The Benefits of Online Play: An Investigation of Virtual Worlds for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: Children with autism and their families participate in virtual worlds, a persistent digital environment which participants can access via the internet and interact with one another. Previous work has shown how parents create safe online environments within virtual worlds for their children with autism to play and socialize without fear (Ringland et al., 2015). Play is an important part of childhood development and these virtual worlds provide a space to play that is free from bullying and harassment, dangers often encountered in other environments children with autism play in. Minecraft is an open-ended, free-play type of game, where players can interact in a virtual world with no particular goals or play requirements. The open-endedness of Minecraft allows for an expression of individuality and creativity during play, which may make the game particularly compelling for players. Minecraft allows players to interact with others and be as socially engaged as the individual player desires in a procedurally generated virtual world. This allows for a freedom of expression and open play for children participating in a Minecraft virtual world. Parents have created and maintain a Minecraft virtual world specifically for their children with autism.

Objectives: To explore the role that virtual worlds play in the daily lives of children with autism, including potential therapeutic benefits.  

Methods: This work reports on results from an ongoing digital ethnography.  The digital ethnography includes immersive participant observations in the virtual world, analysis of digital artifacts associated with the virtual world’s community, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with players of the virtual world. This study is structurally similar to others conducted with disability communities in virtual worlds, such as Irani et al.’s work in Second Life (2008). In-world observations include participating in activities on the server, recording dialogue as it appears in the chat, and writing extensive field notes on everyday practices and events as they occur in the virtual world. Researcher participation in the world also included building an in-world home office that acts as a home-base for in-world activities and enabled other players to visit and ask the researcher questions, as the researcher’s presence and purpose were made clear to the community through announcements on Autcraft web forums and through in-world chat. We used an inductive approach to derive the emergent themes from our data, following techniques similar to those employed in grounded theory.  

Results: We will present the results of our observations and interviews to illustrate how families of children with autism integrate technology such as virtual worlds into their daily living and how these types of play may be beneficial.  

Conclusions: Virtual worlds have the potential to be an important part of a child with autism’s daily living experience. Members of the Minecraft virtual world form relationships with each other and participate in group-play, which is an important part of development for children with autism.