Animation Blog

Lucky you if you’ve never experienced the pain of being bullied – so much more if you are the bully itself. But bullying has been one of the consistent problems of school interactions and many children have had some lasting traumatic effect because of this. Now we have an unexpected element trying its hand at solving this social problem: virtual worlds.

So it all boils down to the EU-funded project eCIRCUS (which means Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-Playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction). That might be a bit long-winded but what’s important here is their belief that those age-old problems such as bullying and scapegoating can be solved when these bullies participate actively in virtual dramas.

We know that bullies can be a bit macho or adamant so how can you get them to participate in this undertaking. The video game nature of virtual worlds is cool enough to bypass this macho concern. The eCIRCUS people created free online virtual worlds where the users can interact, eventually leading to behavioral change.

So there are two eCIRCUS programs that are important here FearNot! And ORIENT.

FearNot! acts as the virtual world which readily attends to those bullied and emotionally frail children. The key train of thought in this virtual world is that bullied children will help other bullied victims – in so doing they will try to deal with their own.

Imagine how you seemingly try to find the solution to your problem just by talking to your friend and bouncing around ideas. That’s the essence of FearNot!

“We are the first people to produce software for dealing with bullying that is not pre-scripted,” says eCIRCUS coordinator Ruth Aylett. “We’ve produced something that is genuinely interactive to the individual responses of each child.”

On the other hand, ORIENT has a more complicated 3D look and is tailored for newcomers in a school. It revolves around the saving of Planet Orient which is being populated by aliens called Sprytes.

While it sounds like a real video game, that’s because it really is and the subliminal message here is for users to integrate with the society of the alien Sprytes. The Sprytes are a metaphor to a new culture and society which needs to be appreciated.

“We wanted users to feel adrift in this alien culture,” says Aylett. “How can you empathise with new people in your own culture if you’ve never experienced being adrift yourself? There’s no fixed plot. Our characters are acting autonomously, making up their minds as they go.”

Bullying and other social problems in children have lots to do with the integration of a newcomer into a society. Classrooms are mini-societies which solicit the attention of gamers. ORIENT prepares this student about the intricacies of such an activity.

So if you’re a student and you can tell to your parents that you can play a video game inside the school, wouldn’t you be excited? This is where most of the allure of virtual worlds for education comes from. It takes advantage of this enthusiasm of children to state a point about how they should interact in an environment.

I guess that’s a point for the side of the fence which believes that video games are not for violence alone.

Who says that entertainment and education can never go hand in hand? When it comes to children, it is important to understand that parents and the faculty members have been students and children before – but children have never been adults. So this process of stepping in the shoes of the youth is definitely the way to go.