the potential of virtual worlds for family interaction based on actual experience, we let them use technology that resembles the technology envisioned in the scenarios. Participants were able to use this technology, which we call proxy technology, in the comforts of their own home. They monitored their own use and were interviewed afterwards about their experiences. This procedure forms the essence of

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 9

Proxy Technology Assessment, which was developed in our research institute (see Pierson et al., 2006).

The selection criteria for our proxy technology were largely informed by the characteristics of the applications in our scenarios. The virtual world application had to be ‘family-friendly’, to allow for remote interaction (i.e., communication, play and cooperation), and to enable exploration through teleportation and free navigation. Preferably, it should also provide a private space (i.e., a kind of home space for the avatar), customization, and the opportunity to share user-generated content. In addition to the functional specifications, we preferred an application that had an intuitive interface, since the learning curve was not our main interest. Finally, to ease recruitment, the application had to run on MAC and Windows operating systems, on laptops and desktops.

We considered several applications, but ultimately selected Chobots (see www.chobots.com). This flash-based web application sufficiently met the criteria set. It has an intuitive interface (see Figure 3), is promoted as a virtual world suitable for the whole family, and allows for the creation of a family of avatars in which the adult controls the children's system settings. Users can explore by selecting a zone in which their avatar consequently appears. They can then walk around in that zone by steering their avatar. They can communicate with each other using emoticons, moderated text chat or picture chat. They can also engage in individual and multiplayer mini-games. In addition, users have a private spot: a home in the virtual world. Personalization is possible to a certain degree, depending on the type of subscription (free or paying). Users cannot share their own content in Chobots.

Nevertheless, we have found them to do so on related websites.

Figure 3. Snapshot of the Chobots interface.

Process As indicated by Karapanos et al. (2009), expectations form a fundamental part of our experiences. They serve as a reference and can also change as a result of experience. Hence, we captured participants’ attitudes both prior and after use of the proxy technology.

The first storyboard was shown to family members during the first face-to-face meeting with them. At the end of this meeting, we asked family members to use Chobots for approximately four weeks, giving them time to move beyond the first experimental phase of use. Adult avatars in Chobots had been created beforehand and we added the child avatar to

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 10

the "virtual family" during this first contact. The basic features of the application were explained (e.g., how to log in), and could be reviewed in a logbook that was handed over.

In their logbook, participants kept track of their use of Chobots. Automatic data logging was not possible because we had no access to the underlying source code of the web application. For each uninterrupted play session, participants filled in a fixed set of questions concerning when and where it took place, whom they had contact with, their activities and what they did and did not enjoy about it.

After four weeks, we interviewed participants about their experiences with Chobots.

This group interview was semi-structured. The topic list addressed both participants’ general experience with Chobots (e.g., likes, dislikes, suitability for them as a family) as well as particular experiences of presence. During this second meeting, the second storyboard was presented.

Analysis To analyze our rich data set, we applied a qualitative approach that is based on Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The goal was to achieve a ‘thick interpretation’ (Ponterotto, 2006) of family members’ reflections on the storyboards and experiences with the proxy technology. That is to be able to situate it in the social context from which it arose and to understand underlying motivations. Using NVivo, we first identified concepts that emerged from the data (i.e., open coding). We then proceeded by placing these concepts in overarching categories.

For each separate storyboard session, concepts were categorized as identifying likeable, unlikeable or confusing affordances or instances of envisioned use1 (if applicable).

In the case of the proxy technology, concepts were labeled as identifying experiences of presence (if applicable). Separate nodes were coded for the following aspects of presence as identified in the literature: social presence (i.e., sensing the presence, intentionality and behavior of others), immersion (i.e., the state of being fully engaged by the medium), transportation (i.e., the sense of being present in the mediated environment), and realism (i.e., the sense that the presented content is realistic both on a sensory level and in terms of plausibility) (Biocca, Harms, & Burgoon, 2003; Ijsselsteijn, de Ridder, Freeman, & Avons, 2000; Lombard & Ditton, 1997).

Results Responses to the storyboards Family members’ expectations were highly similar across storyboard sessions and hence we discuss results from both together. We found that the participating adults, the grandparents in particular, had concerns about potential problems that could arise from virtual world use. Nevertheless, all the family members also saw opportunities that virtual worlds could offer them, as individuals and as a family. Most adults, unlike the children, emphasized the importance of everyday reality and existing relationships when reflecting on the potential of virtual world use.

1

‘Envisioned use’ statements refer to how family members thought they would use the device if they had it.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 11

Potential problems 1.

Issues with ease of use and scheduling The grandparents were concerned that not having grown up with digital games, they lacked sufficient skills to use virtual worlds. They foresaw usability issues as potentially hindering their interaction and perhaps even preventing them from using the technology at all, as shared by one of the grandfathers: Grandfather, Family 3 (Session 1):“But I think that ease of use will also play an important role (…) if I have to spend a long time on that, then it would be better that I come over here and pick her up and go do something together than spend time there virtually, you know.”

As the quote also illustrates, time is of the essence for the busy family members. This relates to another issue signaled in the second session (after proxy technology use). Being able to log in and spend time together online, requires scheduling this in advance. Given the tight and sometimes conflicting schedules of adults and children, this can be problematic.

2. Invasion of privacy The ability to maintain privacy was a major issue for the adults. They see the virtual world as a public space and anything they bring to this world may start to lead its own life. In line with this concern, one of the parents advocated a clear distinction between a private space, where people manage their own content,,and a public space (i.e. the virtual world), where content may be introduced in due time.

Father, Family 2 (Session 1): "I think it's good to have a public and a personal space.

In your virtual world, what you have there, that's what you share with other people who also have an avatar running around there. But it could be that you don't want to introduce certain information sources or sounds, etcetera, in that world yet (...)"

Several family members were wary of how a virtual world application might lead to intrusion into their private time. Although valuing their family a lot, they emphasize that each family member has particular interests and obligations and that this should be acknowledged.

They may not always be available and willing to commit to a joint synchronous session.

Father, Family 2 (Session 1): "(...) it's something that you have to want to go along with, that you get dragged into. It's actually nice that someone sends you a link of a photo album and that you can go through it at your own pace, while when you have to go there with your avatar and you have to respond at the right time, in the right way, that requires a lot more commitment of course."

Nevertheless, when an invitation comes from someone you cherish, it may be difficult to decline.

3.

Addiction and deception Adult family members had concerns about possible negative effects that virtual world use might have on themselves and on their children. They referred to media reports on it, like the mother in the following quote.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 12

Mother, Family 1 (Session 1): "Now, things like that shouldn't seem too real. (...) I mean, if you hear about those people in Second Life that eventually can't figure out for themselves which life they are leading, that's not, you know..."

They worried about addictive effects, resulting in the replacement of ‘actual’ activities by virtual ones. In addition, they feared that the “constructed” nature of virtual worlds and avatars creates a space for misrepresentation that can be abused. A so-called simulated environment may be a biased representation of the world. People may consciously use avatars to represent themselves as someone they are not. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that adults want to keep an eye on things when their (grand)children are online.

Opportunities 1.

Deepening existing relationships Family members saw particular value in using virtual world interactions to nurture the relationships they already have. This constitutes a positive alternative to replacing these contacts, as the mother mentions in the following quote.

Mother, Family 3 (Session 1): "(…) if you use it to deepen your contacts, that's something else. But what a lot of people do, they really replace (those contacts), like on Facebook and stuff."

Our participants envisioned several activities of interest that would reinforce or strengthen their existing family ties including joint play, cooperation and exploration in a virtual world. Some of these desirable activities clearly reflect the specific relationships between them and the roles that each generation has. For instance, parents and grandparents imagined how they could guide their (grand)children through a particular place they had visited before or knew more about. The children thought of how they could create something and share it with friends and family through the virtual world to demonstrate their abilities or as a gift.

2.

Learning about and exploring the world In addition to deepening existing relationships, adult family members also saw virtual worlds as suitable environments for learning about and exploring the world. For them, graphical virtual worlds can be a platform for a more engaging and fun form of learning, both for themselves as well as for their children. In the following quote, one of the grandfathers describes that it would be nice if he could visualize his books and thereby help his grandchildren with preparing a school presentation.

Grandfather, Family 3 (Session 2): “Suppose that they (grandchildren) say… well consider for example the nomads in the Sahel region…. I have some books on magnificent reports on their way of life… so that you could indeed say: ‘Are you looking for something, could this be something for you to do something on that theme?’”

Our participants were enthusiastic about virtual travel, especially when considering the possibility of experiencing certain locations in three dimensions (as in the second storyboard). Virtual visits were seen as a means for active exploration of places, learning about, or returning to places that are not so straightforward or even impossible to visit (e.g., space, historical places).

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 13

Mother, Family 3 (Session 2): “<Girl’s name>, you could go to space!”

Girl: (excited) “Yeah, space, that’s my dream!”

Mother: “They’re learning about that and she’s extremely involved in that.”

3.

Practising skills Some grandparents were interested in using virtual worlds to improve skills that are useful in everyday life. One of the participating grandfathers picked up the idea of gesture tracking (featured in the second storyboard). He thought of how such a system could help him improve his tai chi exercises.

Grandfather, Family 3 (Session 2): “…For example, you have a lot of people that do yoga or…I do some tai chi myself… if something like that could help you (…) to do your stuff the right way, yes.”

The other grandfather considered the opportunity for practising particular social skills like giving your condolences to a relative or friend who has lost someone. Although he did not mention this in response to a storyboard, but to a related probe2, it is worth mentioning.

Grandfather, Family 2 (Session 1): “If you could try out situations with it and discover what the possibilities are. For instance, when a relative has passed away and you don’t really know how to react, I mean, how to address the bereaved, there are frictions and such, you know. Then you could try that out…”

4.

Creative expression: play and experimentation The children liked the idea of the virtual world as a place where they could bring their fantasy to life. The second storyboard featured the option to transform actual drawings into 3D virtual objects that could be used and altered through gesture control, and the participating children immediately envisioned themselves using this as part of their play.

Girl, Family 1 (Session 2): “You could draw vehicles and get in there and then you could … or make something where you have to step on a pedal or something like that.

A bike and then you have to make certain movements to step.”

Boy, Family 2 (Session 2): “If I would make a dragon, then I would put myself in the armor of a knight and then I would fight it. Or I would be the giant beast!”

The adults saw virtual spaces as places where they could experiment with their environment. For instance, the participating grandmother said she would be interested in trying out different interior decoration ideas and one of the grandfathers had a similar idea about trying out alternatives for his garden.

Use of the proxy technology and recounted experiences In this section, we will describe how family members actually dealt with the virtual world application that we introduced to their homes (i.e., Chobots) and how they recounted their experiences during the post-interview.

2

During the first contact with family members, we briefly demonstrated a virtual world application with predefined chat.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 14

Patterns of usage Family 1 used Chobots most frequently. In particular, the granddaughter grew quite fond of it. She played over 14 sessions, sometimes even more than one session a day. She and her sister started using Chobots well before their grandmother and explained to her how it worked. On one occasion, grandmother and granddaughter met at the grandchild’s house to play Chobots while sitting next to each other, each on their own laptop. Both the grandmother (who played 5 times) and granddaughter explained that they would continue to play Chobots in the future. They also thought about creating more Chobots avatars for, for instance, the girl’s little sister who did not have one yet.

Family 2 used Chobots a few times. The grandfather played 5 times in total. The grandson reported playing twice, both times with his grandfather. During the first time, the boy helped his grandfather via telephone. During the second session, they met as avatars in the virtual world. They arranged to meet in advance, again by telephone, at a certain location they both knew. The grandfather explained how they had also talked face-to-face about how Chobots worked. Neither the boy nor his grandfather liked Chobots. For the grandson, it did not have sufficient possibilities, although he did like the mini-games. The grandfather did not find it interesting and he had a bad experience during a particular session in which other users used inappropriate language. He found this particularly disconcerting because he was with grandchildren at that time, learning how to use the application.

The grandfather of Family 3 never used Chobots eventually. He had neither the time nor interest in using it. He explained that he uses technology in a very goal-oriented, pragmatic way. In his opinion, Chobots did not fit that kind of use. He could only imagine using technology for play when he was unable to see his granddaughter. Unlike him, his granddaughter had used Chobots twice. While she does not use the computer a lot and did not do many sessions, she said she had enjoyed it and would like to do it again.

Recounted experiences Overall, the family members felt that Chobots was not an appropriate medium for family interaction. They had difficulties establishing remote contact with each other and grandparents were not satisfied with the kind of remote contact that was possible. Finally, concerns were expressed about the presence of strangers and the risks that come with it.

1.

Barriers to initiating remote contact For family members, scheduling a remote session in which they were simultaneously available was not a straightforward process. Both grandparents and grandchildren have busy and conflicting schedules. Moreover, parents prefer to be around when their children are online or control access to the Internet, which means their availability is also required. One family mentioned they have a password set on the computer that is connected to the Internet and the child does not know this password.

The family members’ discourse further suggests that Chobots stimulated individual use, rather than fostering family interaction. Indeed, many family members reported experiencing strong immersion in the mini-games. They lost track of time, but also awareness of others, both online and offline. Some of the mini-games afforded multi-play, but family members reported having difficulty entering these games together. Some adult family members reported competing for the high-score on a game but stated that the children could not participate in this competition because they would never be able to surpass the adults’ score.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 15

Aside from the former issues, certain usability and technical issues also acted as a barrier to initiating remote contact. The family members of Family 1 reported that they had not been able to locate each other in the virtual world. This is likely to be related to the fact that in Chobots, users have to choose between different “duplicate” worlds when logging in, each corresponding to a different server. As a result, users can unknowingly enter two different worlds if they do not verify this.

Identification of other users was also impeded due to the limited customizability of Chobot avatars. Non-paying users can only change the color of their avatar and buy a limited number of attributes with virtual currency that they have won by playing mini-games. As a result, there is little differentiation between such users. Some participants stated that they had on occasion initially confused another user for their relative because they looked the same. In that case, the only distinction was the different user name shown below the avatar.

Finally, there were a few usability issues that may have indirectly hindered remote interaction. As anticipated, certain family members preferred an interface in their native language, instead of English. Most had a sufficient command of the English language to be able to deal with the application. Our youngest participant (girl of Family 1) was initially annoyed because she did not understand the words she saw. Her mother helped her by translating. In addition, the system occasionally froze, which forced users to start over.

Finally, when navigating through the world, users sometimes felt that the application did not respond to their actions.

2.

Nature of remote contact Grandparents expressed the desire to see and hear their relatives, which was not possible during remote contact through Chobots. The grandmother said she enjoyed the colocated play with her granddaughter because it allowed them to hear and see each other’s responses. The grandfather of Family 2 indicated that he did not like the indirectness of avatar interaction. The grandfather of Family 3 would rather consider something like Skype to interact with his granddaughter. For the children, the use of avatars was not an issue, but they were aware that their grandparents had difficulties using the system.

Similarly, chat was considered to be problematic. Grandparents feel that it is a shallow and unsatisfactory form of communication. For the children, it is a difficult medium, because it requires a lot of typing. In addition to these general observations, we found that family members had experienced particular usability issues with the communication features of Chobots.

When a family of avatars has been created in Chobots, the adults have control the children’s chat settings. Grandparents were, however, unaware of this. As such, settings remained default, which meant that grandparents could either enter plain text or combine picture icons to chat, while children could only do the latter. Second, the grandmother of Family 1 seemingly confused public chat with leaving a message. While she was convinced that she had sent messages to her granddaughter, the granddaughter never received any. The fact that both features were tagged with the same tooltip (i.e., “Send a message”) is indeed confusing.

In essence, family members did not really feel together during remote contact because of the obtrusive nature of the technology. This obtrusiveness does not merely refer to the computer. For grandparents, the avatar was in many ways a frustrating reminder of the technology between them. It represents something unfamiliar, something they cannot identify with and hence prevents them from feeling like they are together with their grandchild.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 16

3.

Presence of unknown users Throughout the discussion, it was noted that the presence of other unknown users came with both benefits and disadvantages. The children found the games more fun when there were others to play it with. The grandmother mentioned she enjoyed other users’ presence, since they made the world feel less “empty”, at least when it was not overcrowded.

Given that Chobots is a relatively small virtual world, there was an actual risk of overcrowding. Developers tried to remedy this by providing additional servers.

Given that Chobots is an open virtual world, it is possible to encounter strangers who do not have other users’ best interests at heart. This became painfully obvious for one of the grandfathers who had a bad experience with some users’ poor conduct, as mentioned previously. Chobots works with moderators to counter abuse, but this is not a foolproof system. For the parents and grandparents, this was clearly a difficult matter. On the one hand, they want their (grand)children to be safe from harm. On the other hand, they feel that no system that allows remote contact is foolproof, and that restrictive measures, such as disabling text chat, impede children’s ability to learn social skills.

Clearly, there are a number of issues with Chobots. Nevertheless, grandparents enjoyed the increase in offline contact that came with the use of the application. In the following quote, the grandmother replies on a question about whether Chobots had an added value for them as a family.

Grandmother, Family 1: ”Yeah, you know what, because we made arrangements to meet and such, yes, we had more contact, that’s a fact. In that respect, it’s the case.

But the Chobots part as such wasn’t actually.”

Both grandparents that wanted to use Chobots, asked their children how to do so. The children, in turn, were eager to explain. One of the grandparents stated that it had given them a common task, which brought them together. As such Chobots formed a bridge between the children’s and adults’ worlds.

Grandfather, Family 2: “The positive thing about it, I thought, was that there had certainly been conversations this way between me and (name grandchild), even very long ones, like during that walk, you know, which otherwise wouldn’t be so easy, you know. Because we actually only see each other when there are other children around as well. And what happens then? Yes, those children go play with each other, that makes sense. And those older people have each other to nag to.”

Discussion Relating our work to other empirical studies The development of innovative technologies for family interaction is not straightforward. This may explain why so little research and design work has been done on this matter. Rare exceptions are the work of Vetere and colleagues (2009) and Khoo, Merritt and Cheok (2009).

Most studies focus on the impact of children’s ICT use on family life. As Valentine and Holloway (2002) point out, such studies fail to recognize that children’s online activities are connected with their everyday lives. Like these authors, we reject a technologically deterministic perspective. Instead, we assume that the value of virtual worlds for families arises from interplay between an application’s characteristics on the one hand and family background and interests on the other hand. In particular, we have investigated what

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meaning remote interaction through virtual worlds can have for children, parents and grandparents by probing their attitudes and interests and observing how the use of an application plays out in their households.

We found that family members foresee both problems and opportunities. Livingstone and Bober (2006) describe a similar ambivalence among parents regarding their children’s online use. On the one hand, grandparents are concerned that such an application will be difficult to use. Parents and grandparents fear that their privacy and the wellbeing of their (grand)children will be at stake and also foresee issues with scheduling a virtual get-together.

On the other hand, family members see virtual worlds as places affording joint and individual play, experimentation, exploration and learning. Unlike the children, the adults’ focus was on how virtual worlds could deepen existing relationships, as well as knowledge and skills they need in everyday life. Overall, and perhaps not surprisingly, the fears and hopes of family members are clearly shaped by how virtual worlds are portrayed in the press and their experience with related new media.

By introducing a virtual world application at family members’ homes, we found differences in how family members dealt with the application, ranging from early rejection to extensive use. In hindsight, participants agreed that the application was not appropriate for remote interaction with their relatives. Family members referred to difficulties to initiate remote contact (due to a combination of application characteristics and their particular family context), the indirect nature of the remote contact and bad experiences with the virtual world as a public space.

Despite the problems that arose during use, grandparents did like the additional contact that came with it. This corresponds with findings that media can be a way for family members of different generations to connect (media in general: Horst, 2009; gaming: Ito & Bittanti, 2009). This is often omitted in the discussion on intergenerational differences (Horst, 2009, p.191-192). Media can function as the subject of both scheduled and fluid forms of social time and of sharing interests and expertise among relatives. In our study, children shared their knowledge about the virtual world application with their relatives and enjoyed being acknowledged for that.

Design guidelines Based on our results, we have formulated some design guidelines. We describe the rationale and offer suggestions on how it could be implemented.

Guideline 1: Respect the distinction between people’s personal, family and public life Family members want to control what they share with others online. In addition, family members value their family life, but also have other obligations and personal interests.

A sense of control can be provided in various ways. Developers should clearly demarcate public (where content is available for everyone), semi-private and private spaces (where content can only be accessed and managed by the owner or his relatives and friends).

At the level of contact management, family and friends should be easily distinguishable from unrelated users. Finally, in terms of time management, providing asynchronous communication could enable responding at your own pace.

Developers should also consider the actual setting of use. Household members may use the application while other household members are present in the same room, yet engaged in other activities. Hence, use should not disturb others in the household.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Beyond Being There 18

Guideline 2: Enable family members to reinforce and strengthen existing relationships Family members see merit in a medium that adds to their existing relationships rather than replacing them.

This can be accomplished by designing for cooperation rather than immersion. For instance, individual games that are geared towards personal gain should be avoided. Also, games should allow joint play despite different cognitive and ICT skills. Developers might consider creating games in which game play extends beyond the virtual world.

