Högskolan i Skövde

In this chapter we discuss games from an embodiment perspective and illustrate the importance of a particular category of embodied experience where perception, action, and socio-cultural context are closely interrelated. The embodied experiences we have in mind relate to young children’s learning, in particular to understanding the abstract concept of risk awareness. We are interested in how young people can grasp this concept through embodied experiences mediated by a computer game. Online risk is inherently abstract for young children and as such is difficult to grasp due to their level of cognitive maturity. Since the abstract concept is not grounded in experience, it needs to be made concrete through their own hands-on experience. The overarching purpose is to enable young children to make sound decisions when faced with uncomfortable or even threatening situations during online interactions. The experiences we discuss include both game experiences and what we term pre-experiences which may be remembered at a later point in time when faced with real-world events.

While much of the games research field for the last two decades has focused on digital games, this article draws attention to the benefits of combining analogue and digital game components to cater for a serious but fun game experience. In this case, the game design provides a set of game rules for players, where the goal is to win by finding another player’s hidden treasure. But, the game also includes deceptive characters, initially unknown to the players, whose goal is to lure the players to reveal information, which will make a player lose the game. Hence, the players and the unknown characters are involved in opposite but intertwined activities. To describe the differing activities we use the activity system model foundin Activity Theory. The theoretical conceptualisation, the game design and the play situation create what we term a zone of experience where young players can experience the consequences of sharing too much information. The game design mimics real world online interactions, but under safe off-line conditions. The zone of experience also creates the foundation for an ensuing activity that fits well within the concept of the zone of proximal development: A follow-up conversation under adult guidance of game experiences aimed at raising children’s online risk awareness.

Developing children's games that concern sensitive subjects such as online sexual grooming obviously poses a number of challenges. Such challenges include, for instance, the sensitivity of the topic itself, the ethics surrounding the subject matter, and the need to bypass inappropriate language while also creating a game that children will want to play. This paper describes a computer game development project in which a game for 8-10-year-old children was created with the purpose to raise young peoples' risk awareness in online interactions such as multi-user gaming and social networking. The game's mechanics are based on our extensive studies of naturalistic online dialogues derived from closed-forum dialogues between children and later-convicted perpetrators. The perpetrators' tactics and strategies were transferred into game events but in a non-sexual and non-violent format. The game, Hidden in the Zoo, combines a classic board game, a computer game, and augmented reality technology. The traditional game board can be viewed on a tablet that transfers the basic picture on the board into an exciting 3D world. The game's setting is a zoo. To play, each player hides a treasure and is then given a set of clues to the location of the player's own hiding place. The players need to be mindful of the clues to the hiding place so that other players cannot find their treasure. Beyond this basic game premise, the game also contains messages, similar to online chats or text messages, through which players can choose whether or not to reveal a clue, bearing in mind that revealing a clue may or may not be a good idea in the long run. The game is now a fully playable prototype, and initial results show that the game serves as a tool for generating discussions about possible actions and consequences within the game but also in real life. Hence, the game provides a means to empower young children through raised risk awareness.

This paper describes the use of the WOz method in the development of a prototype for a multi-player mixed reality game for children. It is an adventure game with hidden treasures, clues to hiding places, and information that should not be revealed. The game design, however, includes deceptive elements aimed at luring players to give up information. The game’s underlying intent is to raise children’s online risk awareness. The WOz was used in the early developmental stage to evaluate and explore the game concept, and to find a way to synchronise and integrate different in-game processes. We describe four central game mechanics for which the wizarding proved to be highly useful. We also discuss some ethical aspects related to the method a such as well as to the game design. In sum, we found the WOz method as such to be very useful for game design and development.

This paper presents a game-based approach for raising young children's online risk awareness, to decrease the risk of becoming the subject of sexual grooming. Hidden in the Park is an adventure game, including a classic game board and a tablet with Augmented Reality-technology. The game mechanics are based on data from true grooming processes. The game's target group is children aged 8-10 years. This paper describes the game development, from a prototype to an approved release version that will be released as a non-profit product during 2019. We describe the creation of the game mechanics, the iterative development process, and game evaluation. 25 pupils in the target group participated, but the ages 7-12 (n=70) were included to evaluate whether the game would suit the intended target group. Results show that the game is fun and engaging but that it also raise questions concerning online activities.

This paper describes the development and evaluation of the innovative computer game Hidden in the Park, for 8–10 year old children. It is a mixed media game that includes classic game elements and Augmented Reality technology. It is a non-profit game designed for a playful game experience. But, it is also a serious game intended to raise young childrens’ risk awareness in online interactions, to decrease the risk of becoming the subject of online sexual grooming. The game is intended to evoke thoughts and reflections related to players’ decisions and their consequences. Furthermore, the game is based on research on true online grooming processes, which provides the basis for some central game mechanics. Game evaluations were carried out with 70 children in school settings. The results show that the participants perceived the game as fun and engaging, but that it also raised questions and reactions, as intended. Hidden in the Park will be released during 2019 and it will be available for free download. 

