Improving Family Co-Play Experiences through Family-Centered Design

TL;DR

This paper explores how to design user-generated virtual worlds to reduce harms that disrupt family co-play, focusing on improving safety and bonding in platforms like Roblox.

Contribution

It introduces family-centered design principles aimed at minimizing interactive harms in virtual worlds to enhance family co-play experiences.

Findings

Identifies key harms disrupting family co-play in UGVWs.

Proposes design strategies to mitigate harms and support positive family interactions.

Abstract

Cooperative play (co-play) is often positioned as a family-beneficial practice that can strengthen parent-child bonds and support parental mediation in games. Yet co-play in user-generated virtual worlds (UGVWs) can be disrupted by real-time harms that parents cannot easily prevent. Roblox, a platform with millions of user-generated virtual worlds and a large child player base, illustrates this challenge. Prior work on harmful UGVW design highlights risks beyond content problems, including manipulative monetization prompts, unmoderated social interactions, emergent in-world behaviors, and narrative designs that may normalize harmful ideologies. Current governance and moderation approaches, largely adapted from social media, focus on static artifacts and often fail to capture interactive and emergent harms in virtual worlds. This workshop paper asks: how might UGVWs and their platforms be designed to minimize harms that specifically impair family co-play experiences?