In addition to play, other family practices such as sharing pictures and movies and gift giving could be supported. Both practices contribute to the construction of family identity and bonding. By allowing relatives to exchange user-generated content in the virtual world, sharing content with relatives in a contextualized way becomes possible. Enabling family members to also print received digital content would support gift giving. For example, a drawing or an image of a virtual object could be put up at home.

Guideline 3: Support manageable (grand)parental mediation, while respecting children’s need for autonomy as well as guidance Family members want to keep an eye on their (grand)children’s online behavior but often lack the skills. Children, however, have their own interests and desires with regard to using online media that do not always correspond to what their older relatives see as appropriate use.

Many virtual worlds targeting children restrict communication, enforcing ‘safe’ use.

As such developers inscribe themselves in a discourse of ‘moral panic’ that surrounds these applications. Rather than imposing restrictive control, developers should be aware of and allow different forms of parental mediation to support healthy and safe use.

Appropriate measures depend on the family situation (maturity of the children; ability and willingness of (grand)parents to use the application, …). In any case, joint navigation and play will benefit both (grand)parents and children. Livingstone and Bober (2006) have shown that parents’ assessment of online risks tend to differ greatly from the exposure to risks that children themselves report. By going online together, (grand)parents will be able to make a more accurate risk assessment and children’s needs for guidance can be addressed. When children then go online without a relative, they can carry that experience with them.

Guideline 4: Stimulate co-presence by letting family members interact in a direct, physical way Grandparents do not wish to be represented by an avatar. For them, an avatar complicates interaction with their grandchild. In addition, chat poses difficulties for older and younger family members. The grandparents are not familiar with it and find it superficial, for the children it is not straightforward to have to type everything.

A mixed reality solution in which family members can be represented audio-visually could help. When hearing and seeing each other, they can interact in a way they feel confident about: using speech and gesture, sensing each others’ emotional states and responses. In the future, gesturing could become more than a way of communicating with each other, it could be implemented to become a way of controlling the application. Family members enjoyed the idea of physically interacting with an application.

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Theoretical and methodological considerations Besides the strength and implications of our study, we want to reflect on its scope and the further research steps to take.

This study is essentially exploratory. We gave a close analysis of the appropriation process following the introduction of a virtual world technology. This in turn served to guide future development of virtual world applications by establishing what family members consider “appropriate” use. This study was not conducted to advance or refute theoretical claims.

Although empirical, our study was rooted in a particular theoretical perspective, namely the domestication framework. While the domestication perspective allows us to fully appreciate the contextualized nature of human experience, such situated accounts come with a risk of inadequately capturing the sensual and emotional quality of human experience (McCarthy & Wright, 2004). Although we did pay attention to individual experiences, McCarthy and Wright’s framework could be used to broaden our perspective in further research.

Our results are tied to the participants we observed. As explained previously, recruitment resulted in a relatively homogeneous set of traditional, media-rich, well-educated households. Family members’ expectations and experiences will inevitably be related to their background.

Finally, family members’ reflections as discussed here can only provide us with a partial account of their expectations and experiences. Indeed, through their particularities, the selected storyboards and the virtual world application have highlighted certain aspects, while having left out others.

Conclusion Our results show that the potential of virtual worlds for families cannot be delimited to generating a sense of being together in an online space, but that its value is tied to families’ interests and preoccupations that transcend the online/offline distinction. An important interest is the desire to spend time together as a family. As Horst concludes (2009, p. 192), this desire is a confirmation of the fact that the opportunity to do so becomes more limited as children grow up. As children grow older, their need for privacy and their desire to spend time with their peers increases. As such, the relationship between children’s age and the willingness to share virtual spaces with relatives is an interesting subject of further investigation.

Acknowledgements This research is part of the HI-Masquerade project, funded by IBBT (Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology). We would like to thank the reviewer who helped us improve this manuscript. In addition, we thank all project partners. A special thanks goes out to Marjan Geerts and Jan Moons (from Alcatel-Lucent) and Pieter Heytens (designer at IBBT) who contributed to the creation of the storyboards. For more project information see: http://www.ibbt.be/en/project/hi-masquerade.

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(2003). Technology probes: Inspiring design for and with families. In Proc. of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 17-24). Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA: ACM. Ijsselsteijn, W., A., de Ridder, H., Freeman, J., & Avons, S. E. (2000). Presence: Concept, determinants and measurement. In Proceedings of the SPIE, 3959, 520-529.

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Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

Making Sense of the Virtual World for Young Children: Estonian Pre-School Teachers’ Experiences and Perceptions

By Andra Siibak Institute of Journalism and Communication, University of Tartu Kristi Vinter Department of Educational Science, Tallinn University

Abstract The study provides an overview of teacher perceptions regarding young children’s internet use and media education in pre-schools. Two focus-group interviews with 24 Estonian pre-school teachers were carried out in order to analyze their experiences and opinions about factors that influence pre-school children’s computer and Internet use.

Pre-school teachers’ perceptions about their own role in shaping children’s media literacy were also examined. The results indicate that teachers consider the role of the family on children’s computer use to be more significant compared to their own role.

Although the teachers started to acknowledge their own role as supervisors and parents’ counselors as the interviews progressed, no curriculum-based media literacy shaping is done in the classrooms. Furthermore, rather than developing children’s awareness of the media, various new media had been used as “enrichment” and significantly fewer activities that would actually help to shape children’s media literacy were mentioned.

Keywords: pre-school teachers, young children, computer use, media literacy, Estonia

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

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Making Sense of the Virtual World for Young Children: Estonian Pre-School Teachers’ Experiences and Perceptions Researchers (e.g. Livingstone & Bovill 2001, p. vii) have noted that in the last decade we have witnessed a visible change in the media environments and leisure time habits of children (Swanbrow, 2004). Compared to children in the early 1980s, today’s young children are spending much less time outdoors or engaged in organized sports, whereas a progressive increase in time spent on the computer has been noted (Swanbrow, 2004). However, as young children are only starting to climb “the ladder of online opportunities” (Hasebrink et al 2009, 87), their main online activities are often connected to playing computer games. For instance, according to the evaluations of Estonian parents, the majority of 5-7 year olds in Estonia (81%) are, on a weekly basis, engaged in playing online computer games, with 23% of them estimated to engage in playing computer games for more than 10 hours per week (Finantsteadlikus ja rahaline kirjaoskus 5-7 aastaste ja 8-9aastaste Eesti laste seas, 2010). The most popular virtual worlds among Estonian children are Lastekas (80 000 users) (www.lastekas.ee) and Mängukoobas (66 000 users) (www.mangukoobas.ee), which are widely regarded as offering a varied gaming environment for the young. Even though several authors have suggested that playing computer games should not be considered a waste of time but a “motivational step on the way of `approved activities`” (Hasebrink et al 2009, 50), Estonian children have been perceived to be taking rather passive and unimaginative roles in virtual worlds (Rudi, 2009). In other words, despite the fact that Estonian youths are heavy users of new media (Kalmus & Keller & Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, 2009), the general lack of mediation and guidance (Livingstone & Haddon, 2009) might be one of the reasons why Estonian children have yet to fully grasp the wonders that the online medium offers.

Parental strategies of mediation, however, are dependent on several factors. Although some authors (see Kirwil et al. 2009 for an overview) have suggested that parental strategies of mediation depend largely on the general value orientation of the country, others (Kalmus & Roosalu, in press) refer to the role of welfare state institutions, which, through regulating female labor force participation and the availability of public childcare, have some bearing on the strategies parents are actually able to employ in their child-rearing tasks. As the dualcareer family with both parents working full-time is rather typical in Estonia, with 91% of all three- to six-year-olds attending pre-school daily, the role and responsibility of teachers in shaping children’s media literacy has become essential (Statistics Estonia, 2009). However,

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as the National Curriculum for Pre-school Child Care Institutions (Koolieelse lasteasutuse riiklik õppekava, 2008) does not contain media education as a subject field and, as a result, teachers do not have any training in the area, the question of suitable monitoring strategies and teaching methods is of vital importance.

The aim of this study was to explore how pre-school teachers perceived factors that influence pre-school children’s use of the computer and the Internet, as well as their own role in shaping children’s media literacy. Two focus-group interviews with 24 Estonian preschool teachers were carried out in order to analyze their perceptions and experiences regarding the topic.

This paper consists of three parts. In the first part, we provide an overview of the literature related to children’s computer use and mediation. The article then moves on to the methodology of the empirical study. In the last part of the article, the results of the study are presented and discussed.

Literature Review Interdisciplinary theories and concepts form the basis of our article. We have applied theoretical views mainly from the fields of educational sciences, media and communication, and psychology.

The first section of the literature overview presents the discussions around generational differences and important aspects related to children’s computer use. Then we move on to discuss aspects related to attitudes toward computer use by pre-school teachers.

Generational differences and mediation Livingstone and Helsper (2008) claim that, in the present-day media saturated world, “parents seem engaged in a constant battle with their children as they seek to balance the educational and social advantages of media use and the negative effects that some content or mediated contact might have on children's attitudes, behavior, or safety” (p. 1). In this context, the term “mediation” is used to refer to the parental management of the relationship between children and media. However, the term provides an extension to the role of the adult, as it moves beyond simple restrictions parents can implement and includes more conversational and interpretative strategies (e.g. Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, & Marseille, 1999), as well as monitoring activities (Kerr & Sattin, 2000). Although parents have been facing this challenge for some decades, for example, in regulating children’s television

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viewing (Valkenburg, 2004), their greatest mediational task is now connected with children’s computer use.

Compared to the members of the “digital generation” (Papert, 1996), adults tend to struggle much more when adopting practices related to digital technologies. This struggle is most evident in the technology-knowledge gap between the members of the new generation and their parents, which has resulted in the claim that the Internet and computers have provided the young with a position of greater authority and control (Tapscott, 1998; Alch, 2000; Livingstone & Bober, 2005). Furthermore, as the Internet is considered to be a very specific environment in terms of risks, Livingstone & Helsper (2008) claim that the strategies used for mediating the television use of children have proved to be insufficient in terms of the new media. Hence, the suggested changes in the position and role of adults, as well as the need for improved mediational strategies, may start to play an important role in shaping the attitude of parents and teachers toward the computer use of young children.

Computer use among pre-school children In recent years, the hype around the new, technology-savvy generation has not only increased the number of studies of Internet use and the online practices of adolescents or tweens, but has also resulted in discussions of the role of ICTs in the lives of pre-school children (Edwards-Groves & Langley, 2009; Dhingra, Sharma, & Kour, 2009; Zevenbergen & Logan, 2008; Thorn, 2008). Furthermore, pre-school children are considered to be the newest group of Internet users (Feller, 2005). The findings of Olle Findhal (2009) regarding the situation in Sweden nicely illustrate the fundamental changes in the Internet usage of preschoolers. Compared to the year 2002, where the critical age marking when half of the age group had started to use the Internet was 10 years, the critical age in the year 2009 was close to four years (Findhal, 2009).

Even though the time pre-schoolers spend using the computer is quite restricted (Dhingra et al., 2009; Rideout,Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003), the results of the parent survey carried out by the World Internet Institute indicate that the time spent online increases significantly as children grow older (Findhal, 2009). Although in some cases it is reported that two- to five-year-olds usually use the Internet under the supervision of an adult (Feller, 2005; Findhal, 2009), generally a significant number of four- to six-year- old children are capable of using the computer without any parental assistance (Rideout et al., 2003).

Furthermore, studies (Zevenbergen & Logan 2008; Rideout et al., 2003) indicate that pre-

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school children have developed a high number of skills through their use of computers. The computer skills the pre-schoolers possess offer them a number of opportunities in their use of new media. For example, Zevenbergen and Logan (2008) claim that the majority of children use computers to play educational and non-educational games, while others (cf. Dhingra et al., 2009; Downes, 2002) suggest that computers are used for self-expression, for instance, drawing and painting, as well as for learning numbers, letters and rhymes online (Feller, 2005).

The influence of the home on computer-use Several studies report that pre-school children have extensive computer use in out-ofschool environments (Edwards-Groves & Langley, 2009; Dhingra et al., 2009). As a great number of children have access to the computer and the Internet in their home settings, Stephen, McPake, Plowman and Berch-Heyman (2008) note that “the family habitus (practices and culture)” has an impact on the child’s engagement with the ICT (p. 24).

Furthermore, Rideout and Hamel (2006) claim that “parents’ beliefs about media — and their own media habits — are strongly related to how much time their children spend with media, the patterns of their children’s use, and the types of content their children are exposed to.” (p.

5) However, parents are not always aware of their role in supporting their child’s learning or in shaping the computer-use habits of the child. For example, parents tend to make use of media content as “a chance to get their chores done, quiet their kids down, or just have some 'me' time, knowing that their kids are 'safe' — not playing outside, and less likely to be making trouble around the house” (Rideout & Hamel, 2006, p. 32). Thus, although researchers (e.g. Magid, 2003) have warned against making use of computers as digital babysitters, many parents still admit to this habit (He, Irwin, Sangster Bouch, Tucher, & Pollett, 2005).

Even though pre-schoolers name parents as the main source of information when it comes to learning how to use the ICT (Stephen et al., 2008, p. 25), parents themselves tend to believe that “children’s competences with technology were mainly the result of being selftaught” (Plowman, McPake, & Stephen, 2008, p.13). Researchers have also noted the significant role of older siblings in acquainting younger ones with new technology (Plowman et al., 2008, p. 8). The presence of older siblings may result in competition for resources, and older siblings have also been found to be likely to introduce activities that are not favoured by

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parents (e.g. Plowman et al., 2008). In comparison with the highly acknowledged role of family members in shaping the computer use of a child, the findings of Stephen et al (2008) indicate that pre-school is not perceived as a source of learning through technology, either by parents or children.

Aspects related to the attitudes and computer use of pre-school teachers Lee Shulman (1986) suggests that the knowledge of teachers’ “intellectual biography – that set of understandings, conceptions, and orientations that constitutes the source of their comprehension of the subjects they teach” (p. 8) is crucial for assessing their content knowledge. However, according to Flores-Koulish (2005), in the case of including media and new media literacy in their teaching, teachers mainly have to rely on their own knowledge, which usually “comes from daily exposure and social interaction related to media culture” (p.

6). According to Flores-Koulish (2005), not only is the media consumption of pre-service teachers “somewhat less than the average of most young people” (p. 12), but future teachers also currently tend to “consume media slightly less than during their childhood” (p. 13).

Furthermore, a phenomenon known as “apprenticeship of observation”, first coined

by Dan Lortie (1975), is also suggested (Mayer, 1999) to have an impact on the teaching methods and pedagogical beliefs of young teachers. According to this viewpoint, young teachers usually teach in the way they themselves were taught. Hence, by bringing in “their implicit institutional biographies” (Britzman, 1991, p. 443, quoted from Mayer, 1999) prospective teachers “may fail to realize that the aspects of teaching which they perceived as students represented only a partial view of the teacher’s job” (Borg, 2004, p. 274). Hence, generational differences could also be one of the reasons why there is still little use of new media technologies in pre-schools (Edwards-Groves & Langley, 2009; Marsh et al., 2005).

Probably due to the above-mentioned phenomenon, many pre-school teachers also tend to feel that computers restrict rather than enhance the social development of children and have therefore decided not to implement digital devices in their own teaching practices (Bayhan et al., 2002). Furthermore, as noted by Marinovi! et al. (2001), pre-school teachers in Croatia listed considerably more drawbacks, e.g. the negative impact on social development, harmful health impacts, insufficient physical activity, and the negative impact on emotional development, compared to the possible benefits from computer use in pre-schools.

Besides the fact that the “intellectual biography” of pre-school teachers does not consist of the usage of digital devices and thus excludes the technology from their own

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teaching experience, studies also report on ICT in pre-school settings being used as “a benign addition” (Cuban, 2001, p. 67). In other words, although ICTs are being used in pre-school settings, the teachers view the devices as a “useful supplement to existing resources” (Plowman & Stephen, 2003, p. 149) and not as devices which could lead to new concepts of play and learning (cf. Laffey & Espinosa, 2003).

Hence, it may be concluded that teachers’ own media consumption, computer skills and pedagogical beliefs all form an integral part of making use of new media in pre-school settings.

Method and Sample In November 2009, two focus group interviews were carried out with teachers (N=24) who educate children younger than eight years old. The interviews focused on clarifying teachers’ perceptions of computer and Internet use by young children and their perceptions of the role of the teacher. Teachers' understandings and opinions of the topic mainly rely upon their observations in pre-school groups, as well as on everyday conversations with parents and children. Furthermore, Estonian pre-school teachers have an obligation to carry out formal and pre-determined questionnaire-based development conversations with parents at least once an academic year. As one of the aims of these development conversations is to “explain the parents’ viewpoints and expectations with respect to the development of the child” (Koolieelse lasteasutuse riiklik õppekava, 2008), the teachers are relatively well informed on parents' perceptions and attitudes regarding children’s favorite activities, including the computer and Internet use of the child.

In compiling our sample, we aimed to select a broad range of participants and thus decided to cover diverse groups (different pre-school educational establishments, varying in region, size and form of ownership). A full list of Estonian pre-schools was used to compile the sample. Random sampling among groups of pre-schools was used to make the final selection, and every pre-school selected chose a teacher to participate in the focus-group.

The final sample comprised 24 female teachers whose ages ranged from 22 to 50 years; more than half of the interviewees were older than 35 years. Almost half of the teachers had been working in pre-schools for more than 20 years; slightly fewer teachers had been working for less than five years. Less than a quarter of the teachers had been working in pre-school for six to 19 years. As the majority of pre-school teachers in Estonia are female

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(99.7%), our sample provided a proportionally accurate cross-section of teachers working in Estonian pre-schools (Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, 2010).

We considered the focus-group method to be the best suited in respect to the aims of the present study, as it helped to capture the opinions and experiences of pre-school teachers with very different backgrounds in Estonia. Furthermore, as the discussed topics were relatively new to Estonian pre-school teachers, the focus-group method supported in-group content creation and encouraged the participants to point out examples of similar or even antagonistic cases in their own practice. In addition, the focus group method allowed for a variety of additional topics to be raised by group members and, hence, enriched the data.

The interview style for both of the two-hour focus groups was based on a qualitative interviewing technique, which involved a flexible outline of topics and questions (Patton, 2002). A prepared interview schedule with open-ended questions was used to help guide the interviews. The procedures of the “grounded theory approach”, as described by Strauss and Corbin (1998), were used to analyze the data.

After transcribing the interviews, the verbatim transcripts were read to get an overall sense of the data. The format was organized around categories that arose from the data. The data interpretation was cyclical, starting with line-by-line coding. In coding, we considered only those utterances that concerned computer and Internet usage of children and the adults' role as mediators.

During the open coding, the data was broken down into separate ideas and events. In the axial coding, conceptually similar phenomena were grouped to form categories and subcategories. After that, the relationships among categories were articulated within and across informants. During the selective coding, the core categories were identified. Teachers' perceptions, examples and events were used in the data analysis. A theoretical literature overview was used to explain the results.

Results Children’s computer and Internet use Our first aim was to explore how pre-school teachers perceive factors that influence pre-school children’s computer and Internet use. The teachers generally indicated that at the age of three, children start showing interest in computers, but the interest is still not echoed in their activities and, thus, the teachers do not see the need to raise this topic. The teachers

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Making Sense of the Virtual World for Young Children 11

believed five- to seven-year-old children to be more receptive toward new media, as the teachers had witnessed the effects of Internet and computer game usage in the games and communication of the children in the pre-schools. Nevertheless, according to the observations of the teachers, children in that age group had very different experiences with computers.

There were children who showed no interest in computers but also children whom teachers characterized as being addicted to computers. However, it has to be noted that, compared to the scientific definition of the word “addiction” (Young, 1996), the teachers both understood as well as used the word “addiction” in a different context.

T1: I had a boy in one group who was a heavy computer user. He got very upset if things did not go as fast as he wanted, especially with computer games. Sometimes, when the irritation was very strong, he just collapsed. If there was no computer around, he had that “psp” toy with him. His psychiatrist suggested limiting computer and psp use and the boy has become much calmer now.

T2: Conversations with parents indicate clearly whose children spend too much time with the computer. Those children are anxious and they have concentration difficulties. Parents are worried because their children don’t want to come to kindergarten because they can’t play computer games here. It is like an addiction.

According to the perceptions of the teachers, the children tended to form their overall attitudes and interests regarding computers within groups, and thus the values and opinions regarding the topic differed depending on the peer culture.

T1: I have noticed that the situation varies in different classes. The children who went to school 18 months ago were more interested in computers. ...But the present class wants to play and the children are not interested in computers ...

In other words, the teachers noticed that the more the children played creative, board or building games, the less interest they had in computers. Furthermore, according to the perceptions of teachers, other factors, for instance, the leaders’ play skills etc., which however are not investigated in the present study, also helped to form the child’s interest in computers.

Factors influencing children’s computer use

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When speaking of children’s computer and Internet use, the teachers focused on two different roles a computer had in the home setting, both of which might have an impact on the computer and Internet use of a child.

According to the perceptions of teachers in our sample, there are parents who make use of a computer as a babysitter in order to keep a child occupied while grown-ups are working or relaxing.