A pre-study of spectators' perspectives on eSports was conducted in collaboration with two Swedish game development companies. The main goal was to identify factors that contribute to qualitative spectator experiences and how they can influence game design. A qualitative approach was chosen to explore spectators' perspectives on eSports through observations and focus-group interviews of 28 participants in total. Results indicate that spectatorship is a complex issue that goes beyond the mere watching of a game. We identified four themes that are important for qualitative spectator experiences: the need for an overview of game events; highlighting and exposing hidden objects and events; viewer- and commentator-friendly game pacing; the importance of professional commentators and casters. Based on the results, we present design guidelines and recommendations for the development of games in eSports.

A number of different coordination concepts have been developed to explain how individual activities are coordinated on a social level, and the variety of concepts shows there is an interest in many domains to find such explanations. Stigmergy being one of them, has come to be increasingly applied on various kinds of human activities. In other domains we find other concepts for explaining how environmental resources contribute to work activities or how people use them to structure their work. This paper discusses different coordination concepts, including stigmergy, articulation work, coordination mechanisms, triggers, placeholders, and entry points. The first three concepts are explicitly concerned with coordination among several agents, while the last three instead concern individual activities, but arguably they can be extended to the social level. They also bring an explicitly cognitive dimension to coordination, which is not as salient in the former concepts. The concepts discussed here do have some similarities, but also important differences. They may not be interchangeable, but they could complement each other, or contribute to further elaboration of existing concepts. The stigmergic sign, e.g., could usefully be developed to recognise qualitative differences in its role as a coordination mechanism.

While online social networking sites and other digital media provide a means for positive online experiences, they are also being misused for offences like online sexual grooming. Attempts have been made to analyse and model online grooming in order to understand this kind of predator behaviour (e.g., O’Connell, 2004; Williams et al., 2013). This research, and the resulting models of the grooming process, is however, invariably based on material where adult decoys (e.g., researchers, law enforcement officers, adults trained to entrap offenders) pose as children in the interaction with potential offenders. We argue that such material, i.e., decoy-offender chat logs, does not reflect real grooming processes; Decoys have an underlying agenda to make prosecutable cases against offenders, which entails decoys resorting to manipulation tactics otherwise typical for offender behaviour. In all essence, this often leads to a dialogue with two adults using grooming tactics on each other, and the resulting models do not capture the patterns of child-offender dialogues.

Contrary to previous research, we have analysed real-world child-offender chat logs from closed forums. Our data set, selected dialogues (ca. 500 pages) from a corpus of ca. 12 000 A4-pages was thematically analysed and categorised using NVivo 10 software. The coding was done by both authors for inter-rater reliability. Where coding differed, the authors explored the categorisation until agreement was reached (cf., Whittle et al., 2013). The material was also compared to decoy-offender chat logs (ca. 100 pages, publically available on perverted-justice.com).

The analysis of the different data sets reveal quite different pictures of the grooming process. While previous models describe the grooming process as sequential (O’Connell, 2004) or thematic (Williams et al., 2013), our findings suggest a far more complex behavioural pattern – significantly diverse dialogue patterns with different tactics emerge, depending on whether the respondent is a decoy or a child, and their respective responses. The (preliminary) results show differences in both dialogue and process structure. Dialogues with decoys commonly show what can best be described as “artificial compliance”, presumably due to their underlying agenda of generating prosecutable cases. Furthermore, decoys tease out personal information from the offenders, and also share “personal” information about themselves, even when not asked for it.

Child-offender dialogues instead show patterns of reluctance or objections to offender requests for personal information, suggestions of sexual nature, etc. Another offender tactic is threats to obtain compliance, which was not found in any of the analysed decoy-offender dialogues. Other deviations include differences in dialogue length, number of dialogue turns, and complexity, with regard to changes in topics and offender tactics. Further research is necessary for a more thorough understanding of online grooming, and new models are needed that reflect real-world grooming processes. This includes offender behaviours, reasoning, decisions, and tactics used in grooming. Further, such knowledge is of outmost importance for risk awareness measures for young people so they can better cope with online challenges and risks, and make sensible judgements and decisions in online interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to promote sustainability as an important research topic within the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community. CSCL can play a crucial role in the achievement of sustainability, which is paramount for the well-being of current and future generations. While CSCL brings formal educational settings to mind, computers and cooperative learning should be considered in a wider perspective since learning also takes place in and through people’s everyday practices. This paper considers two on-going research projects outside mainstream CSCL research, to illustrate ways that technology can lead to changed practices for the benefit of increased environmental and social sustainability. The projects concern children’s online practices and social sustainability, and information and communication technology (ICT) and practices in sustainable agriculture, respectively.