Improving Family Co-Play Experiences through Family-Centered Design

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Zinan, Gui, Xinning, Kou, Yubo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Zinan
Gui, Xinning
Kou, Yubo
author_facet Zhang, Zinan
Gui, Xinning
Kou, Yubo
contents 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?
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_23596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Family Co-Play Experiences through Family-Centered Design
Zhang, Zinan
Gui, Xinning
Kou, Yubo
Human-Computer Interaction
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?
title Improving Family Co-Play Experiences through Family-Centered Design
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23596