T1: … the computer fills up the time and you can be on your own.

T2: ... this [the computer] is the most convenient method of babysitting.

Teachers suggested that, in some families, the computer was also used in order to motivate or reward a child.

T1: Two children in my class can use a computer as a reward. One has tasks given by a speech therapist and he knows that after completing these exercises he can use the computer for 20 minutes. And it is a great motivator for him.

T2: ...There is a habit of making effort.

T1: This is positive.

These kinds of parental strategies were viewed in a favorable light, as teachers believed this kind of computer usage to be connected with the acknowledged mediational role of a parent who has set up concrete rules for computer usage.

Thus, besides the notable peer norms that helped to shape the general attitude of the class toward computers, the teachers believed that the heavy workload of parents could sometimes help to explain why some children tended to use the computer more frequently than others. Furthermore, making use of a parental strategy according to which computer use is a reward may also have positive effects on the general computer use of a child.

Role and impact of family on the child’s computer use The teachers in our sample brought up two aspects: the role of older siblings and parents, both of whom they believed to have an impact on the general computer use habits of the child.

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The teachers considered the role of older siblings to be rather significant in terms of young children’s access to computers, as well as in discovering their potential. For instance, the teachers noted that, although the rules regarding priority of computer use often favored older siblings, the younger ones were eager to stay up late in order to wait for their turn.

According to the teachers, older siblings were also the reason why younger children encountered games and online environments which were not suitable for their age.

T1: … older children use the computer when they can and younger children can use it when the older ones are tired of it. Then, in pre-school, these children are tired and bad-tempered.

T2: In the class, I can see that the child is nervous. And it is because the previous night his older brother had shown him a frightening game with guns.

Parents’ influence on children’s computer and Internet use, however, was perceived to be much more diverse. Five different sub-categories – the example set by the parents, admiration, ignorance, helplessness and awareness – were distinguished in the perceptions of teachers. The latter category is related to separate sub-categories of “reward” and “motivation”, both of which were analyzed in the previous section.

The personal example set by parents was often mentioned as an important aspect in shaping the media literacy of the child. First of all, parents were perceived to be the introducers of different media to the child. For instance, it was suggested that the example set by the parents in terms of computer use also helped to form the pattern of usage for a preschool child.

T1: Children see their parents on the computer far too often; dad is always on the computer.

Many teachers in our sample noted that parents admired and praised children who were able to use a computer and surf on the Internet without the assistance of adults. This kind of appreciation was considered to be rather dangerous. Mainly the teachers feared that the majority of those approving parents were not able or willing to control computer use, which might lead to possible negative consequences later on.

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T1: There is a danger when parents acknowledge the child’s achievements on the Internet. Parents’ appreciation is too great. That is a danger.

T2: Parents admire the child too much and later are not able to control the situation.

Furthermore, the teachers in our sample blamed the parents for being the motivating force whose enthusiasm had helped to increase the time children spent on the computer, which decreased their opportunities for face-to-face social relations.

T1: Social development is more important; the child should communicate..., but parents say: “you can’t imagine what s/he can do on the computer” and are proud.

The teachers also mentioned problems they claimed to be caused by the lack of awareness and ignorance of parents. Mainly it was suggested that pre-school children’s parents were not sufficiently concerned about safe computer and Internet use. For instance, the teachers believed that many parents had not set restrictions on computer use or had not prohibited access to unsuitable materials, such as films and violent or pornographic web pages.

T1: Parents consider their children to be older than they actually are. They allow them to watch things that are not proper for their age.

T2: And they believe that the child understands.

T3. I rather imagine parents don’t think about it.

In other words, the pre-school teachers sensed that parents were quite helpless, especially as far as limits and rules for computers were concerned. It was even suggested that for some parents, taking a child to pre-school seemed to be looked upon as the only chance to get the child away from the computer.

T1: As a matter of fact, some parents see this [having a child in pre-school] as reducing computer use, because they have allowed their young children to access the Internet and other places and now all of a sudden the children will not obey, and parents see pre-schools as a way out… the child is sent to the pre-school in order to avoid the child spending the whole day on the Internet, and instead spend time with his/her friends.

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All in all, the teachers claimed that parents should take the role of balancer by regulating time on the computer and suitable media content, as well as taking time to explain the media messages to their children. The above-mentioned aspects were considered the most important, as the teachers in our sample felt that family members had a greater mediational role in comparison with the role of pre-school teachers. Furthermore, Estonian children do not have that much contact with the new media in pre-schools, and it is important to note that the teachers did not consider themselves to be role models in children’s computer and Internet use.

Teachers’ vision of their role in shaping children’s media literacy Our analysis demonstrated that clear changes took place in the teachers’ awareness during the time of the interviews. At the beginning of the interviews, the teachers regarded parents as the child’s only supervisors and educators regarding media content, and fully withdrew from their own role as supervisors. They supported their argument by claiming that, compared to the variety of media accessible to a child in the home environment; the usage of media in the pre-school was rather limited. Although some of the teachers in our sample noted that maintaining pre-schools as computer-free `oases` would not improve the media competence of children, others stated that “computers are not suitable as a part of the daily life of young children”. Only later, after increasing their knowledge of the issue, did teachers realize the importance of their own role as supervisors and start to acknowledge their significance in shaping children’s media literacy.

The teachers admitted that, as they were involved with children in pre-schools on a daily basis, they should act as supervisors who were also responsible for shaping the media literacy of children.

T1: The parent is responsible; the teacher guides.

T2: The fact is that most of the time the child is in the pre-school.

Furthermore, the teachers acknowledged, especially during panel discussions with parents, that there was a need for them to mentor parents. The teachers admitted that during the panel discussions the parents often expressed their questions and concerns and thus, in their role as mentors, teachers should be responsible for a variety of tasks. For instance,

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teachers perceived it to be their task to suggest educational and age appropriate computer games, web pages or informative reading materials to the parents, as well as educating the parents about suitable time limits or about the possible media impact on the child. The need for similar rules and requirements in both pre-school and at home was also emphasized by the teachers.

As media education is not part of the curriculum of Estonian pre-schools and teachers have had no special training, we were interested in finding out what kind of monitoring strategies and teaching methods the pre-school teachers found appropriate to use.

Pre-school teachers’ understanding of media education The opinions expressed during the focus group interviews suggest that pre-school teachers in Estonia see technical resources and the content of media as “enrichment”, supporting and illustrating other subjects, such as language and speech or natural science, none of which, however, shape children’s awareness of media.

T1: …We have no chance to go see how bread is made. We watched it on a DVD. In pre-school, one can make choices about what and how long to watch.

T2: We watched a show about the life of the black stork on a web camera.

T3: ...letters are taught on the computer keyboard.

In some cases, teachers in our sample also incorporated media texts for current events (looking at weather pages) and made use of a videotape in order to document student performance (making a video of a hiking trip). Significantly fewer activities that shape skills of understanding, creating and analyzing media were mentioned.

However, as the interviews progressed the teachers came to the understanding that media education in pre-school is not only about using the computer and screening educational films. For instance, the importance of adult supervision of media use, as well as the need to provide explanations about content, was recognized.

T1: This is still a part of our life and children need education in every field. It happens at home anyway and we can’t ignore that.

T2: And if it still raises problems, then one has to talk about it and children need to be taught regarding this theme.

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Thus, eventually, the teachers started to emphasize the need to move beyond the idea of seeing media as mere “enrichment” in the classroom and to concentrate more on discussing, analyzing and explaining media messages. In other words, teachers started to name real aspects leading to media literacy in children.

T1: ... to prevent the negative impact, we can help with our actions. That is the theme of the future.

T2: The child should learn to select media for him/herself.

T3: It's not enough to say that a program is bad and s/he shouldn’t watch it.

Several important aspects which should be considered in improving pre-school teacher training curricula were suggested. For instance, the teachers emphasized the need for courses on media education, as well as expressing the need to enhance their media competence and improve their technical skills in order to be able to make use of various technologies. The latter suggestion is closely connected to the biggest concerns that older teachers in particular have about teaching media.

Discussion According to Sutherland et al. (2000), perceptions of the computer’s potential depend on the domestic environment. Furthermore, Sonia Livingstone (2007) has suggested that if parents themselves are computer-oriented their children may also start to follow their example. The focus-group interviews with Estonian pre-school teachers indicated that the role of the family in general, but parents and older siblings in particular, was considered to be the greatest influence in shaping the computer use of young children. For instance, similar to the findings of Downes (2002), the experiences of teachers in our sample led them to believe that older siblings had priority in terms of computer use. Nevertheless, they perceived that a young child’s interest in computers was much greater when there were older siblings compared to when the child had no siblings.

Other authors (Sutherland et al., 2000; He et al., 2005) have noted that parents often use the computer as a babysitter in order to keep the child occupied. Teachers in our sample also noted that Estonian parents of pre-schoolers want their children to be engaged in online activities but the parents cannot keep an eye on them. Furthermore, conversations with

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parents led the teachers to believe that parents often used computers in order to reward or motivate their children. Although the teachers gave positive evaluations to both of the abovementioned parental trends, neither of the strategies was actually considered to be educational by the teachers and both were even referred to as “misuses” of media (Hobbs, 1997). The opinions expressed by the teachers, however, reflected their recognition that using a computer was a very attractive activity for the child and thus it might serve as a meaningful reward after having completed difficult tasks (doing homework, cleaning one’s toys, washing dishes, etc) demanded by the parents. However, as noted by Hobbs (2006), in the case of using videos as rewards in the classroom, the teachers in our sample did not seem to understand the indirect message when approving of this kind of parental strategy: using the computer could be the best thing grown-ups can offer.

A more sceptical attitude was expressed by the teachers when describing the enthusiasm of parents related to the computer competencies of their children. The teachers feared that this genuinely positive attitude the parents shared, which has also been noted by several other authors (Marsh et al., 2005; Rideout et al., 2003), would later be followed by general neglect and carelessness about the possible negative impacts and risks involved in computer use. The results of Flash Eurobarometer 248 (2008), according to which Estonian parents tend to be much less concerned about the online activities of their children compared to parents from other European countries, provides scientific justification for the scepticism of teachers. Although the scepticism of teachers was justified, their opinions also illustrated their own overall lack of enthusiasm and hesitation about incorporating digital technologies in their daily teaching practices.

Furthermore, despite the fact that the teachers perceived parents to be quite helpless and careless in mediating their child’s media consumption and computer use, the parents’ role was considered to be far more significant compared to their own role as children’s supervisors and mentors. Hence, it can be stated that the opinions of the teachers in our sample echoed the results of Flores-Koulish (2005), who noted that pre-school teachers “emphasized parents’ responsibility so passionately that it would follow that they feel media literacy in schools should be irrelevant” (p. 24). On the one hand, as daily home computer use is routine for many children (Findahl, 2009), such strong expectations regarding the parental mediational role were justified. Furthermore, when stressing parental responsibilities, the teachers might have been referring to a principle in Estonian pre-school education which emphasizes the importance of co-operation between the pre-school and home (Koolieelse lasteasutuse riiklik õppekava, 2008). On the other hand, in minimizing their own role, pre-

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school teachers may have (un)consciously tried to justify the general neglect of new media education in Estonian pre-schools. Compared to a number of countries, e.g. Finland, Australia, United States, etc., which conduct special media education training programs for pre-school teachers, meaningful and systematic media education does not exist in Estonian pre-schools. Hence, supervising strategies that are seen as adults’ views and practices in guiding media consumption and media literacy development are not fully acknowledged by Estonian teachers. However, Yelland (2005), in her overview of previous research on the use of computers in early childhood education, concludes that “the role of the teacher in the learning process is critical” (p. 224). Hence, we considered it to be crucial to find out what roles the teachers in our sample actually perceived as their tasks.

Compared to Labbo (2000), who suggested that in order to shape children’s digital

literacy skills pre-school teachers should start to fulfil the roles of models, mentors and managers the teachers in our sample considered the teacher’s role to have two main functions - supervisors for the children and mentors for the parents. As the former task can be associated with the overall role of adults, the teachers may have emphasized the latter role because of the peculiarities in Estonian pre-schools: according to the relevant law, the preschool teacher has the obligation to support and counsel the family (Koolieelse lasteasutuse riiklik õppekava, 2008). In other words, the Pre-school Child Care Institutions Act (1999) suggests that both home and pre-school should share responsibility in supporting the growth and development of the child. In order to guarantee the two-way flow of communication between the pre-school and home, development conversations with parents are carried out regularly. Hence, the legislative language might also have had an impact on our results. As with the findings of Floures-Koluish (2005), teachers in our sample also regarded preventive and informative work, for instance about dangers found on the Internet, to be part of media education and thereby part of their role.

Still, considering the fact that media literacy is understood as the ability to use, analyze, create and impart the media message in different forms and contexts (Livingstone, 2003; Buckingham, Banaji, Carr, Cranmer, &Willett, 2005) and, hence, media education in pre-school should actually include a variety of tasks, for example, interpreting media messages with children, do-it-yourself tasks, expressing oneself through the means of media, and learning about technical means (Mediakasvatus varhaiskasvatuksessa, 2008), the teachers in our sample at first described only one narrow facet of media education. Although some of them had made use of ICTs in their teaching, the focus group interviews indicated that the teachers in our sample mainly made use of the “content delivery approach”, that is, they

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“refer to specific media `texts` as a strategy for conveying subject matter, information, illustration and idea” (Hobbs, 1997, p. 13). Hence, it can be claimed that teachers generally used technology as a “benign addition” (Cuban, 2001, p. 67) which did not help to shape either media literacy or the digital competence of the child.

Our findings clearly point out the need to include media education in pre-school teacher training courses. Pre-school teachers in our sample were not only hesitant about their own computer skills and related knowledge, but their answers also demonstrated a relative lack of awareness of the importance of media literacy and digital literacy skills in general.

Even though various programs (e.g. Tiger Leap) have been instituted to establish Internet connection in every elementary school, high school and university in Estonia, as well as to develop the technology skills of the teachers in these institutions (Partners in Learning Progress, 2007), these initiatives have not yet focused on pre-school settings. Thus, the relative lack of ICT in Estonian pre-schools and the uneven computer knowledge of teachers may have been the reasons why the teachers were not accustomed to and were hesitant about making use of the few technologies their classrooms offered. Special pre-school teacher training courses which focus on making use of ICTs to fulfill communicative and creative tasks in the classroom, which started in June 2010 (Koolitus Lasteaedade õpetajatele, 2010), will hopefully help to improve both the skills and the self-confidence of teachers.

Considering these new courses, a follow-up study should be carried out in a few years to see if and how pre-school teacher perceptions have changed. In addition, future research should also consider examining in greater detail the expectations parents have about the role of teachers in shaping the media literacy of the child.

Finally, there are two notable limitations to this research. The focus-group method allowed us to study the self-reported perceptions of teachers, but we were unable to evaluate the actual practices of teachers and the actual use of new technologies by young children.

Hence, we acknowledge that the discourse provided by the teachers might not match the lived experience. Furthermore, our relatively small and homogeneous sample did not allow us to differentiate between teachers based on their socio-demographic background. In addition, although we acknowledge that neither children nor parents should be seen as homogeneous, no socio-demographic information was provided by the teachers to make the distinctions between these groups.

Despite these limitations, the study has contributed to the existing research by combining the pre-school teachers’ perceptions regarding aspects influencing young children’s computer and Internet use with their reflections on the teacher’s role in shaping the

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media literacy of children. This study on teachers’ perceptions is also important in that it has been suggested that teachers’ perceptions also guide their classroom practices (Hollins. 1999, p. 12-13). The grounded theory approach has helped us to capture the points in the interviews where the participants started to negotiate and focus on the meaning and content of the terms they were asked to elaborate upon, thus creating new visions and understandings of their own role in shaping the media literacy of children. The approach also helped to highlight the importance of the teachers' perception change when discussing their own role in educating children about the possible uses of new media, as well as broadening their own pedagogical perspectives.

Conclusion This study has provided the first overview of teacher perceptions regarding young children’s Internet use and media education in Estonian pre-schools. Pre-school teachers’ experiences and opinions of factors that influence pre-school children’s computer and Internet use, as well as their role in shaping children’s media literacy, were examined.

The focus-group interviews with pre-school teachers indicated that teachers considered the role of the family in children’s computer use to be more significant than their own role. According to the perceptions of teachers, different processes in family dynamics (e.g. the impact of older siblings, and the personal example set by parents) and family values (e.g. using the computer as a motivator, as a reward or a means of babysitting, the ignorance and helplessness of parents, and parents' admiration of the child’s computer skills) tended to increase children’s use of the computer and the Internet.

The teachers considered the mediational role of parents to be most influential in terms of media literacy development, as they not only regulate children's time on the computer and suitable media content, but also interpret and explain these media messages. However, the importance of their own role in shaping the media literacy of children was acknowledged only as the interviews progressed. The teachers became aware of two roles they should start to fulfill: the teacher as children’s supervisor and the teacher as parents’ mentor. The latter role includes a variety of tasks, for example, suggesting educational and age appropriate computer games, web pages or informative reading materials to parents, educating parents about suitable time limits or about the possible media impact on the child, and suggesting similar rules and requirements in both the pre-school and at home. Preventive and informative work was also seen as part of media education.

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Although teachers agreed to share responsibility in supervising children’s computer and Internet use with families and parents, no curriculum-based media literacy shaping was being done in the classrooms. Rather than developing children’s awareness of the media, teachers had been making use of technical resources and various media content as “enrichment”, in order to support and illustrate other subjects, e.g. language or natural science activities. However, significantly fewer activities that would actually help to shape children’s media literacy were mentioned by the teachers. Nevertheless, even though the teachers started by describing only one narrow facet of media education; they later acknowledged the need to move beyond the idea of using media as “enrichment” into discussing, analyzing and interpreting media messages with children. Thus, by the end of the focus-group interviews, the teachers were able to distinguish three aspects of media education: making use of technical equipment (but not teaching how to use it), introducing and analyzing media content, and doing preventive or informative work.

Acknowledgements The preparation of this article was supported by the research grants ESF Program EDUKO sub-project No. 30.2-10.2/1276 and No. 6968 by Estonian Science Foundation. Andra Siibak is also thankful for the support of the target financed projects No. 0180017s07 and No. 0180002s7.

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33(1), 37-44.

Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe: Advergames in the UK and Hungary

By Arhlene A. Flowers Department of Strategic Communication, Ithaca College, USA Katalin Lustyik Department of Television-Radio, Ithaca College, USA Emese GulyĂĄs Association of Conscious Consumers, Hungary

Abstract Unhealthy foods and drinks are among the top products advertised to young children.

Considering the growing childhood obesity epidemic and the soaring number of children accessing the Internet, even online junk food advertising has come under increasing scrutiny. Many countries are in the process of expanding and revising existing regulation to account for the realities of the digital age and to respond to health and other social concerns. This paper focuses on two European countries in particular to examine and compare these processes through the lens of junk food advergames aimed at children.

Our questions are: 1) Given the differences in the media landscapes of the UK and Hungary, what types of junk food advergames target children?; and 2) In light of the growing childhood obesity problem faced by both nations, how have government bodies, advocacy groups, and advertisers approached junk food advertising targeting children in general and online advertising including advergames in particular? The United Kingdom represents a country with the highest Internet usage by children and the most developed online advertising market in Europe, while Hungary, a post-communist country, represents an emerging media market where young people have less access to the Internet and buying power but constitute a crucial â&#x20AC;&#x153;entry pointâ&#x20AC;? for food advertisers.

Keywords: Advergames, junk food advertising, promotion to children, advertising regulations, Internet, United Kingdom, Hungary, childhood obesity This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 4

Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe: Advergames in the UK and Hungary "Globesity," a new term on the global obesity epidemic, aptly expresses the worldwide population explosion of overweight and obese adults and children facing diet-related health consequences (World Health Organization [WHO], 2006a). According to the WHO (2010), more than 1 billion adults worldwide are overweight, thus posing a serious global health problem (WHO, 2004). Many countries are holding the mediaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;especially television and the Internetâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;accountable for the rise of childhood obesity since they assume a central presence in the lives of children. Mass-produced, unhealthy foods and beverages have consistently been among the top products advertised to children. The "big five" product groups promoted include pre-sugared breakfast cereals, soft drinks, confectionary and savory snacks, and fastfood outlets (e.g. Hastings et al., 2006, p. 2). Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and other leading manufacturers of unhealthy food, soft drinks, and sweets spent almost $13 billion on advertising worldwide in 2006 (Consumers International [CI], 2008a), excluding undisclosed expenditures on cartoon characters, celebrity tie-ins, and new forms of marketing often targeting young people in particular. The advertised diet contrasts sharply with nutritional recommendations by public health advisers (Hastings et al., 2006, p. 1). For every $1 the World Health Organization allocates for nutrition education, the fast food industry spends $500 (CI, 2008b).

As the number of young Internet users grows and traditional forms of advertising are increasingly under scrutiny, food advertisers and manufacturers have diverted a growing percentage of their promotional budget from television to nontraditional media employing creative new forms of marketing communication via the Internet that represents a less strictly regulated and potentially more interactive environment (Hastings et al., 2006; Hawkes, 2002; Lee, Choi, Quillam, & Cole, 2009; Moore, 2006).

