Improving Family Co-Play Experiences through Family-Centered Design
For families using platforms like Roblox, this work highlights design challenges in co-play safety, but is an early-stage workshop paper with no empirical validation.
The paper identifies interactive and emergent harms in user-generated virtual worlds that disrupt family co-play, and proposes a family-centered design approach to minimize these harms, though no concrete results are presented.
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?