Improving Family Co-Play Experiences through Family-Centered Design

2026-02-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges posed by real-time interactive harms—such as manipulative monetization and unmoderated social interactions—in user-generated virtual worlds like Roblox, which significantly disrupt co-play experiences within families. Traditional governance mechanisms relying on static content moderation are ill-equipped to manage dynamic, emergent risks inherent in these environments. To bridge this gap, the project introduces a family-centered design approach that prioritizes shared family play as a core design objective. Integrating human-computer interaction research with platform governance strategies, it proposes a risk prevention framework tailored to domestic contexts, identifies critical intervention points, and articulates actionable design principles. These contributions enhance parental agency and engagement, thereby improving both the safety and quality of parent-child co-play in virtual worlds.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Mitigating online harms, including harassment, spam, and fake reviews
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

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?

Problem

• family co-play
• user-generated virtual worlds
• interactive harms
• emergent harms
• parental mediation

Innovation

• Family-Centered Design
• Co-Play
• User-Generated Virtual Worlds
• Emergent Harms
• Interactive Moderation