Advergames are part of dynamic,

multifaceted, and entertainment-branded Web zones offered by all the leading manufacturers of unhealthy food and drink products.

Advergames represent a form of "branded

entertainment" and of "immersive advertising" that feature "advertising messages, logos, and trade characters in a game format" and "can be tailored to the needs and capabilities of different target markets" and age groups (Mallinckrodt & Mizerski 2007, pp. 87-88). These free games vary from short and simple games, such as puzzles, to longer and more complex games that can be played in a number of languages with multiple players. All of them are

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 5

presented as entertainment and by "evoking feelings of telepresence, a perception of being present in the gaming environment," children and young people are likely to form positive attitudes toward these brands (Lee et al., 2009, p. 134). In many countries, electronic games have become an integrated part of children’s recreational lives, and advergames can simultaneously provide “a playful activity as well as a branding experience” (Yuon & Lee, 2005, p. 322).

According to the International Obesity Taskforce, junk food promotion, whether in the form of television commercials or advergames, will "inevitably undermine the efforts of parents and governments to promote healthy eating" and runs contrary to the objectives of the WHO’s "Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health” (2004) endorsed by 192 countries (International Obesity Taskforce, 2007). The conceptualization of the child as uniquely vulnerable to media exploitation has traditionally justified some level of regulation of advertising in many parts of the world, ranging from the restriction or prohibition of tobacco and alcohol advertising to unhealthy food products, especially on television.

Government bodies, self-regulatory regimes, consumer advocacy groups, and health organizations are in the process of expanding and revising existing regulation to account for the realities of the digital age and to respond to health and other social concerns. This paper will focus on two European countries in particular to examine and compare these processes through the lens of junk food advergames aimed at children. The United Kingdom was selected to represent a Western European country, which recently passed strict regulations of junk food advertising, and has the highest obesity rates among children in Europe. The UK also has the most developed traditional and online advertising market with one of the highest Internet usages by children in Europe, with almost all 5- to 16-year-old UK children having a personal computer or laptop at home and more than 50% owning their own computer (Childwise, 2009). Post-communist Hungary represents a nation with a media landscape in transition

(Curran & Park, 2000), where media advertising targeting children is less

regulated and Internet use among young children is less prominent. While less data are available on the extent and nature of food promotion in developing countries and emerging economies, such as Hungary, studies show that children are effectively targeted and in similar fashion to those in developed countries. Importantly, children are often regarded as a “key entry point” for food advertisers because they are more flexible and responsive than adults, and associate "Western" brands with "desirable attributes of life" (WHO, 2006b).

Our

research focuses on two main issues: 1) Given the differences in the media landscapes of the UK and Hungary, what types of junk food advergames target children in these two

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 6

countries?; and 2) In light of the growing childhood obesity problem faced by both nations, how have government bodies, advocacy groups, and advertisers approached junk food advertising targeting children in general and online advertising including advergames in particular?

Methodology European children born in the 21st century are often described as being part of the digital generation who use the Internet “to explore, create, learn, share, network and even subvert” (Livingstone, 2009, p. 45). By 2008, 75% of children between ages 6 and 17 growing up in the European Union (EU27) use the Internet, and the number of online users is continuously rising among preschoolers and preteens (Eurobarometer, 2008). The online opportunities include access to educational resources, games, entertainment, and social networking, while the risks are offensive and illegal content, cyber-bullying, or advertising.

The increasing amount of time children spend in front of electronic screens in virtual playgrounds making fantasy Cadbury chocolates and personalizing their M&M candies has only elevated such concerns over the last decade in countries such as the United Kingdom.

Internet use among children in the UK is among the highest in Europe and growing rapidly. More than 98% of children between 9 and 19 have Internet access at home, often in their own bedrooms, on their mobile phones or somewhere, raising concerns for parents unable to exercise supervision (Livingstone & Bober, 2004). With some spending more than three hours a day online, screen time has become "pervasive" in the young people who “are now skilled managers of their free time, juggling technology to fit in on average six hours of TV, playing games and surfing the net" (Curtis, 2009, p. 8).

Similarly to other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, media consumption habits of Hungarian youth have changed dramatically due to accelerated Internet penetration during the last decade. Although Internet use still lags behind in comparison to Western European countries, in 2009, every second Hungarian household had Internet access, half of them with broadband connection (Eurostat, 2010a; 2010b). While the most popular free-time activity is watching television, more than two hours a day among the ages of 8 to 14, every fifth child under the age of 15 uses the Internet on a daily basis often to play and download games, images, films, or music (Eurostat, 2009c; 2009d). The most popular cyber destinations include informational, community-based and entertainment sites with 60% of online users playing games (Szonda Ipsos, 2008; Szabó & Bauer, 2009). Today children find computers,

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 7

video games, and the Internet just as interesting as animals, plants, nature, and sports (Szonda Ipsos, 2008).

Advergames in the UK and Hungary A dramatic increase in Internet use and recent or future restrictions in TV advertising targeting children in Europe have led advertisers to devote a growing percentage of their budget to the Internet. In the UK, advertisers allocate close to 20% of their budgets to the Internet, the highest of any other country (Office of Communication [Ofcom], 2007). Online advertising has grown considerably in the Hungary as well, constituting close to 24% of total advertising expenditure in 2009. The Internet became the third preferred medium after television (65%) and print media (50%) (MRSZ, 2010).

Given the aims of our study, we set out to examine advergame sites created by some of the world's leading junk food producers, such as Burger King, McDonald's, Cadbury, Nestlé, Kellogg's, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi (see Tables 1 and 2) in the UK and Hungary. We wanted to find out what types of games are offered to British children who have more spending money and access to play on the Internet and to Hungarian children who constitute a much smaller and less lucrative market.

We identified and played the advergames

associated with key junk food brands in each nation that target children with a methodology adapted from Consumers International's study (2009) on assessing the qualities and marketing tactics of junk food advergames. We examined the content for the following criteria: accessibility for children to play the games (age and membership requirements, registration, and disclaimers on terms of use and parental permission); brand immersion and identification (logos, colors, and integration of products in games); and promotional incentives and interactive brand extensions (discounts, competitions, screensavers, and other features). The research that involved a total of 27 advergames took place between April and May 2009 and March 2010.

Unlike Internet banners or traditional ads, many advergames are part of dynamic, multifaceted, and entertainment-branded Web zones. The two major soft drink companies in the UK feature interactive "zones" with advergames. The Coke Zone showcases games, along with sports, music, entertainment, a blog, registration for free points, and links to products. Because of the graphic nature of many of the games, the limited wording easily allows multi-language versions. Coke’s "Happiness Factory,” (see Figure 1) is a multi-lingual advergame in 20 languages, including UK and US English, Hungarian, and other European

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 8

languages, set in a fantasy world inside a Coke vending machine as a spin-off of the brand’s commercials in which the characters are factory workers, featuring Coke bottles in almost every scene where users have to grab the bottles to "refresh their lives" in five different versions of games incorporating the product. "Coca-Cola Bubble Popper" caters to younger children with a simpler advergame to pop virtual bubbles for points while dodging straws, ice cubes, and slices of lemon and lime.

Figure 1. Coke’s Happiness Factory transnational advergame.

The Pepsi Max site highlights unlimited free music downloads, sports and concert ticket giveaways, and links to Pepsi-branded and non-branded games, movies, and other entertaining sites. The "Your Experience" tab showcases two games geared to audiences 16 and older, which younger children could still play without registering. A simulated cricket game called "Pepsi Max Hit” enables players to register to win real soccer tickets. "Pepsi Max Kicks" must be uploaded from a mobile phone by photographing a QR Code (quick recognition code with content that can be read by mobile phone cameras) to access games and other interactive components.

Advergames also promote cereals, sweets, and fast food products in an environment where children are encouraged to virtually play with the products as part of the game. "The Chocolate Machine" (see Figure 2) requires players to create Cadbury candy bars in a production line within an allotted time limit by pushing buttons as fast as they can to fill and then stop the machine when the production reaches a certain number. The "Your Country Needs Goo!" game lets players win prizes by helping the missing Cadbury Creme Eggs "fulfill their gooey destination," along with other interactive enticements—iPhone "Splatplications,” "Egg-mented Reality" cards (augmented reality application requiring a

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 9

webcam to see the products come to life on one’s computer screen), and downloads for "The Great Eggscape” game and a mobile phone game. Nestlé's "Shreddies’ Knitted by Nana" brings the commercials alive, where an army of grandmothers (nanas) knit the breakfast cereal in a series of games set in an old-fashioned, virtual Shreddies’ factory. To play Nestlé's Smarties advergame, users answer trivia questions and stack up all seven candy colors.

Figure 2. UK Cadbury’s Chocolate Machine advergame.

Hungarian corporate websites of snacks, fast food restaurants, and soft drink beverages, such as Pepsi, Nestlé, McDonald’s, Douwe Egberts, and Chio, include advergames, which range from simple puzzles to complex multi-player games. Pepsi’s "Csocsó bajnokság 2008," accessible directly from the main corporate website, offered an online table football game for multiple players launched on the occasion of the 2008 European Football Cup.

The advergame promoting Nesquik cocoa powders is Quicky

Rabbit’s homepage (see Figure 3) where most games are embedded into stories about the bunny’s adventures. Although McDonald’s corporate logo is placed discreetly on the bottom of the pages, the site’s name, Ronald Klub, clearly connects the games with the brand and the players win Happy Meal menu toys. The site for caffeine-free Douwe Egberts Kid coffee offers games that teach children how to prepare the "3 in 1 drink," where players have to move cups, spoons, and the product to mix them.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 10

Figure 3. Hungarian Nesquik advergame.

The examined Hungarian sites mix promotional and interactive features as well. All sites use promotional tie-ins, at least links to main corporate sites or to other brands. Nestlé and McDonald’s offer opportunities for e-newsletter subscriptions, advertisements, and other entertaining programs are downloadable from the Cheetos, Nesquik, and Douwe Egberts Web sites. Promotional campaigns are accessible through all webpages, except Pepsi’s.

Each brand is clearly identified through its colors, logos, and cartoon figures. Approaches to handling privacy issues differ greatly: on the Ronald Klub advergame, users are asked several times to consult their parents in order to understand the content, especially when registering for prizes. According to their disclaimers, Nestlé and McDonald’s do not collect data directly from children under the age of 14. On these sites and also on the site of Douwe Egberts, some features are accessible only after registration. A feedback opportunity is only provided on the Douwe Egberts’ site and on the “parents only” section of the cheetos.hu, where more information is published on product safety as well.

The games in both the UK and Hungary share more similarities than differences in terms of accessibility, restrictions, and brand immersion. Children of any age can play the games without registering or encountering any age restrictions or parental permission requirements (see Table 1). None of the games required membership; registration was only required to collect prizes or receive other incentives, with only a few stating age restrictions and requiring parental permission. The handling of privacy issues vary from site to site.

Disclaimers are provided on most of the sites; privacy issues and in one case also “cookies” are explained or children are warned to protect their personal data. Notably however, with few exceptions, the language is geared to an adult audience with legal disclaimers on terms of

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 11

use. Of the advergames studied, only Cadbury's games contain clear links to nutritional information.

Advergame

Member

Registration

Disclaimers

-ship Burger King, SK8 (UK)

None

None

None

Cadbury Chocolate Machine (UK)

None

For prizes

Legal, nutrition

Cadbury Crème Egg: Your

None

For prizes

Terms, privacy,

Country Needs Goo! (UK) Chio/Intersnack Pombär (HU)

nutrition None

None

Personal data not collected

Coca-Cola Bubble Popper (UK)

None

"Coke Zone Points" for

Terms and privacy

consumers 12 + Coca-Cola Happiness Factory

None

For some features

Terms and privacy

None

With parental

Legal

(UK, HU) Douwe Egberts As the Grown Ups (Mint a nagyok) (HU)

permission for some features and promotions

Kellogg’s Wake Up to Breakfast:

None

Brain Games (UK) Kellogg’s Zookeeper (UK)

None

For competition, 16+ or

Privacy, legal, note

parental permission

to parents

For competition

Privacy, legal, note to parents

McDonald's Endangered Animals

None

(UK) Nestlé Milkybar (UK)

None

Request first name and

Terms, cookies,

country for "passport"

privacy

None (language directed

Privacy

to parents) Nestlé Smarties: How Smart Are

None

For competition, 18+

Privacy

None

None

Terms

McDonald’s Ronald Club (HU)

None

For some features

Legal

Pepsi Max Hit (UK)

None

For contest, 16+

Terms and privacy

Pepsi Pinball (UK)

None

None

Privacy

You? (UK) Nestlé Shreddies: Knitted by Nana (UK)

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 12

Pepsi Table football championship

None

None

Legal

None

None

None

2008 (HU) Pepsi Chester Space Base (HU)

Table 1. Accessibility and disclaimers of examined advergames.

The examined advergames in both countries creatively blend brand and product values and entertainment features, offering fun, engaging virtual playgrounds for children of all ages in immersive environments, as outlined in Table 2. Even in cases when the branding is minimal, each site clearly identifies the company or its products. In many cases, the products are incorporated as prominent elements of the game. All sites use brand identities, such as colors, brand characters or cartoon figures, or logos more or less intensively, and many games incorporate product integration. Most sites contain promotional tie-ins, such as links to main corporate sites or to other product lines, and many offer opportunities for enewsletter subscriptions and social media connections to extend the brand experience.

Advergame

Brand Immersion, Game

Promotions, Interactive

Features

Brand Extensions

Burger King, SK8 (UK) Minimal brand identity, cartoon

No promotions (micro site)

boy and girl skater unrelated to brand Cadbury Chocolate

Intensive branding colors, logo,

Competitions for cinema

Machine (UK)

product imagery, candy bars and

tickets and candy, recipes,

production line worker in game

party ideas, other games, social media links

Cadbury Crème Egg:

Intensive corporate and product

Prizes, iPhone apps,

Your Country Needs

logos and colors, Crème Egg

augmented reality card,

Goo! (UK)

products in game

facebook, mobile game

Chio/Intersnack

Brand colors and brand bear’s face

Promotions, link to sub-site

Pombär (HU)

on all sub-pages, except on “How

introducing Pombär product

healthy is the Pom Bär?" page,

group

brand figure in each game Coca-Cola Bubble

Intensive logo and brand colors,

Discounts, tie-ins,

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 13

Popper (UK)

soft drink bubbles in game

screensavers, rewards, links to other games

Coca-Cola Happiness

Intensive logo, brand colors, bottle

Multiple downloads, music,

Factory (UK, HU)

images, five game versions of TV

tie-ins

ads with cartoon factory workers and product interaction Douwe Egberts As the

Subtle brand colors, tiger (main

Downloadable TV spots,

Grown Ups (Mint a

brand element), children play

promotional campaign

nagyok) (HU)

“making coffee”

Kellogg’s Wake Up to

Intensive logo and brand colors,

Trip competition

Breakfast: Brain Games breakfast-themed content with (UK)

puzzles

Kellogg’s Zookeeper

Prominent brand logo and colors,

Downloadable certificates

(UK)

animal videos and multiple choice

with product logo

questions McDonald's

Logo discreetly placed on

Downloadable certificates,

Endangered Animals

certificate, prominent yellow arch,

win "a day as an animal

(UK)

lessons to earn certificates

ranger" competition

McDonald’s Ronald

Discreet corporate logo, Ronald

Promotional campaign and e-

Club (HU)

McDonald used intensively, brand

newsletter

figure plays several games Nestlé Milkybar (UK)

Prominent logo and brand colors,

Competitions, downloads, tie-

cartoon images, identification of

ins

sounds of animals Nestlé Smarties: How

Subtle Nestlé logo, trivia game to

Smart Are You? (UK)

collect all Smarties as prizes

Nestlé Shreddies:

Intensive brand logo, colors,

Knitted by Nana (UK)

product shots, four games with

Competitions, multiple tie-ins Multiple tie-ins, commercials

cartoon nanas of characters in TV ads and product integration Pepsi Max Hit (UK)

Logo, brand colors, product image, Prize tickets for cricket cricket game simulation

tournament, link to Pepsi Max Kicks with QR code for

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 14

games Pepsi Pinball (UK)

Intensive logo placements, brand

Multiple tie-ins,

colors, traditional pinball game

downloadable game

Pepsi Table football

Intensive logos and brand colors,

Links to Pepsi products,

championship 2008

table football

corporate site, and other

(HU)

brands

Pepsi Chester Space

Brand name, Chester tiger, brand

Promotions, endorsements,

Base (HU)

figure plays in a spacecraft

multiple downloads

Table 2. Brand immersion and extensions of examined advergames.

The most noteworthy differences were the application of newer technology, use of branded cartoon characters, and educational value. Many of the UK advergames incorporate mobile phone and iPod applications, QR codes or augmented reality innovations while the Hungarian advergames do not yet. This is not surprising since the UK is a more affluent market, with more British children owning MP3 players and smart phones than Hungarian children. The UK games also provide more educational content, brain-teaser puzzles, and social-awareness content.

For example, McDonald’s advergame in the UK centers on

endangered species (see Figure 4), whereas the Hungarian advergame showcases the Ronald McDonald character (see Figure 5). Only the Hungarian advergames feature branded animal cartoon characters; the UK advergames may avoid branded cartoon characters due to the country's television advertising ban on the use of licensed characters to promote foods high in fat, sugar, and salt that target pre-school or primary school children (Ofcom, 2007).

Figure 4. McDonald’s “Become an Animal Ranger” advergame in the UK.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 15

Figure 5. Hungarian McDonald’s advergame.

While both British and Hungarian children build castles made out of branded candies or chips in cyberspace, often unsupervised, their parents, according to a recent Europeanwide survey, indicated some concerns about the impact of advertising on childhood obesity.

Thirteen percent of Hungarians and 21% in the UK thought that advertisements influence most of what children consume, while others stressed the influence of parents and guardians (Eurobarometer, 2006). Twenty-five percent of Hungarians preferred stricter regulation of junk food ads in comparison to 20% of the UK citizens (Eurobarometer, 2006).

The extensive academic literature available on the effects of food advertising on children has demonstrated that such promotional activity can influence children’s nutritional knowledge,

food

preferences,

diet-related

behaviors,

purchasing-related

behavior,

consumption, and diet and health status (e.g. Livingstone, 2004; Hastings et al., 2006).

Survey evidence also shows that children in both developed and developing countries have extensive recall of food advertising, and enjoy watching them for entertainment (e.g.

Hastings et al., 2006; CI, 2008b; WHO, 2006b). According to the comprehensive study conducted by the Institute of Medicine in 2006, “marketing strongly influences children's food preferences, requests, and consumption. The idea that some forms of marketing increase the risk of obesity, ‘cannot be rejected’" (Handsley, Mehta, Coveney, & Nehmy, 2009).

Regulatory Environment and NGO Actions

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 16

To respond to public and academic pressure in Europe, the UK’s Office of Communication (Ofcom), the independent regulator and competition authority in broadcasting, telecommunications, and wireless communications industries (Ofcom, 2007), introduced progressive advertising restrictions from 2007 to 2009 on food and non-alcoholic drinks containing high fat, salt, or sugar (HFSS), based on the nutrient-profiling scheme defined by the Food Standards Agency. According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the UK’s current media restrictions "are amongst the toughest in the world" and "just one part of a broader set of actions government is taking to support the public health agenda" (BBC, 2008).

The immediate future of the recent television advertising bans and debate on new nonbroadcast restrictions of junk food marketing to children in the UK is closely watched by other European countries, including Hungary, where the promotion of unhealthy food to children is currently an unregulated terrain. Advertisements are only prohibited if they can damage children’s physical or mental development, build on their inexperience and gullibility, or urge children to incite adults to buy products or services (2008 XLVIII).

Advertising restrictions of certain product categories pertain only to alcoholic and tobacco products. The same regulation prohibits advertising in institutions that provide basic and specialized child-protection services, kindergartens, elementary schools, and dormitories housing elementary school children. Fast food or beverage companies can, however, enter these educational institutions if their messages are related to health, environmental protection, or to culture (see Nestlé’s Nutrikid program discussed below).

The current main self-regulatory document, "The Code for Advertisement Ethics," approved by the two main industrial alliances, the Hungarian Advertising Self Regulatory Board and the Hungarian Advertising Association, advocates not to use cartoon characters that are strongly tied to children’s emotions or imagination for promotional purposes that may blur the line between commercial and editorial content. Our data show that this recommendation is disregarded by many Hungarian advergames, as many of the sites use cartoon figures, and more importantly they initiate “virtual friendships” with their audience.

The Code also states that while stimulating the imagination of children is acceptable, advertisers should avoid using misleading information on the nutritional value of the products promoted (MRSZ, 2009).

Due to the lack of statutory restrictions and weak self-regulations, Hungarian nongovernment organizations (NGO), inspired by the initiatives of the British Heart Foundation, have called for stricter advertising regulations during the last five years. The Hungarian

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 17

National Heart Foundation along with seven other NGOs, including the Network for Healthy Kindergartens, the National Association for Consumer Protection in Hungary, the National Diabetes Foundation, and the National Institute for the Child, launched a campaign in 2006 to ban junk food advertisements on television between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. (MNSZA, 2006). Their proposal was supported neither by advertisers nor media regulators.

