Minecraft: Emerging Digital Tool for Assessment Among a Virtual Community for Children with Autism

Introduction: Currently, 1 in 59 children are diagnosed with autism by the age of 8, underscoring the importance of continuing research on interventions and support for these individuals. Children with autism find face-to-face communication challenging. To accommodate these challenges, a community of parents have created a safe online environment through the virtual world of Minecraft specifically for their children with autism to play and socialize. Minecraft is an open-ended, free-play game, where players can interact in a virtual world and express individuality and creativity during play, with no particular goals or play requirements. 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. However, not much research has investigated this technological platform. Methods: This work reports on results from a three-year digital ethnography, including 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. 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. 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. The focus of this presentation will be two-fold: to speak in-depth about 1) the methods used in this work as a means to capture information about a difficult-to-reach population in the space they are comfortable and 2) emerging themes from this approach relevant to the prevention science audience, such as the construction of safe spaces in online contexts and the persistence of friendships across physical and digital spaces. Conclusions: This work has important implications both for novel assessment among vulnerable populations via emerging technologies and healthy online communities for these vulnerable populations.