Tackling the bullying problem through virtual drama
The act of intimidating a weaker person to make them do something, or simply bullying has been considered as one of the major problems in Europe. Its negative effects on children include educational under-achievement, physiological disturbance, possible occasional self-harm and even suicide under certain situations. Until now, there has been a lack of a general approach that prevents development of standards and sharing, reuse and exploitation of studies' results. Challenged by this, the VICTEC project explores the potential of interactive drama in virtual environments using autonomous agents as characters and involving children through personifications. With the focus on Personal and Social Education (PSE), researchers addressed the emotional and empathic aspects of the learning process. One of the main project achievements was the development of the FearNot! demonstrator in the area of bullying and aggressive behaviour. More specifically, the demonstrator comes in two versions, a scripted and an emergent one, the latter being driven by character interaction. Both versions are similarly structured including an introduction to characters and situation as well as three scenarios where a bully character attempts to intimidate a victim character. The victim occasionally visits the library, where the child user offers advice to the victim on what to do. Initially, the scripted version involved only text output, but it was later updated to also include speech recorded for character utterances in both physical and relational bullying. The emergent version allows character action through selection from a repertoire of actions with an amount of physical indeterminacy, which makes the exact sequence of events and final outcome unpredictable. The scripted version was evaluated in three countries on a large scale, while for the emergent version only a small scale evaluation was conducted in Portugal.