For the UK, however, the latest battlefield is cyberspace, including advergames, which by some have been described as branded toxic cyber-playgrounds. As the chief executive of the UK governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s "new super-watchdog," Consumer Focus, stated: "The idea that marketing should be free from rules simply because it takes place on the Internet is well past its sell-by date" (Wallop, 2008). In the UK, Internet advertising regulation is overseen by the non-broadcast division of the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP, 2009), comprising primarily advertising companies and advertising industry groups.

A

loophole in the code of conduct classifies editorial content as exempt, which applies to branded Web sites and their games and promotions (Taylor, 2008).

The public and

government debate will likely intensify in non-broadcast marketing. "It is ridiculous that U.K. law protects children up to the age of 16 from junk food advertising during children's television programmes, yet marketers have a free-for-all when it comes to other media, such as the Internet and text messaging," summarized the Children's Food Campaign coordinator of the current situation (Charles, 2009).

Concurrently, the discussion about applying

restrictions to content on branded Web sites also raises "fears about censorship and freedom of speech" of editorial content (Benaday, 2007).

In Hungary, after failed attempts to regulate junk food advertising on television, national consumer and environmental NGOs for sustainable consumption (including the Association of Conscious Consumers, the Hungarian Environmental Partnership Foundation, and Waste Prevention Alliance) set up a national taskforce in 2007. They launched a series of meetings with the participation of policy makers, broadcasters, representatives of the advertising industry, and health and consumer NGOs. The taskforce prepared the policy background material with psychological arguments and legislative case studies from other countries and proposed a limit on all commercial promotion to children under age 12 that would include the Internet and thus advergames as well (TVE 2008; personal communication, TVE, 2009).

While their proposal is currently being debated, another

proposal put forward to the Hungarian Advertising Self Regulatory Board and the Hungarian Advertising Association that called for public contribution to the revision of the "The Code

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 18

for Advertisement Ethics" was rejected (MNSZA, 2010 and personal communication, TVE, 2010).

Especially in the case of the Internet, self-regulation has been preferred to statutory regulation by many of the parties involved in the debates. Some argue that self-regulation offers "a number of advantages that are difficult to reproduce at the government level, foremost of which is the ability to draw on the expertise of the very industries that are most directly involved in the production of hybridized media forms (such as advergames)" (Grimes, 2008, p. 177).

Both European governments included in our research seem

"increasingly reluctant” to regulate the media, particularly new media (Buckingham, 2007, p.

21).

Projects, however, that focus on "consumer literacy" have been supported by

government agencies as well as industry players in both Hungary and the UK. The idea behind consumer literacy programs is to turn children into "competent consumers who are perfectly capable of making up their own minds about what they should buy" (Buckingham, 2007, p. 21). Thus rather than regulating junk food advergames, digital natives should learn skills to understand them.

The Europe-wide non-profit “Media Smart” program, in which both the UK and Hungary participate, is designed with the goal to "teach children to think critically about advertising in the context of their daily lives" and to use "modern media, including advertising content constructively" (Media Smart, 2008; Mediatudor, 2008). Consumer literacy projects, as Buckingham (2007) and others (e.g. Kline, 2009) argue, can "effectively make[s] individuals responsible for things that are not necessarily within their control—and which in practice they may not be willing or able to take responsibility for" (p. 22). While the Media Smart program, supported by national governments and the European Union, might teach children about junk food advergames, its funding comes from advertisers that could present a conflict of interest.

An even more controversial project is Hungary’s national Nutrikid program launched in 2002 by Nestlé to introduce the principles of healthy eating in elementary schools across the nation. Since Nestlé sponsors the campaign and its logo appears on all the educational materials, it successfully circumvents the ban on advertising in schools (Nutrikid, 2009).

NGOs can play a significant role in bringing attention to the consequences of health issues impacting children and educating families about advertising tactics utilizing the Internet. A study by the British Heart Foundation revealed that 73% of children "were unaware that a shortened life was the worst consequence of eating badly" (BHF, 2008). The results prompted the BHF to launch a Food4Thought campaign that showcases an online

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 19

game for children, Yoobot (http://www.yoobot.co.uk; see Figure 6), using a similar creative strategy employed by food manufacturers with advergames. Children design their own Yoobot, an avatar, to learn about the consequences for health by making decisions about its food consumption, exercise, and lifestyle. A sharp contrast to our experiences with corporate advergames, we discovered that this was the only game that required parental permission in order to play. Educational games for children created by NGOs are hoped to counterbalance the commercial games by junk food manufacturers.

Figure 6. Yoobot, British Heart Foundationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s online game.

Conclusion As the Internet, social media, and smart phones continue to evolve, advertisers will remain committed to communicating with children in cost-effective, engaging digital playgrounds. Children's bedrooms in the UK are becoming private "multi-media centers," equipped with a laptop with Internet access, mobile phone, television and other electronic devices, such as MP3 player and digital camera. Children, ages 8 to 11, average four media devices in their bedrooms, and those ages 12 to 15 own six (Ofcom, 2008). While Hungarian teen bedrooms do not resemble those in the UK, an increasing number of young people access the Internet and devote a growing amount of their free time to playing games. As our case studies indicated, when it comes to junk food advergames, Hungarian youth are approached by advertisers in rather similar fashion to those in the UK. While Hungarian

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 20

children do not have the same buying power or access to junk food advergames, they constitute a crucial “entry point” for food advertisers and manufacturers because they are more curious, flexible, and receptive than adults, and associate the "Western" brands such as McDonald’s, Nestlé, or Coca Cola with "desirable attributes of life" (WHO, 2006b).

In the UK, a £372-million cross-government strategy, published in January 2008, supports the promotion of healthier food choices, including pressure on Ofcom to report on the impact of its current restrictions and for the advertising industry to address advertiserowned Web sites, including advergames (Department of Health, 2008). The influence of British NGOs and government health organizations can serve as exportable factors to Hungary, where obesity prevention has not been among the priorities of the government.

While several national campaigns were launched between 1995 and 2007, most of them targeted adults (EUM, 2008). While the Hungarian government recognizes the importance of health communication in realizing its programs, its health communication is mainly targeted towards professionals (dietitians for example) or to a small target group. Most of the healthrelated communication campaigns promote screening and early recognition of cardiovascular diseases, breast cancer, or cervical cancer. Over the past few years, communication activities have not addressed a healthy lifestyle to curb the obesity problem and to reach a wider audience (Sz!ke, 2009).

Children are at the epicenter of the new digital marketing place, a highly lucrative target market of digital natives. The blurring of boundaries between commercial and noncommercial content raises significant challenges for children, parents, and educators. In today’s increasingly commercial and deregulated multi-media environment, one of the most contested issues in relation to children and the media still centers on young people’s susceptibility to potentially harmful media influences (e.g. Livingstone, 2007; 2009).

A major challenge is the transnational quality of the Internet. The Internet has no borders, even if advergames are banned in one country, children can access them from another, particularly from the US where a large proportion of Internet content originates from.

The World Health Organization, Consumers International, and the International

Obesity Taskforce have been advocating for a global initiative to address the promotion of junk food products to children. The Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue also has been seeking proactive cooperation between the EU and US governments to achieve better cooperation and harmonization of regulatory practices and codes.

Acknowledgements

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe 21

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Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

Penguin Life:

A Case Study of One Tweenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Experiences inside Club Penguin

By Diana Burley Department of Human and Organizational Learning, The George Washington University

Abstract Although we are increasingly aware of what young people do online and perhaps even why they do it, we are less clear about how particular affordances of an online environment enables identity formation. Accordingly, this case study sought to explore how one tweenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience in Club Penguin influenced the development of her social identity and community relationships. Reflecting on her experiences, we draw 3 tentative conclusions. First, because Club Penguin enables tweens to change typically static elements of their persona, the scope of generally accepted identifiers is broadened while the perceived boundaries between them is reduced. Second, the integration of virtual and physical spaces further complicates the social interactions that inform tween identity.

Third, whereas many adult participants in virtual worlds use their participation as an opportunity to deconstruct the various aspects of their personality (Suler, 2002), tweens may use the virtual environment as an integration space.

Keywords: tween, virtual world, Club Penguin, identity

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 4

Penguin Life:

A Case Study of One Tween’s Experiences inside Club Penguin

By Diana Burley Department of Human and Organizational Learning, The George Washington University Many of today’s tweens (preteens aged 9-14) are digital natives (Prensky, 2001) who have had knowledge of, if not access to, the Internet and associated technologies since birth.

They are as comfortable online as their parents and grandparents were offline. In fact, as a recent survey of digital media usage among tweens reported, this age group spends more time online than watching television, with 83% of tweens spending at least one hour per day online (DoubleClick Performics, 2008). Online activities include searching for information, playing games, watching videos, sending email, social networking and blogging.

Although some of their online activities occur through traditional (Web 1.0) websites, an increasing proportion of them seem to be occurring through participation in virtual or synthetic worlds. According to some estimates, the Internet is populated with nearly 200 virtual environments designed to engage children (kids, tweens and teens). Whether called Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), shared virtual environments (SVEs), or virtual or synthetic worlds, these graphical, three-dimensional, computergenerated environments are intended to accommodate the many individuals who participate in them as avatars. And although the avatars range from brightly colored penguins in Club Penguin to cartoon children in Whyville, children logon to share information and engage in social, competitive, and economic activities with other participants located around the globe (Castronova, 2005).

A key characteristic of these virtual environments is the penetrable boundary that allows individuals to move between their physical lives and the synthetic worlds while carrying their behavioral assumptions, attitudes, and relationships with them (Castronova, 2005). The blurry boundaries between the physical and synthetic spaces offer users a synergistic awareness of their co-existence with others inside and outside of the environment (Burley, Savion, Peterson, Loetrechiano, Keshavarz-Nia, 2010). No longer can we examine participation in one world without giving consideration to participation in the other - they are inextricably connected (Baym, 2009).

Given the large number of tweens engaging in online activities through these shared virtual environments, it is not surprising that their participation in virtual worlds is the subject of an emerging body of literature (e.g. Crowe & Bradford, 2006; Meyers, E., Fisher, K. & Marcous, E., 2006; Meyers, 2009; Valentine &Holloway, 2002). Studies of online tween behavior examine information seeking (e.g. Meyers et al., 2009), literacy (e.g. Meyers, 2009), and the development of social identity within the online community (e.g. Crowe & Bradford, 2006; Valentine & Holloway, 2002). Acknowledging the complexity of the phenomenon, Meyers (2009) proposes that tween behavior in these virtual environments be examined as contexts for four things: the shaping of their identity, or as a space where they can define a sense of self; the shaping of literacy, or their ability to communicate through a unique method of discourse that requires the integration of technical skill and the ability to convey appropriate ethos; the shaping of problem-solving capabilities, or their ability to work with others in individual and collective learning; and the shaping of community, or their involvement in online spaces as a socialization environment.

This case study builds upon this previous work by exploring how one tween’s participation in a virtual environment shapes, and is shaped by, the interplay of personal, behavioral, and environmental factors within and outside of the virtual environment. Using a

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 5

case study method (Yin, 2009), this research brief considers how the virtual environment shapes and informs the context of one young girl’s identity development and community relationship formation.

This article chronicles the experiences of the author’s tween daughter within Club Penguin. Following a brief introduction to the Club Penguin environment, the case study examines how her identity and social relationships are shaped by her experiences in Club Penguin. The article concludes by drawing inferences from her experiences within the community of Club Penguin, placing her practices within a broader conversation on how children’s participation in shared virtual environments shapes their opportunities for identity formation and negotiation.

Club Penguin Club Penguin is an online virtual community for children aged 6 to 14 in which users navigate the snow covered Club Penguin island using a brightly colored cartoon penguin avatar. Introduced to the public in late 2005, the Club Penguin community was estimated to have more than 12 million user accounts by late 2007. The Disney Corporation purchased the site that year, and by the end of 2009, Disney had significantly expanded the Club Penguin audience by launching French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions of the world.

To participate in Club Penguin, users must register and create a penguin avatar. Users may participate using free registrations or paid memberships at $5.95 per month. Membership is no small issue for the children who use Club Penguin. Although all penguins can participate in Club Penguin activities, free registrants face many constraints that impact their personal identity development and relationship formation. For instance, free registrants are limited to two puffles (fluffy, colorful penguin pets) whereas members can adopt up to18 puffles. Free registrants are unable to purchase costumes or wigs, leaving their penguins nude and hairless and visibly marked as different from the avatars of members, who can purchase an unlimited number of outfits. Non-members are also not afforded the opportunity to purchase specialty items like flags or dance floors for their igloos, leaving their homes quite small and undesirable.

When one enters Club Penguin, a penguin avatar appears in one of the 13 island locations. Users navigate their penguin avatars through the many locations on the snow covered island by clicking on the desired destination. The dock, beach, ski slope, ski village and town occupy the left side of the island. The plaza, cove, forest, and mine, along with user igloos, are located on the right side of the island. The fort and ice skating rink are in the center of the island and the dojo training palace is in the far back of the island. All of the locations have gathering places, a variety of activities, and games that allow users to win coins to purchase personal items. Members can win money or earn it by working in jobs like waiter in the pizza shop, and can then make purchases with that money.

Penguin avatars interact with other users via moderated, text-based chat that appears on the screen in a speech bubble above the penguin’s head. When spaces are crowded, bubbles are often hidden from view as chat bubbles get overlaid on top of each other until the penguins begin to disburse. Adult monitors who have passed the special agent test observe all activities and conversations. Day or night, the island is activity filled with penguins of all colors (red, blue, black, yellow, green, purple and orange) and dressed in a variety of different outfits, playing games, shopping for specialty items and socializing with groups of other penguins.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 6

Penguin Life Shaping her identity My introduction to penguin life started on June 8th, 2008 when, at the insistence of my then-8 year old daughter, I joined Club Penguin along with her. For several months I had listened to her discussing the world with her classmates at school, her cousins, and her brother. I had watched my daughter play games, earn coins, buy goods, decorate her igloo home, and make friends (platonic and love interests) on Club Penguin. Yes, love interests.

My 8 year old daughter, whose alter ego was created as a male penguin, has gained and lost more girlfriends than I can count. Romantic relationships on Club Penguin are fairly simple to establish and break. The heart emote along with a simple text message exchange connects you. Breakups are even easier as they usually are just a matter of no communication.

In Club Penguin, as in any virtual world, a participant can create the characteristics of his or her avatar. My daughter chose to be a boy because, as she put it, “I wanted to see what it would be like to be a boy.” Her interest in ‘being a boy’ was not unique. Indeed, many of her friends made similar cross gender avatar choices in Club Penguin. _______________ It’s 4pm and we have just arrived home from school. She is already logging onto Club Penguin and arrives in the plaza right in front of ‘The Stage’ - a theatre showing the latest Club Penguin feature. The plaza is filled with red, blue, green and even black penguins. Some are walking with their puffles. Many are wearing some sort of costume; a colorful wig, long ponytails with earmuffs, a polkadot dress with a baseball cap. My daughter immediately opens up her ‘closet’ to adjust her appearance for the day. She has twelve body color options, and an equal number of headgear items that range from bunny ears and antlers to a pirate scarf and a knight’s helmet to green spiked hair and a single, long pony tail. She is struggling with her wardrobe choice.

Me (M): What’s wrong?

Daughter (D): My friends and I decided to be green today. I don’t like the green body and my green hair is boy hair. I wanna be a girl today.

At that point I realize that what she is considering is not a mere wardrobe decision, but rather an identity decision. For whereas in the physical world her gender, race, and physical appearance are, for the most part, outside of her control, here she is able to explore and experiment with the typically fixed aspects of her identity. The ability to construct multiple expressions of her avatar facilitates the creative construction of identity in the virtual space (Crow & Bradford, 2006; Turkle, 1995).

Finally, she dons the green coat she found in her closet, chooses to be a black penguin with a long brown ponytail, and runs off to the plaza to find her friends. She takes a look in the nightclub where she finds two red penguins dancing and urging others to convert to red and dance.

Penguin 1 (P1)/texting: Everyone turn red and dance.

D/texting: Why? Now there are 4 red, dancing penguins.

P2/texting: Omigosh, epic.

P1/texting: Turn red and dance.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 7

D/texting: Woo hoo!

She has turned red and is dancing. Now there are 6.

P1/texting: Turn red and dance. Make the dance floor red.

Seconds later there are 12 red penguins dancing and the dance floor has turned red…

Ten seconds later, the dance floor is back to the normal, multicolor pattern, and the 12 red penguins have either dispersed or changed to another color. My daughter has returned to her black penguin body and has resumed her search for her friends.

Peer pressure to alter appearance and behavior is not unique to the online environment. Offline, tweens are similarly encouraged to experiment with their physical appearance. Much to the dismay of many parents, they change their hair color and style, and go from one end of the clothing spectrum to the other to ‘go along’ with the crowd. In the virtual environment, identity development occurs in much the same way but with one key difference. In the virtual space tweens can safely follow the crowd, indulge in the fad, and then go back to their preferred identity without enduring consequence. Indeed, their closest friends may not have even noticed the temporary diversion.

Similarly, they can experiment with multiple personalities (as manifested through styles and behavior), gauge the reaction of others, and decide what fits and what doesn’t based on public appeal (Winder, 2008). For instance, when a new penguin enters the area and asks for friendship, the following exchange occurs.

P2/texting: Anybody wanna be my friend?

P2/texting: Please. I like your outfit, you are so cool, wanna be friends.

P1/texting: I don’t like your hair. [Walks away] D[to me]: I feel bad. That was mean.

P2/texting: Meanie. [Emote] Angry face.

D/texting: I’ll be ur friend. Hair’s ok. Do u have a ponytail?

P2/texting: [After a quick change to a long brown ponytail] Like this?

P3/texting: Me too. All 3 of us.

P2/texting: Ok D/texting: Let’s go shopping. Follow me.

The process of shaping one’s social identity over time is complex and is informed through the reciprocal influence of personal, behavioral, and environmental factors (Bandura, 1986). The expanded environment offered by the integration of the virtual and physical spaces further complicates the identity formation process because it alters the relative importance of these factors. Identity, and the beliefs and expectations that form its basis, are constructed through social interactions that activate emotional reactions to behavior (Bandura, 1986). In this instance, my daughter’s offer of friendship was based on a sympathetic reaction to the other penguin’s denial of friendship. Her emotion on Club Penguin was no different than it would be in a similar situation on the playground at school.

Her reaction, however, was different, as it was more immediate and unencumbered by concerns about what her friends thought. Whereas on the playground her reaction might be more measured and would occur after consultation with her friends, in Club Penguin, she freely acted on her sympathy for the new penguin as an individual. She felt empowered to act based on her own feelings. Interestingly, and without consultation, her friend followed her lead.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 8

Community Relationships – Mothers, Brothers and Friends Part of the appeal to Club Penguin is that my daughter’s school friends are members too. In this way, Club Penguin is not a new community. Rather it is an extension of her existing social environment. She and her school friends make play dates in school to meet virtually for coffee, go sledding, attend events and visit with mutual friends. Some of the mutual friends are known in the physical world, others are not. In fact, she makes play dates with virtual friends as well.

P: Shall we play tomorrow D: Maybe P: Pls D: What time?

P: Right now D: Ok, meet me at Yeti Server P: Plaza In this example another difference between the real world and virtual contexts for identity is apparent. Whereas my daughter’s plans to see her friends after school are limited by the reliance on adults for transportation to and from selected locales, they can choose more freely where and when they will interact in the online environment.

A Family of Penguins On June 8th and after months of begging, when she looked at me and said, “Mommy, when are you going to join Club Penguin?” I said, “Today.” Dutiful as ever, and thrilled that my daughter wanted to play with me, I registered for a free penguin so that I could participate in Club Penguin with her. For a short while things were good. We experienced the virtual world together and she showed me how to navigate through the island, how to win games and receive more coins, and how to express my feelings through the emotes. Most often we participated in Club Penguin while physically sitting in the same or adjacent rooms. We talked while virtually walking together as penguins, conversing via text-based chat messages.

Our desire to stay in touch through the virtual world is something that Club Penguin encourages. On the website’s FAQs, for instance, the following explanation of the site’s utility for family life is mentioned: “Many families use Club Penguin as a communication device between kids and grandparents, or aunts and uncles, who aren’t living close by in the real world.” Clearly, the intent is to support communication between distant family members, although the distance between us at that time was no more than 20 feet. ______________ It’s Saturday evening around 5PM and we’ve just come in from walking the dog and are preparing for dinner. We log on to the site. She is on the desktop computer in the family room while I am typing on the laptop now sitting on the dining room table where I have easy access to the kitchen and meal preparation. The following exchange occurs through a mixture of verbal and text-based dialogue: M: That was fun, you’re getting really fast on your scooter.

D: Yeah, I’m getting good at sled racing too. Watch me.

I walked over to her computer.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 9

D: No mommy, bring your penguin over to the ski slope. Watch me beat you.

M: Oh, ok. How do I get there D/texting: Follow me.

M/texting: Ok. We arrive at the sledding hill and begin to race. I lose, of course.

D/texting: Let’s go for coffee. Follow me.

When we arrive in the town center, the area is filled with colorful penguins. By my count there are at least 25 penguins and they are loosely clustered by body color. Red penguins are standing in front of the coffee shop, blue penguins are gathering in front of the gift shop. I am yellow. She is red.

D: Turn red, mommy.

M: I can’t, I don’t have a red body.

D: You really need a membership so you can buy things and have more fun. Now you can’t be with me and the red penguins. You can go ahead and cook dinner.

I logged off. No more than a few weeks after entering her space, she had begun to express her disappointment with me. The exchange below followed not long after the above.

She was online, I was not.

D: You don't have any friends, mommy. I'm embarrassed.

I was silent for a moment, puzzled by her statement, and then I responded.

M: What do you mean? I have friends. ...and I proceeded to name them, but after the third name, she stopped me.

D: No, I don't mean those friends. I mean friends on Club Penguin.

So there it was: I was embarrassing her virtual penguin and was at risk of losing her virtual friendship because she was my only virtual friend. Not wanting to lose her virtual friendship and dutiful as ever, I logged on and began asking every penguin in proximity to be my buddy. Of course, most of those I asked said no. I wondered if perhaps they were refusing my friendship because I didn't have any hair, or special clothes, or fancy decor in my igloo.

Perhaps my invitation or some other indicator had given away my age. Without any other way to determine friendship, appearance, verbal exchanges and the display of possessions are the primary determining factors for friendship. Interestingly, the freedom afforded by the ability to change appearance at will is counterbalanced by the limited spectrum of how one can express one’s own worthiness for friendship. This tension illustrates the complexity of identity construction in virtual worlds. As in the physical world, those you interact with are as important to your identity as who you are. In fact, one might argue that community affiliation and relationships become increasingly important in the virtual world because other factors that might contribute to identity construction are unavailable for assessment. Ultimately, I was able to gain a few friends, many of whom were non-members like me.

M/texting: Be my BFF P/texting: Me? M/texting: Please

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 10

P/texting: Are you a member?

M/texting: No P/texting: Same. Ok Not surprisingly, my daughter was still disappointed with me because these friends were not sufficient and were not the ‘right’ friends. They were not members. Now, however, I realized her embarrassment was based on the opinion of her school friends. Word was out: they knew that I was on Club Penguin, that I was not a member, and I did not have many friends. Initially, my daughter was proud that her mother had joined Club Penguin and she told her friends. But now, her peers (physical and virtual) wondered why she walked around Club Penguin with a largely friendless, naked penguin with a one room igloo.

P/texting: Who’s that? [Referring to me] D/texting: Dunno P/texting: Why’s he following us?

D/texting: Let’s go to the Coffee shop D: Mom, don’t follow us. Ok M: Ok My daughter’s friend had been unable to identify me in the virtual world, and my daughter had at first decided to pretend that she did not know me, either. Such a denial would not have been possible in a physical setting, where her friend would have recognized me immediately. Yet in the virtual space, my daughter interpreted her friend’s question as a challenge and as a result, she chose to first deny, then direct me away. Such subtle conversational miscues may be fairly common among young people who are just beginning to sort out the complexities of how they evaluate one another as a result of their relationships with others, but such misunderstandings are augmented in virtual space because of the lack of visual and verbal cues.

Interestingly, this same scenario repeated itself one year later. This time her younger brother, who had taken over my penguin alter ego (but upgraded with a paid membership) was the source of her embarrassment. I felt a sense of déjà vu when she (or rather, her penguin avatar) told her younger brother (in the form of his penguin avatar) to “go find his own friends.” Interestingly, she did this through typing messages on the keyboard while sitting two rooms away from him, and then by yelling across the room when that did not work. True to form, he ignored her, lurked in the background of her social interactions and continued to engage both her and her penguin friends until he got bored and went outside (in the physical yard) to play ball.

Conclusion Identity construction always takes place within particular contexts, and in relation to other people. In this case study, I have explored how my daughter’s involvement in Club Penguin illustrates some of the ways in which the context of that virtual world provides for certain identity formation practices whereas it limits or complicates others. I have noted that there are three important ways in which this occurs.

First, because Club Penguin makes it easy for tweens to change typically static elements of their persona in their presentations to others, the site effectively broadens the scope of generally accepted identifiers and reduces the perceived boundaries between them.

In the virtual world, where tweens are able to adjust their appearance instantaneously, their sense of what it means to be a boy or a girl (in the social sense) brings gender into question.

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It is no longer something that is fixed and physical or easily ascribed to another, but rather gender is something that can be chosen in relation to how one wishes to act. Certain characterizations travel from the physical world into the virtual space, such as the assumption that boys might be more competitive than girls or more likely to play certain online games than girls would. Yet because girls can experiment with these roles, they can explore what it feels like to enact a gender that differs from the one that is usually assumed or ascribed to them.

Racial identification similarly changes, so that young people are challenged to see that race may not be solely related to appearance but may also be related to one’s choices and particularly to the affiliations one chooses. In Club Penguin, race as manifested through the penguin body color is a seen as a legitimate reason for gathering and for exclusion. My daughter saw no problem with changing her color in order to participate in the ‘red’ gathering even though I was unable to change to red and engage with her. In the physical world, however, she questions race-based gatherings and often wonders if single-race gatherings are exclusionary and racist. Indeed, today’s physical reality of tweens is one that encourages a mixed-race existence and her group of school friends is fairly diverse. They are taught to respect diversity and to embrace what makes each person unique. The virtual world echoes the choice-based nature of how today’s young people are encouraged to approach gender and race, then, as greater emphasis is placed on inclusion and on an ability to change oneself in order to enjoy that inclusion in any manner of diverse forms. Race and gender can be viewed as less fixed and can come to be understood more in relation to affiliations, or how one chooses to interact as a member or ally with differing groups. As virtual worlds such as Club Penguin make changing one’s appearance easy, and as children opt to change their appearances so as to create new affiliations that they then invite others to join, they are playing out the implications of this shift in how their generation approaches differences in identification and inclusion.

A second way in which virtual worlds afford new avenues for identity formation involves how individuals interact with others within these sites. One example of this occurred in my daughter’s sympathetic offer of friendship to the rejected ‘new kid.’ As noted earlier, had she observed the rejection of someone in physical space, she may have looked to her friends to observe their reactions before reacting herself. Yet in the virtual space, she was free to act according to her own best self, expressing sympathy and offering friendship.

Although the ultimate behavior demonstrated by a tween online may mirror that displayed in the physical world, the virtual space affords an initial freedom of expression and action because it may be free from the usual contexts of social pressure. Even though her school friends were present online, the virtual space provided sufficient distance from the influence of peer pressure for her to react based on personal emotions and values. Although a great deal of attention has been focused on how the online environment may encourage young people to embrace a callous attitude toward others, therefore, this example illustrates that virtual worlds may also afford children with opportunities to embrace opportunities to act out of good intentions apart from fear of social criticism. Such acting may be good practice for those who wish to take similar action in their own physical spaces.

Virtual worlds afford opportunities for extension and experimentation with one’s self and one’s activities, as noted in the previous two examples. Yet they also afford new avenues for complication, as they call for the development of new social cues in an environment in which visual and verbal cues are more limited than they are in physical space. This was most evident in my own interactions with my daughter in the online environment. My daughter enjoyed playing with me online at first, as it seemed that she was able to “play with” and even dictate how she was going to interact with me: sometimes as friend who goes for coffee in virtual space, at other times as daughter who tells her mother to leave the room and go

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Penguin Life 12

make dinner. When one of her friends observed her with me, this play with the mother/daughter identity came to an end, as my daughter interpreted her friend’s question about me as a challenge to her own identity. Then, her interaction with me quickly switched, as she first denied that she knew me and then told me not to follow her. Perhaps she was embarrassed to be seen with me because I was a nude penguin with a one-room igloo.

Perhaps she was embarrassed that a friend had seen her “playing” with her mother as if her mother were a friend. Had visual and verbal cues been available, our roles would have been clearer to others in her social circles, and such questions may not have been raised.

Undoubtedly, she would have found other reasons to be embarrassed about her relationship with her mother, but the online environment made the social cues that much more complicated to navigate.

Penguin life has been interesting. It has presented a dynamic backdrop for the exploration of how personal, behavioral and environmental factors have influenced the development of my tween daughter’s social identity, and of how the platform of Club Penguin makes it easy to experiment with identification, and more challenging to read social cues that relate to those identifications. Our days are numbered on the snow covered Club Penguin island. She and her friends are becoming bored with their penguin existence and are moving to WeeWorld. Notably, she has not asked me to join with her. She is growing up and her world is a complex interaction of identity and environment, physical and virtual. Her reality and how she develops her identity within it, continues to evolve. However, this experience has provided me with some insight on the development process, and on the role a key mediated space is playing within it.

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Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010

Growing Up with Neopets: A Personal Case-Study

By Stephanie Louise Lu Northwestern University, USA

Abstract Neopets.com is a popular virtual pet site attracting roughly 44 million players worldwide. As more and more children spend time on sites like Neopets.com, there is debate over whether they are being victimized or empowered by their exposure to cultural products and discourses online. The existing literature mostly consists of observations and interpretations that are made by researchers from an adult outsider's perspective. In this study, I discuss how, in my nine years of membership on Neopets.com, I have developed an awareness of myself in relation to a larger society, and also gained important skills that proved useful to me later in life. I conclude that a virtual world can enable a young person to try on active roles in addition to passive ones in a modern commercial society.

Keywords: Neopets; children; teens; COPPA; virtual world; commercial; social identity

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 4

Growing Up with Neopets: A Personal Case-Study

When it comes to discussing media use by children, we always return to the question of agency: Are the ideas from consumer culture detrimental or beneficial to individuality?

Are children passive absorbers or active adaptors to these ideas? What is the best way to protect children while still allowing them enough freedom to construct social identities?

The ongoing debate over how to regulate children's media is a projection of how we view ourselves as members of a consumer society. Theorists like Foucault argue that we are constantly "policing" our identities to comply with surrounding behavior (Willett, 2008, p.

54). For example, when a woman chooses to buy a certain dress, her choice is informed by the ideas of her peers and by the ideas displayed in commercial advertisements. Theorists such as Giddens, however, take a less deterministic view, stressing the agency of the individual in this identity-shaping process. In this view, products and messages from society are resources that we draw upon as we cultivate our personal "lifestyles" (Willett, 2008, p.

55). To take the same example, though the woman's choice is informed by external ideas, her choice is ultimately her own, and she can even mix, match and modify her clothes in ways that were never intended by advertisers. When we live in a consumer society, then, we inevitably encounter ideas that are not our own, whether they are projected by other individuals or embedded in advertisements. If we regard these ideas as detrimental to individuality, then we would want to shelter children until they are mature enough to handle them. If we consider these ideas to be valuable tools for identity development, however, then we would want children to have access to them.

The role of the Internet in this debate is a complex one, because of its highly interactive nature. When children see images in a magazine or on television, it is clear that they are on the receiving end of social messages. When children play in virtual worlds, however, they seem to be contributing messages in addition to receiving them: they seem to be using virtual products as resources for identity expression. Some researchers argue that these children's apparent agency is only an illusion. In their view, virtual worlds are hosts to "increasingly devious marketing strategies that are serving to exploit children" (Willett, 2008, p. 53). For example, when Neopets.com had a deal with Six Flags in July 2010, there appeared in Neopia a virtual amusement park. The virtual wealth generated from this advertisement then trickled into the main Neopian economy. This kind of "immersive

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 5

advertising" blends so subtly into virtual world structures that it takes experience to distinguish between advertised content and in-world content. A recent study found that only 23% of a sample of 4th and 5th graders were able to identify advertised content on Neopets.com (Wollslager, 2009). The concern is that, by playing in virtual worlds, children may be absorbing advertised values without realizing that their personal tastes are being shaped by advertisers.

Other researchers argue that, far from being passive, children are actually actively building "alternative economies of status and value" online (Ito & Horst, 2006, p. 1).

Unbeknownst to most adult observers, children are engaged in all kinds of autonomous activities, such as buying and selling virtual items, developing their own means of expression, and competing and cooperating with other players â&#x20AC;&#x201C; much like adults who work within real consumer societies. Advertised messages sent by adults from the outside world are therefore only a "peripheral dimension" of what children are really doing in-world (Ito & Horst, 2006, p. 6). In this view, the Internet is a source of empowerment for children, and it would be ideal for more children who are not as "lucky" to also have access to the "cultural resources" online (Ito & Horst, 2006, p. 1).

The existing literature in this field mostly consists of observations and interpretations that are made by researchers from an adult outsider's perspective. What I would like to contribute is the perspective of an insider who has had long-term immersive experience in a virtual world for youth. I started playing on Neopets.com in February 2001, and to this day I remain an active member, so the virtual world of Neopia has been an integral part of my journey to adulthood. My personal case-study will address the following issues: whether children have enough protection in virtual worlds like Neopia, whether they are passive absorbers or active adaptors to external ideas, and finally, whether they are adversely or positively affected by exposure to such ideas in virtual worlds.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 6

Young Playersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Engagement with Neopets.com

Figure 1. The homepage of Neopets.com, viewed at 1pm (GMT -8) on July 18, 2010.

Neopets.com is a popular virtual pet site where players can acquire Neopets for free and participate in games and events. It was founded in November 1999 by two British students who wanted to create a website where teenagers could have fun in their free time. In early 2000, however, they ran into financial difficulties and began sourcing for ways to keep the enterprise afloat. After American entrepreneur Doug Dohring joined the Neopets venture, they started to shift their market focus toward a younger player demographic, and to experiment with immersive advertising. In June 2005, American media conglomerate Viacom purchased the site for $160 million, and since then Neopets.com has become larger and more commercialized (Kushner, 2005). Neopets cards, games, toys and books made their way into real-world shops. Virtual merchandise such as deluxe clothing for Neopets was also released.

This virtual merchandise is priced in terms of Neocash (NC), which, unlike the main in-world currency, Neopoints (NP), can be purchased with real money. However, NC is not exchangeable with NP, and NC items, though collectible and attractive, provide no in-world gameplay advantages, so Neopets.com remains essentially free-to-play. In 2008, Neopets.com had 44 million global registered players. Comscore ranked Neopets.com as one of the most popular game sites for youth, with each visitor spending an average of 2 hours and 45 minutes per month on the site (Neopets, 2008).

When I was 10 years old, Neopets.com was a huge fad at my school. All the children in fourth grade had to take a computer class to master basic skills such as word-processing.

Although we were not supposed to be in the computer lab unless we had class there, we

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 7

found out one day that a custodian always unlocked the lab a few minutes before class, toward the end of lunch break. Fairly soon, all of us were wolfing down our lunches early in order to spend time on Neopets.com before the teacher arrived. When the teacher found out what was happening, she struck a deal with her students: If we paid attention during class and finished our lessons, she would let us spend the rest of class time on Neopets.com. We became very conscientious from then on, and the final fifteen minutes or so of each class were always spent in happy playing.

Neopets.com is attractive to young people because of the following features. Those marked with asterisks, however, are for ages 13 and above only.

Pets Players may create or adopt their own pets, choosing from 54 species and hundreds of color combinations. Each pet is given a unique name and set of personality traits, can be dressed in various styles, and can be trained to compete with other pets. The most exemplary pets are recognized through spotlights and other contests.

Stories Neopets.com is set in a parallel world with its own fantastical histories. Neopian lands include the underwater village of Maraqua, the desert kingdoms of Sakhmet and Qasala, the snow-capped towns of Terror Mountain, the volcanic city of Moltara, and more. Each land has its own origin story, whether it is the fall of a despotic ruler or the erasure of an age-old curse. Staff and players are constantly adding to this rich collection of stories.

Games There are hundreds of mini-games on Neopets.com, ranging from arcade classics to puzzles to advergames, all of which give out NP, the main in-world currency.

Creative outlets Players may express themselves in a variety of areas: â&#x20AC;˘ *The "user lookup," which displays such details as account age, pets, and trophies. â&#x20AC;˘ *A "pet lookup" for each pet, which displays such details as statistics and awards.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Growing Up with Neopets 8

• *A "petpage" for each pet, which is an open web page that is not necessarily related to the pet. Common petpage topics include milestones, wishlists, and guild events.

• A Neohome, which can be furnished according to the player's own design.

• A shop to sell items, and a gallery to display items, both of which can be *customized.

• The Neopian Times, Storytelling Competition, Poetry Contest, Art Gallery, and Random Contest, which showcase original work contributed by players.

• *A profile for use on discussion boards.

Figure 2. Creating a Neoboard profile.

Events Every now and then, a large-scale event takes place. For example, during this year's Altador Cup (a Neopian version of the World Cup), players chose to join one of eighteen teams representing eighteen lands in Neopia. The game scores they submitted over the course of a month determined how well their team did in the Cup. There was also a staff tournament, with players rooting for their favorite staff members. Everybody received prizes for their efforts.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 9

Collections Players may accumulate NP in virtual bank accounts. They may also build up virtual wealth in the form of cards, stamps, trophies, items and avatars, which are images that players use to represent themselves on discussion boards. *Social spaces The Neoboards are public discussion boards where players chat about site events, advertise items for sale, help one another with Neopian goals, and more. Some players have established "Neoboard chat groups" with focused interests, such as writing for the Neopian Times, or training pets to fight in the Battledome. There are also more private groups called "guilds," which have their own, separate "guild boards."

There are many ways to summarize this section. From one perspective, Neopets.com is luring players into a web of interactive entertainment for the sole purpose of making money off them. The attachments that players develop for their pets, possessions and social networks keep them coming back, thus enabling the company to sell their attention to advertisers. The site events also fuel huge fandoms to which the company can market all kinds of real and virtual merchandise. From another perspective, however, Neopets.com is providing players with resources which they can use in autonomous ways. Children can develop interests and skills by participating in the contests and games, and by cultivating their own virtual pets. They can experiment with finances by opening a virtual bank account, running a virtual shop, and using their hard-earned NP to fund their own collections. Later, they can also create web pages, join a guild, and even collaborate with other players. Just as the woman in our introductory example can be seen either as succumbing to commercial advertising or as adapting a cultural resource for her own purposes, there is more than one side to children's activity in virtual worlds.

Now that we have taken a glimpse at how players are engaged with Neopets.com, let us look at the protections that they are subjected to, in order to evaluate how safe this playground is as a space in which to learn and grow.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 10

The Protective Measures of Neopets.com By default, children under the age of 13 do not have access to all the features listed in the previous section. In accordance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), children under 13 may not use the communication features that I have marked out with asterisks. An exception can only be made for a child in the case that her parent or legal guardian contacts the company to express written consent (Parental Consent Form, 2010). In my case, because my reference group comprised other 10-year-olds as oblivious as I was, I did not know what I was missing out on, so I did not experience any desire to upgrade my junior account. My early playing experience was therefore very sheltered.

I was a member of the virtual world to the extent that I contributed to its economy, but at the same time I was excluded from its social aspects. For example, if I wanted to buy an item from a player-owned shop, I would go to the Shop Wizard, which is a search engine that finds the best prices for any given item. After arriving at a shop via the Shop Wizard, I would simply click on the item I wanted to buy and acquire it for its listed price. Selling items was just as straightforward. I would put items into my shop, list them at competitive prices, and check my shop later. If someone had made a purchase, there would be NP left in my "shop till" and an item taken from my "shop stock," and that would be the end of the transaction. I never had to exchange a single word with another player. As other researchers have observed, this sheltering has the effect of protecting children from "harassment" while still allowing them some autonomy in virtual worlds. There is debate about "what degree of presence is optimal," (Bleumers, Van Lier, & Jacobs, 2009), but at present, COPPA is a U.S. federal law that affects all websites with an American audience.

Neopets.com enforces COPPA by hiring a team of moderators to watch the Neoboards 24 hours a day. These moderators watch for, among other things, behavior that suggests a child is chatting online without parental consent. Depending on the strength of the evidence available, moderators may reset the accounts of those children whom they suspect of using fake birthdates. Of course, it is not difficult to imagine children resisting these shelters by creating multiple accounts, or by enlisting the help of older siblings and friends.

This issue is shared by other virtual pet sites. As the parent information page on Powerpets.com states, through staff will do anything that is "humanly possible" to protect young players, "you need to take the responsibility to educate your child" (Privacy Policy, 2010). Staff and parents therefore have a shared responsibility to ensure that children are safe in virtual worlds.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Growing Up with Neopets 11

Beyond COPPA, Neopets.com also has other rules in place: •

Players may not disclose any personal information about themselves, such as photos, telephone numbers or email addresses.

•

Neoboard filters prevent players from using profanity.

•

Discussion of real-world topics like politics or religion is not allowed on the Neoboards.

•

All user-contributed content is screened by staff for any mentions of violence, romance or other mature subject matter.

•

Offsite links are strictly prohibited.

•

Any discussion topics that are found in violation of the rules are promptly removed by staff. Players can also "report" a topic to bring it to the attention of the nearest moderator.

•

Offenders who do not respond to warnings may have their accounts disabled or their IP addresses blocked, or both.

•

Finally, children are advised to "always follow your family's rules for the Internet," and to talk to "Mum, Dad or a responsible adult" in case of any doubt (Safety Tips, 2010).

These protective measures are similar to those adopted by Club Penguin, another

popular virtual pet site. Club Penguin also has filters and moderators to control what players can or cannot say. The main difference is that, whereas children under 13 are completely excluded from the discussion boards on Neopets.com, they may chat through "a predefined menu of greetings, questions and statements" in Club Penguin (Parent's Guide, 2010).

However, this difference may be due to the fact that Neopia is predominantly based on a static interface, which allows for a greater degree of shielding than Club Penguin's animated, real-time-chat interface.

The Neopian Economy: What Can A Child Learn?

Wrapped within the messages and rules designed by adults is a vibrant virtual society composed of young players. The currency of its economy is NP, which players generate for their own use by participating in the site's events and games. Inflation is controlled by daily limits on games and by the constant introduction of new items through contests, giveaways and computer-owned shops. Real money cannot be legally exchanged for NP, so this economy is purely virtual.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Growing Up with Neopets 12

"While Neopets.com is a massive site that supports a wide range of engagement including different forms of gaming, collecting, authoring, and socializing, the underlying engine of Neopets engagement is economic activity. Just as in our capitalist real world, wealth is generated through labor, investment, and commerce.

In turn, capitalist exchange drives endless diversity in consumption, identity production, and social distinction."

(Ito & Horst, 2006, p. 3) Ito and Horst did not emphasize, however, what I feel is an essential difference between a virtual economy and a real one. In the Neopian economy, commercial activity is driven by esteem needs – such as the need for achievement and the need for respect – and not by subsistence needs. The drive of players to earn virtual wealth is not as urgent as that of real-world workers, who provide food, shelter, and other necessities for themselves and their dependents. In Neopia, you can "get by" perfectly fine without a single NP. Neopets thrive equally well whether they are fed free food – which is always available – or rare, expensive dishes. Even if you neglected to feed your pets, they would not die, but would simply remain "dying" until you cared to feed them again. Players feed their pets, then, mainly for personal enjoyment and social status. A well-fed pet has a happy face, which not only makes you feel rewarded, but also reflects positively on you when other players browse your pet's lookup. If you are a very indulgent pet owner, you may even earn your pet a Gourmet Club award. To generalize from this example of pet-feeding, anything you can purchase with NP goes toward the fulfillment of esteem needs. While there are class distinctions in Neopia, as I will explain in the next few paragraphs, these distinctions do not have the human rights implications that they have in the real world. This economy is therefore a simplified version of a real commercial economy.

Labor Class I am borrowing the idea of "salaried labor" from Ito and Horst to describe how NP is generated. Each of the hundreds of mini-games on the site typically takes a few minutes to play and dispenses up to 1,000 NP per play, up to three plays a day. Most players earn NP this way. Some games are arcade classics that challenge hand-eye coordination, some are puzzles that test logical and verbal skills, and a few are advergames. More sophisticated games include investing in virtual stocks, whose rise-and-fall patterns are determined by a computer program. Each player may buy up to 1,000 shares per day, ranging from 15 NP to over 100 NP each, which he can then sell at any time. No matter which games they play,

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 13

however, "salaried laborers" tend to follow an individual routine after the fashion of office workers.

Creative Class For these players, their main income is in the form of items rather than currency.

There are roughly 100 computer-owned shops in Neopia that "restock" every few minutes, meaning they fill up with items for purchase. With a fast reaction time and a memory for item values, "restockers" snag the most valuable items at cheap purchase prices. Other sources of items are contests, such as the Art Gallery. Generally, members of the Creative Class spend as much time socializing as they do earning. While they are waiting for a "restock" or working on a contest entry, they chat, earning no NP at all. When they do win an item, however, they can often sell it for more than what a "salaried laborer" can earn from hours of gaming.

Merchant Class While the Labor Class introduces currency and the Creative Class introduces items, the Merchant Class redistributes this wealth by buying items from the Creative Class and "reselling" them for profit. Their customers may come from any class, whether it is a "salaried laborer" going on a splurge, or a rich collector adding to a gallery.

These classes I've defined are by no means exhaustive, but they do provide a glimpse into how players are actively using the resources on Neopets.com to build their own alternative society. The overarching framework of NP generators (games) and item generators (contests, giveaways and computer-owned shops) was set in place by adults, but within that framework, players are entirely autonomous in their acquisition, distribution and consumption of wealth.

When I was a child, I played an isolated role in the Neopian economy. Because I was shielded from all social activity, I was content to follow a simple routine of earning a few thousand NP each day from my favorite games. At this stage, perhaps the most important lesson I learned was the value of persistence. The more I played the games, the better I became at them, and the better able I was to earn NP from them. I put most of my NP into my virtual bank account and spent the rest of it on making my virtual pet more "intelligent."

While I was aware of the existence of other players from whose shops I bought "books" for my pet, I did not understand that I was part of an enormous economy. My early playing

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 14

experience revolved around just me and my pet; all I cared about was earning NP for my personal satisfaction and for the well-being of my pet.

Figure 3. Playing an anagram game and earning 1,000 NP from one play.

After I gained full communication privileges, however, I became more involved in both the social and economic aspects of the virtual world. My first story for the Neopian Times was published in January 2007, when I was 16. Soon after, encouraged by the feedback I received from readers and by the virtual items I won, I began to participate in more writing contests. One writer who inspired me went by the username Schefflera. She was a frequent winner of the Storytelling Competition and had a humorous writing style. After exchanging a few Neomails with her, I joined the Neopian Times Appreciation Guild and met more young people who loved writing as much as I did. We chatted about everything from writing to schoolwork to gameplay strategies. Later, I also took on leadership roles such as organizing writing events and keeping a petpage record of the guild's history. I developed an awareness of myself as a member of a complex society. What I did in Neopia had consequences beyond just me and my pet. What I earned and what I consumed affected the circulation of the economy, and what I wrote on discussion boards, petpages and competition pages had real impacts on my readers.

The recognition that I could be an active participant in society was both illuminating and empowering. When I earned my first paycheck from a work-study job in the real world, I understood that my income, though small, was part of a much larger system. Its significance went beyond how I could use it. I began to pay attention, therefore, to how taxpayers' dollars were used, how society was governed, and other socioeconomic issues. I began to contribute my voice to real-world publications in my school and in my community. When I cast my first

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Growing Up with Neopets 15

vote, I did so in the knowledge that I was aggregating my volition with millions of others, all working within an overarching framework, but all active, all thinking, and all free.

Identity Formation in Neopia: Shaping Oneself, and Being Shaped Just as members of real societies use cultural resources to display and tailor their identities, so do members of virtual societies. In the real world, you judge and are judged based on the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the vocabulary you are accustomed to using, and so on. Neopia as a virtual society is just as intricate. Let us now look at how players express themselves using the resources available on Neopets.com.

User lookup A player's "user lookup" is his main profile page. It is the first thing you look at when you are getting to know another player. The real-world equivalent of the user lookup would be the résumé: it gives you a glimpse into the person's interests, skills, experience and personality. Indeed, when Neopets.com has job openings, it asks applicants to submit not only their real-world résumés, but also their Neopian usernames if they have one.

Neoboard profile When you chat on the Neoboards, people form an impression of you based on your profile. As I have shown in Fig. 2, this profile displays your username, title, account age, avatar, active Neopet, and signature. There are default avatars that anyone can use, but there are also "secret avatars" that can only be unlocked by fulfilling certain requirements. The avatar in Fig. 2 became available to me only after I was published in an anniversary issue of the Neopian Times (NT). Therefore, I had to earn the right to be known as an "NT Writer."

The criteria for evaluating Neopets are complex enough to require another list: Species Most Neopets, such as the Shoyru, can be created at any time. Some Neopets, however, can only be created on special days or through special means. For example, Poogles can only be created on September 19th. An even rarer species is the Draik, which cannot be created at all. To obtain a Draik, you need to hatch a Draik egg, which is worth several millions of NP. Rare pets are therefore a great source of pride for owners.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 16

Figure 4. A Shoryu, a Poodle and a Draik.

Name Due to the nature of the computer system, each Neopet has to have a unique name.

One-word names are therefore very precious: a pet with a name like "Terror" would be much more highly regarded than a pet with a name like "_pretty_butterfly_" or "Bob145927."

Color All Neopets, with the exception of the alien species Grundo, are created in one of four basic colors: red, yellow, green or blue. Grundos can also come in white, brown or purple. To turn a pet into a rarer color, you can either purchase a "paintbrush" or invest in the right to access a "lab ray." Some colors can only be obtained from the lab ray. However, pets that are zapped with the lab ray also run the risk of turning into another species.

Figure 5. Four colors for the species Aisha: blue (basic), rainbow (300, 000 NP), royal (1,750,000 NP), and alien (lab ray).

Statistics Pets can be sent to training school to gain stat boosts in strength, defense, movement and hitpoints. Reading books to them gives them intelligence points. These statistics are used in combination with weapons to compete with opponents in the Battledome.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 17

Awards There are many awards that a pet can win for excellence in different areas, such as tasteful attire, gourmet eating, and book reading, to name a few.

Clothes A player can customize his pets using any combination of virtual clothes. Some clothes come with an expensive paint job, such as Royal or Desert. Other clothes are purchased separately, and can range in value from less than 100 NP to several millions of NP. A third category of clothes is bought with NC. However, it is not necessary for a pet to wear NC items in order to stand a chance at winning a customization award.

Figure 6. The authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s favourite pet, Yinna, dressed up as a warrior.

Pet lookup The quality of the graphics, descriptions and coding reflects a player's skills.

In such an atmosphere of capitalist competition, one must always find a balance between one's personal values and the values of society. When I was younger, my pet was, for me, simply a pet, not a status symbol or a way to assert my identity. There came a time, however, when I became aware of how she was judged by other players. I lamented the fact

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 18

that my pet's name, Yinna802, contained numbers. But there was nothing I could do about it, apart from replacing her with a better-named pet â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and I could not possibly take that drastic action, because of the emotional value that she had in my eyes. It was with Yinna that I had begun to play in Neopia, and it was on Yinna that I had spent my first NP. No other pet could ever replace her. What I could change, however, and did change, was her appearance. As a child, I had created Yinna in the form of a yellow Wocky (Fig. 7) . As a teen, I was no longer satisfied with a beginner's pet.

Figure 7. A yellow Wocky.

I was not sure what species or color I wanted Yinna to be yet; I simply wanted her to look more impressive. So I invested in the lab ray and decided to keep zapping Yinna until she assumed a form that I liked. In the meantime, I also acquired more pets, all with expensive species-color combinations. (Currently I have eight pets, all of whom I have kept for more than half a year. The largest number of pets I owned at one time was 12. In total, I have created, adopted, and abandoned at least 30 pets.) I wrote a short story called "Experimenting with Identity," using Yinna's lab ray adventures as a metaphor for identity formation. About a year later, after Yinna had gone through many species and color changes, I finally settled on a form for her. She became an orange Grundo, as seen in Fig. 6.

I chose to let Yinna remain a Grundo because I realized that I admired the understated courage of that species. Even though Grundos can be obtained at any time, they have an origin story that distinguishes them from other species. The first Grundos had been created by a mad scientist who wanted to take over Neopia, but when his plot failed, many Grundos later broke free. I had the financial means to make Yinna into a Draik or some other more elite pet, but I chose not to. What had begun as a search for social recognition turned into an unexpected personal discovery. Looking back on Yinna's journey, I wrote a short story called

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Growing Up with Neopets 19

"Reflections in the Night," which was published in August 2008. The Neopian Times editor even chose a sentence from my story to feature as the Quote of the Week: "Grundos were very special Neopets – brought into being by Dr. Sloth's plans, yet somehow managing to create their own destinies." Getting the Quote of the Week was a wonderful moment in my Neopian life, marking the beginning of a period of personal confidence after intense identity experimentation.

In addition to cultivating my pets and writing about them, I also explored my social identity in other ways. There was a time when I was enthusiastic about collecting the secret avatars on Neopets.com. Because secret avatars require expertise to unlock, when you see a player wearing a particular avatar, you immediately know that he must have completed some task to unlock it. When I chat on the Neoboards, other players treat me differently depending on what avatar I am wearing. If I wear the "NT Writer" avatar from Fig. 2, any writers or readers present will greet me warmly, but members of other groups will not have much interest in me. If I wear the "Super Attack Pea" avatar, which is symbolic either of immense virtual wealth or of connections to wealthy players, traders will not attempt to take advantage of me, but I will also risk appearing obnoxious. And if I wear a default avatar which can be used by anyone, I will not attract much attention at all. Over the years, I have unlocked more than 300 avatars, each with a different story behind it, whether it is owning a rare pet, winning a contest, or participating in a site event. I use different avatars depending on whether I want to reminisce, trade, help a newcomer, or blend in. My favorite avatar, however, is "NT Writer," because it is the closest to who I am, even though it is not the most highly valued avatar by the majority of Neopians.

Growing up is full of these kinds of conundrums: how to reconcile the need for social acceptance with the need for individuality. It is the concern of many parents and researchers that some young people succumb mostly to the former, thus becoming victims of such forces as peer pressure and advertising. Due to my experience in Neopia, however, I was able from an early age to view social messages from both sides. Apart from absorbing ideas projected by my peers and by advertisements, I was also able to express my own ideas – through my pets, avatars, stories, web pages and artwork. When I was in my second year at university, my roommate, Katherine, said to me, "You know one thing I like about you? You're very sure of yourself." I did not mind being different from other people. In the winter, I noticed that most of the people around me were wearing gray, black and white, but I decided to wear a red coat with bright, tiger-themed earmuffs to express my own creativity.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 20

My social interactions in Neopia have also equipped me with valuable life skills. I learned to receive and respond to criticism from my readers, although it was not easy at the beginning. After the publication of my Neopian story "Reflections in the Night," for example, one reader by the username of Micrody commented that although he could see "all the emotion" in the dialogue, he thought the characters sounded "unnatural." At the time I was rather discouraged by his comment, but I did recognize that he had a valid point. In the story, I had written the following line as part of Yinna's dialogue: "I want to make up, in some small way, for the bossy and thoughtless things I did in the past." If I were to rewrite it, I would certainly use a more natural phrasing, such as: "I'm really sorry for all the bossy things I did." However, what has been published has already been published. I re-read my old stories with fond remembrance. These days, when I write fiction, I pay much closer attention to dialogue and other stylistic devices, and I am still working to improve my skill all the time.

My ability to take criticism has also served me well in my later ventures into academic and journalistic writing. I have maintained an A- average thus far in university, and contributed several pieces of art and writing to my university's student newspaper.

I am not the only young person who has benefitted from participating in a virtual society. In the 454th Neopian Times editorial, one player by the username of Oodlesafnoodles wrote in to say that she owed her current skills in artwork and web coding to the social support she found on Neopets.com. "The things I've learned on Neopets are what adults call 'Transferable Job Skills,' and I've enjoyed the whole thing!" she said. Most of the players I know are still in high school or university and are too young to boast of successful careers, but I do know one player, Nimras23, who has found some success in the academic field. She is the head of the Neopian Times Appreciation Guild, and she enjoys writing Neopian stories set in the medieval land of Meridell. In real life, she is working on a history degree, and some of her research has been accepted for publication in history museums. Another player I know, Frostcrystal, has developed interests in computer programming, and is currently doing a programming internship. She also has a webcomic called Catalyst, and often exchanges criticism with her fellow artists online. The benefits of online social interaction are beautifully represented in a short story by one of my online friends, Reggieman721.

"Kthxbye" was published in the Neopian Times in September 2007, and is structured as a series of letters between a fan and an established Neopian writer. The fan's Neomails evolve from childish chatspeak to mature, articulate vocabulary, showing the positive influence of a mentor on him. Reggieman721's story reminded me of my early correspondence with

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 21

Schefflera and how I myself later became a role model for younger players. The real stories of all these players suggest that virtual worlds like Neopia provide young people with a space in which to explore their social identities.

Conclusion Developers of virtual worlds for children must abide by laws, and they have protective measures in place to shelter young players. However, participation in any community, real or virtual, always entails some risks, no matter how much effort we put into designing protective measures. When you take children on a shopping trip, you are exposing them to advertisements, and when you allow them to play with other children, you are exposing them to peer pressure. While it is natural for us to be concerned about the effects of external ideas on children's identity development, it is unrealistic to try to shelter children from all sources of potential harm. Instead, as good parents know, allowing children to explore while providing them with care and guidance is the best way to help them become confident and happy adults.

As the Internet becomes a more integral part of the social fabric, it is increasingly important for children to learn to interact with other global citizens and to express themselves using cultural resources. In today's era, our notion of the self is a connected, not a secluded one. We adopt products like virtual pets as our own and imbue them with our individual characteristics. We buy clothes produced by commercial manufacturers and make them part of our personal wardrobes. We ingest ideas from external sources such as large companies and governments, and adapt them for our own purposes. Advertisers may try to sell products and messages to consumers, but consumers are also actively projecting their identities all the time. To enter into this network of shaping and being shaped is part of what it means to be a member of modern society.

In this personal case-study, I have reflected and ruminated on my nine years of experience in Neopia. Although it is not for me to judge whether my life would have been better or worse without Neopets.com, I do feel that overall, the friendships, values and skills I formed there have been beneficial to me and have enriched my life. Hopefully, my work will be of value to researchers who have never had the opportunity to consider a virtual world from an insider's perspective.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 22

As a research method, a personal case-study has its natural limits, because it relies on subjective, anecdotal evidence. Possibilities for future research include more objective and comprehensive assessments of how today's young people are doing identity work through online social interaction. Recognizing that children can be not only passive absorbers, but also active adapters to ideas they find on the Internet is an important step toward making our societies â&#x20AC;&#x201C; both real and virtual â&#x20AC;&#x201C; better environments for children.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Growing Up with Neopets 23

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Bleumers, L., Van Lier, T., & Jacobs, A. (2009). Presence and Mediated Interaction: A Means to an End? Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Retrieved August 3, 2010, from http://soc.kuleuven.be/com/mediac/euroitv2009/docs/adjunct_proceedings/workshops /W3%20ENHANCING%20SOCIAL%20COMMUNICATION/BLEUMERS,%20LI ZZY%20et%20al.%20-%20workshop.pdf Ito, M., & Horst, H. (2006). Neopoints, and Neo Economies: Emergent Regimes of Value in Kids' Peer-to-Peer Networks. American Anthropological Association Meetings.

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Wollslager, E. (2009). Children's Awareness of Online Advertising on Neopets: The Effect of Media Literacy Training on Recall. University of Toronto Press Journals. Retrieved March 18, 2010, from http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/b218420800278j25/ fulltext.pdf Additional note All screenshots were taken by the author during her adventures on Neopets.com, much as a journalist would take photographs while traveling.

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Volume 3, Number 2 Virtual Worlds for Kids December 2010 !

Virtual worlds as a site of convergence for children’s play Sun Sun Lim National University of Singapore Lynn Schofield Clark University of Denver, USA

Abstract

Virtual worlds have made notable inroads into the lives of children, affording online extensions of their offline lives In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for understanding the space that virtual worlds occupy in children’s play and the ways in which children’s participation in them overlap with their everyday play experiences, both offline and mediated. We argue that virtual worlds can be viewed as sites of convergence for children’s play in that virtual worlds allow for almost all aspects of children’s play to converge, primarily manifested in the convergence of social spheres, the convergence of play spaces and playthings, the convergence of cultures and the convergence of learning experiences. we explain how such convergence, while presenting valuable opportunities for children to learn and develop, will not be fully exploited without a corresponding ability on the part of parents and children to recognise potential risks; and for parents and educators to scaffold these learning opportunities.

Keywords: children, virtual worlds, play, sociability, identity formation, literacy, online risks and opportunities

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Virtual worlds as a site of convergence 4

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Virtual worlds as a site of convergence for children’s play

A little girl, seven, is playing with her neighbour, also seven, in her bedroom. The two girls are playing school, where her Barbie doll is the teacher of a first grade class whose students are her Little People, Pokemon, Power Rangers and Sesame Street action figures. The classroom furniture is an elaborate assembly of Lego pieces, MegaBloks and Littlest Pet Shop accessories. At recess, the students eat hamburgers and fruit salad which the girls lovingly made out of Play-Doh. Class is dismissed and her Thomas the Tank Engine set has been commandeered as the makeshift school bus which takes the students home. The neighbour arrives to pick up her daughter and the two girls exchange reluctant goodbyes, before quickly brightening up and saying to each other, “See you in Barbie Girls.com later!”. “ We can play school there too!”.

As children around the world explore virtual worlds in increasing numbers, scenes like this will be played out countless times in varied settings around the world. Even as children continue to play with toys, dabble in art and craft and expend their energy through sports, online play and virtual worlds have made notable inroads into the lives of children, affording online extensions of their offline lives. Each of the toys mentioned in the earlier scenario has an online presence in the form of websites with interactive games, smartphone apps or full-fledged virtual worlds boasting of multiple environments, activity genres and levels of play. Defined as “persistent virtual environments in which people experience others as being there with them and where they can interact with them” (Schroeder 2008, p. 2), virtual worlds for children and adults alike offer a “third place” (Steinkuehler & Williams, 2006, p. 885) for recreation and sociability.

When contrasted with their adult counterparts however, virtual worlds for children bear some distinctive features (Cao, Lim & Lin, 2010). First, because they are designed for children, activities within virtual worlds tend to be age-appropriate, illustrated with colourful graphics and involving relatively easy tasks. Second, virtual worlds for children explicitly invite parents’ involvement and supervision, and provide parental guidance advisories and support channels.

Third, most proprietary virtual worlds for children are isolated from the rest of the online world in the sense that there are no advertisements and hyperlinks which can lead children to unsecure third-party locales. Fourth, as most sites are monitored by adult chaperones and several prevent participants from sharing phone numbers or personal information with one another, policies and safeguards are in place to protect children from unwanted interactions. Fifth, virtual worlds for

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children often have an espoused educational purpose, with companies claiming that children can improve their literacy and social skills through participation in these worlds.

With children around the world using the Internet at younger and younger ages, virtual worlds for children are also growing in popularity. According to KZero (2010), a total of 570 million accounts for youth virtual worlds have been created, constituting more than 70% of virtual world accounts worldwide. To cater to rising demand, the market for children’s virtual worlds is expanding with one study estimating that 225 out of 366 virtual environments are targeted at kids aged 12 and below (Association of Virtual Worlds, 2008). The most popular of these worlds for the 6- to 10-year-old age group included Club Penguin, purchased by Disney in 2007 for $700 million, when it had increased its registered users by 329% over the previous year (Marketing Charts, 2007). Webkinz World, owned by Ganz and targeting 8- to 11-year-olds, claimed nearly 4 million unique visitors each month in 2010. Neopets, purchased by Viacom in 2005 for $160 million and appealing to 8- to 11-year-olds as well as a slightly older female audience, received about 1.5 million unique visitors each month in 2010 (Barnes, 2010). For the 10-to-15 year-old age group, Habbo Hotel had the largest number of visitors in 2010, with upwards of 15 million unique visitors a month thanks to tie-ins with the Twilight film series and MTV (PRWeb, 2010).

While these figures may seem impressive, it should be noted that the numbers participating in virtual worlds are relatively small and that such activity is only part of kids’ mediated experiences in their everyday lives. Nonetheless, with the rising adoption of home computers and the growing ubiquity of broadband Internet access, all online activity by kids, including their participation in virtual worlds, is set to intensify. As at 2010, 71% of households in developed countries own computers and 65.6% enjoy Internet access, with the corresponding figures for developing countries being 22.5% and 15.8% respectively (International Telecommunications Union, 2010). In addition, emerging trends in the organisation of family life also contribute to greater media use amongst kids (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998). In Europe and North America for example, families increasingly live some distance from work and school, and in many locales there is little sense of a neighbourhood in which young people can play outdoors safely. Now that parents are fearful that their children might encounter trouble due to a lack of supervision, young people spend more time in their own homes, and media provide a “safe”

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alternative to the outdoors. Even in Asia, where families place a strong emphasis on children’s academic performance, parents consider media diversions a convenient and productive way for children to relieve stress; and parents use media to incentivise good behaviour in their children by for example, granting time for watching television or playing computer games (Lim, 2008; 2009). In light of these concomitant trends, virtual worlds - with their immersive interactive environments and multiple affordances for exploration, sociability and self-discovery - are a significant addition to the slate of media options that children can access, and another key arena for play.

In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for understanding the space that virtual worlds occupy in children’s play and the ways in which children’s participation in them overlap with their everyday play experiences, both offline and mediated. We argue that virtual worlds can be viewed as sites of convergence for children’s play in that virtual worlds allow for almost all aspects of children’s play to converge, primarily manifested in the: "

convergence of social spheres

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convergence of play spaces and playthings

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convergence of cultures

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convergence of learning experiences

In the subsequent sections, we explain how such convergence, while presenting valuable opportunities for children to learn and develop, will not be fully exploited without a corresponding ability on the part of parents and children to recognise potential risks. We begin with a review of the role of play and learning in children’s lives.

Play, Learning, and Virtual Worlds Since the 19th century, people have struggled over the value of games and leisure in children’s lives, with some arguing that games are meant to function as educational tools and are detrimental when they fail to connect with educational goals (Cross, 1999; Fleming, 2006). Not surprisingly, there has been a great deal of suspicion about gaming, and about computers and electronically mediated gaming in particular (Levin & Rosenquest, 2001; Palmer, 2007). Many

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seem to see gaming as a distraction from the more focused efforts that are believed to be central to the educational achievement of children.

However, the value of children’s lives goes beyond what they must learn in order to achieve a developmentally successful adulthood; children are constantly learning from the people around them and from the environments in which they are located. Learning is part of what it means to be human, and thus its scope is much broader than the goals of education.

Moreover, learning is fundamentally a social practice rather than something that occurs in an individual’s head (Lave and Wagner, 1991). Thus, as more and more scholars have looked at the problems within the formal educational system, new avenues have opened for considering how, and where, children have opportunities to learn. Gardner’s (1993) influential work on multiple intelligences suggested that learning occurs best in a variety of differing complementary settings.

This led scholars to begin to consider how young people engage in play not just as an important leisure activity, but as a site for informal learning that occurs outside of, but in some relationship to, the formal learning that happens in school settings (Gee, 2003; Greenfield, 2009; Plowman, McPake, & Stephen, 2008).

Social and developmental psychologists have also been interested in the role of play in relation to learning and development. At the life-stage of 7-12 years, children transition from a mental state of “egocentrism” to “socialization”, and are keen to learn more about the world around them (Wadsworth, 1989). Hence, spontaneous play and exploration allow a cognitively and socially active child to observe relationships between people and things, and to observe how the physical world around him/her functions (Duncan & Lockwood, 2008). In their imaginary, make-believe play, children create elaborate worlds which are influenced in part by their exposure to media culture (Götz, Lemish, Aidmann & Moon, 2005). A number of people have therefore begun to argue that it is high time to pay greater attention to children’s play in order to learn more about how children themselves participate in learning and experiencing life through play (see, eg. Ito, 2004; Ito et.al., 2008). The articles in this special issue thus are contributors to this ongoing conversation about children’s play and about the new spaces in which play, learning, and identity-formation are occurring.

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Convergence of social spheres Most children first learn about virtual worlds such as Webkinz or Neopets from siblings,

relatives, or their friends at school. Like the girls introduced in the opening story of this article, when they are not in school together, young people enjoy playing with their “offline” school friends in these online locations. They also interact there with people they may not know offline, and, in some cases, they interact with their family members, as well. Thus, when they are engaged in play in virtual worlds, they are simultaneously interacting with a variety of people who play different roles in their everyday lives. This situation can bring about what Michael Wesch (2009) has termed “context collapse,” in which young people must negotiate between the social expectations of different groups at the same time. Sometimes, as Bleumers and Jacobs assert in this volume, family members find that virtual worlds can open up possibilities for new kinds of cross-generational interactions. In Bleumers and Jacobs’s study, different generations within the same family trialed an application which allowed them to set up a home in the virtual world, create avatars and communicate with one another using emoticons, moderated text or picture chat; and engage in individual and multiplayer mini-games. While the respondents were circumspect about the ability of virtual worlds to facilitate remote family interaction, they appreciated the increased offline interaction that it generated because it helped to bridge the children’s and adults' worlds.

In an exploration of the dyadic dynamics of parent-child interaction in a kids’ virtual world, Burley (this volume) reflects on exploring Club Penguin together with her daughter. She notes the joys of them sharing this virtual space as they become a ‘family of penguins’. She also airs her frustrations at being unable to sustain this virtual relationship with her daughter, who comes to view her mother’s penguin as not sufficiently ‘cool’ and in fact, as a source of embarrassment. Mother and daughter then find their own ways to negotiate these virtual tensions which threaten to seep into their everyday relationship. Indeed, just as people are beginning to gain awareness about the problems of “context collapse” within the social network site Facebook, children in virtual worlds are similarly experiencing new situations in which they must encounter and negotiate with people from differing parts of their lives as they attempt to interact within a common virtual world. Future research on virtual worlds for kids, therefore, might think more about how, with whom, and for what purposes kids enter these spaces. These entrances, exits,

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and negotiations should be considered in relation to privacy, so that certain spaces are reserved in which children may interact only with other children. Moreover, children need to be granted permission to determine when and under what circumstances they will interact with adults in these sites. Game designers and educators who would seek to maximize the potential of these spaces for learning need to respect the different social spheres in which young peoples’ social lives operate. In this regard, Meyers, Nathan and Unsworth (this volume) suggest that designers of children’s virtual worlds be more mindful of the tensions between safety and surveillance, and shift the responsibility for safety away from in-built technological features toward children and their adult caregivers, as well as to increase the transparency of technical features and surveillance practices so as to better educate users.

Convergence of play spaces and playthings Virtual worlds can also become important “third places” (the first being the family and the second, school communities), somewhat like public playgrounds, in that they serve as important spaces for children’s play, exploration and development (Oldenburg, 1991). Virtual worlds, as an additional “third place” for children, are unique in their permeability, facilitating the individuals’ transit from their offline worlds into their online lives (Castronova, 2005). In a virtual world, a child’s play spaces can converge in the sense that physical play spaces such as the child’s bedroom, the neighbourhood playground, the school classroom, the suburban mall etc., can all be replicated and augmented virtually. Similarly, children’s playthings can converge in virtual worlds through their online iterations. For example, virtual worlds which are associated with particular brands of toys such as Lego World and Littlest Pet Shop, enable children’s playthings to assume an online existence. Through the children’s manoeuvres in these virtual worlds, their playthings interact via and with avatars within these immersive, multi-layered environments, thus acquiring a complexity and “authenticity” of being that children’s offline play with these toys cannot quite approximate. Children can thus bring imaginative play from one platform to another, trying out interactions between stuffed animals, for instance, and then trying the same interactions when one’s avatar interacts with that of others. Of course, marketers, too, are aware of the potential for playthings and play spaces to intersect and overlap. Before a child could buy a Webkinz stuffed animal and play with it in virtual space, children could buy toys with tie-ins to children’s television programming and bring to life both scripted and

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imagined stories involving its beloved characters (Seiter, 1995). In an interesting example of online-offline migration of children’s play, Druin (2008) witnessed a group of seven and eight year olds using stuffed animals to recreate Webkinz’s online environment in their classroom which they had renamed Webkinz School, leading Druin to label Webkinz a ‘convergent toy’ (para. 2).

Notably, this convergence of play spaces and playthings has also been an important source of revenue, and controversy, in relation to the highly commercialized virtual worlds that host the highest number of young visitors. Although children are savvy about television advertising, they are less attuned to online “stealth marketing” (Calvert, 2008) because they fail to understand how web businesses profit from online product placement or user profiling and data mining (Seiter, 2005). To better grasp the implications of this trend, more scholars are studying how online spaces are being exploited for the purposes of marketing to children. For example, Flowers, Lustyik and Gulyás (this volume) review online junk food advergames targeted at children in Hungary and the UK. They observe that junk food advergames offer engaging virtual playgrounds that aggressively blend brand and product values with entertainment features. They note that regulators have responded to this insidious fusion of commercial and non-commercial content by stepping up public education programmes in ‘consumer literacy’, while some non-governmental organisations have innovatively developed their own advergames to promote healthy lifestyles.

Convergence of cultures Virtual worlds also provide a platform for children to experiment with identity formation because they are sites of cultural convergence. Cultures which are of particular salience in the lives of young people - an individual’s own culture, peer culture and media culture – can be experienced and asserted within virtual worlds. When children visit virtual worlds, they can use a range of tools to represent themselves and construct personal narratives. They can employ the language of peer culture and the images of media culture to create online instantiations of themselves that enjoy agency and autonomy. On BarbieGirls.com for example, a girl can be her own best version of Barbie by developing her very own Barbie-like avatar. This process of bricolage enables children to transpose their own personalities onto the avatars of pop culture icons, and a child could literally star in his/her own favourite cartoon. Through their avatars,

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children are also able to experiment with a variety of roles that might be quite different from those they adopt in their everyday lives. In one study of children’s uses of a virtual world, for instance, the researchers found that children adopted eight different roles: nurturers, explorerinvestigators, self-stampers, social climbers, fighters, power-users, life-system builders, and collector-consumers (Gauntlett & Jackson, 2008). Although this research did not capture all of the identity positions that are possible within virtual worlds, it does suggest that children can move in and out of roles and can find in these places opportunities for low-risk identity experimentation. For instance, Lu (this volume) recounts her “intense identity experimentation” within Neopets.com as she transitioned from a child to a tween, with her personal development reflected in the evolution of her avatars. However, the cultural convergence and identity formation that that is enabled by virtual worlds is circumscribed by the predefined scripts which companies offer. This sociotechnical scripting of the online space in terms of who one can be and what one can do is both limited and limiting. Furthermore, identity experimentation in a virtual world can be a potentially costly venture. As Lu herself discovered, the pressure for one’s avatar to have a unique outfit or special powers can be strong and such enhancements come at a price. Just as children feel the need to fit in in their daily interactions with friends, this instinct may be felt just as strongly, or perhaps even more so in the highly visual and visible online environment. Compelling demands from children for more money to spend on these online accoutrements, and parents’ resistance to acceding to them, can be a source of tension which families need to be prepared for. Future research on parental mediation of children’s Internet use should scrutinise this nexus between the financial and emotional burdens of mediating children’s explorations of virtual worlds. These financial aspects of parental mediation of children’s media use, although seemingly prosaic, can have very real implications for the quality for family relationships, as prior research on parent-child negotiations over mobile phone usage has demonstrated (Green & Haddon, 2009).

Convergence of learning experiences Virtual worlds are also a site of convergence for children’s learning experiences. These experiences vary in terms of what children are learning about (speech, text, visual representations, social interaction, civic participation etc.), modes of learning (observing, doing, experimenting, role-playing etc.), and the levels of autonomy children which enjoy while

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learning (independent, supervised, collaborative, distributed etc.).

With their complex,

immersive and multi-dimensional environments offering a spectrum of opportunities for children to exercise agency, virtual worlds facilitate these afore-mentioned learning experiences in a dynamic mix of combinations, potentially enabling the acquisition of multifarious skills. Jenkins (2009) argues that in the new media environment, children need new skills that build on and go beyond traditional literacy, research and analytical skills. These skills include (i) play, the ability to experiment with one’s surroundings in the course of problem-solving; (ii) performance, the ability to assume different identities during improvisation, (iii) simulation, the ability to create fluid models of real-world processes, (iv) distributed cognition, the ability to use tools that enhance one’s mental capacities and (v) transmedia navigation — the ability to keep up with narratives and information that transcend multiple modalities. Of the broad range of skills that Jenkins identified, the five listed here are the ones that can be exercised and honed within virtual worlds.

The learning experiences which virtual worlds afford children, as well as the skills which children can acquire through participating in them, are the focal point of two of the papers in this collection. Tuukkanen, Iqbal and Kankaanranta (this volume) review participatory practices in children’s virtual worlds and deliberate over the potential of these worlds to educate children about their civic life. They propose a framework for children’s participation in virtual worlds which views children as social actors, learners of civic participation and as citizens. To complement their framework, they surveyed children on their participatory practices in virtual worlds and found the children highly interested in socializing with friends and engaging in avatar-related activities, but less engaged in traditional forms of civic participation. With respect to children’s knowledge of health matters, Kafai and Fefferman (this volume) argue that virtual epidemics can play a critical pedagogical role in educating school children on the spread of infectious diseases. They surveyed Whyville players during an outbreak of the virtual epidemic Whypox in Whyville.net; and tracked their online movements and chat interactions before, during, and after the outbreak. They found that the players use their own experiences and observations of the community to learn about processes of infection and immunity, the interactions of social behaviour, and reactions to perceived health risk. With this understanding, Kafai and Fefferman develop a series of learning laboratories where students can experiment with different parameters in epidemic simulations, identify and develop vaccines, analyze

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archival records of past epidemics, and discuss ethical issues. The virtual environment thus affords a depth of exploration and experimentation that would be impossible to replicate in real life. These two papers provide compelling evidence of the educational potential of virtual worlds, while also acknowledging the limits to which educational objectives can be met.

Today’s commercially developed virtual worlds have some important precedents in both the educational and leisure realms. While many of today’s parents may remember the first time they participated in batting a white speck across a black screen in the primitive 1972 game of Pong, the 1980s and 1990s saw a transformation in the computer software design industry, with the rise of “edutainment” programs that sought to appeal to children while also attracting the dollars of the parents who wanted to harness the computer for learning (Ito, 2009). Electronic games with a distinctively educational mission first found success with the 1985 release of the popular game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. Since that time, Ito (2009) has observed three educational philosophies that have guided the development of software for children: instruction, exploration, and construction. Whereas virtual worlds for kids usually align most clearly with exploration as they allow for open-ended play, they also have the potential to engage young people in the process of creating and manipulating spaces. How well different sites provide spaces for such engagement, however, is part of an ongoing debate that future research on virtual worlds for children can seek to advance.

Opportunities, risks and scaffolding As Livingstone (2007) observes, online risks and opportunities are inextricably linked in that the very medium that affords opportunities also introduces risks. In this regard, virtual worlds are certainly no exception. Given the relative novelty of virtual worlds for children, and the technological challenges which parents may encounter in supervising children’s play in them, the tried and tested mediation strategies applied to children’s television viewing (e.g. Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, & Marseille, 1999) or general Internet use (e.g. Eastin, Greenberg & Hofschire, 2006) cannot be easily migrated to this new realm.

But virtual worlds are also spaces in which young people find meaning and enjoyment with their peers.

They offer challenges, rewards, and opportunities to learn through

experimentation, and as children experiment, they also learn the value of patience and

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perseverance in problem-solving. Prensky (2006) has argued that games teach children about cause and effect relationships, long-term winning versus short term gains, creating order from chaos, complex system behaviours, counter-intuitive results, the use of obstacles as motivation, and the value of persistence. Most children engage in virtual worlds from their home, giving parents an opportunity to discuss these aspects of learning and to draw connections between such informal learning and the goals of formal education. Parents and older relatives can help children learn to make positive choices about what worlds they enter and for what length of time, and they can model critical questioning of materials and interactions found in those worlds.

Additionally, as young people often have greater expertise and comfort with digital and mobile media than their parents, new media such as virtual worlds can also provide family members with opportunities to experience role reversals: a child can become the teacher to the parent, a situation that can allow the parent to demonstrate respect for the child’s ability to learn and exhibit mastery (Ribak, 2001; Clark, 2010).

Those who care about young people know that transformative things can happen when children have a stake in what they are learning and sharing with others. The challenge for parents and educators, therefore, is to bridge the increasing gap between how educators teach, and how young people find meaning in what they are learning (Davidson and Goldberg, 2009).

In this process, educators, policymakers, and parents must be encouraged to find positive alternatives to the discourse of negative media effects so that they can begin to rethink the positive potential that digital media affords in scaffolding learning. Educators continue to realize the benefits of working closely with the people in the child’s home environment to scaffold learning across the various settings of the child. This is evident in the work of Siibak and Vinter (this volume), who provide an overview of teacher perceptions regarding young children’s internet use and media education in pre-schools. Through focus-group interviews with Estonian pre-school teachers, they find that teachers consider the role of the family on children’s computer use to be more significant compared to their own.

Conclusion Today’s children are growing up in a wired world full of gadgets. At the same time, parents experience ever-increasing demands on their time due to a 24/7 workplace.

With

increased structured child supervision and escalating expectations within formal school settings,

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many children have less unstructured time for play with peers, even as they have greater access to the digital realm than ever before. As a result, there is a great need for children to have dedicated online spaces that encourage imaginative play and interaction.

Such play areas are still in development, however, and are largely, although not exclusively, emerging in the realms of edutainment and commercially-driven ventures. These spaces raise new questions and are encouraging all stakeholders to rethink what we expect with regard to play, learning, cultural barriers, and risks. Future research must continue to explore questions such as: how is learning best encouraged through online virtual worlds, and how can this learning be linked with the goals of literacy, self-development, and educational achievement?

How do virtual worlds help their young participants to preserve or overcome cultural barriers?

What policies are appropriate for regulating these spaces to minimize commercial intrusion while maximizing individual and collective creativity? And how can parents, educators, policymakers, and game designers work together to maximize potentially positive outcomes?

In this editorial and throughout this special issue, we have explored the ways in which virtual worlds for children may be understood in relation to convergences of social spheres, of play spaces and playthings, of cultures, and of learning experiences. Each of the papers in this issue provides empirical evidence which illustrates different facets of such convergence, providing in their totality an overview of children’s play in virtual worlds and lending insight into the perspectives of the different stakeholders – families, parents, educators, governments, corporations and of course, the children themselves. In putting together this special issue, we recognise that virtual worlds are assuming a growing presence in children’s lives and are thus worthy of greater academic attention, with this issue being a small but significant step in advancing the knowledge of this area. We believe that studies of virtual worlds open up and speak to concerns likely to be of relevance to many scholarly fields. The articles here mark an important step in taking the conversation forward.

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