Researching mental health in a virtual world for teens

Our experience with Teen Second Life login processes suggests that we are probably the first Australians to work in this teen-only environment. That’s quite a unique, unexpected and exciting position to be in. But it also raises some interesting questions and possibilities for research, including:

• how do we frame our research when there are a lack of precedents in this area?
• how does a Second Life-type environment differ from other technologies in terms of how young people use it to construct/augment their identity and relate to others?
• what’s the impact of virtual worlds on life in the real world for young people?
• and what methods do we use to research this, given that environments like Teen Second Life carry with them a different set of constantly evolving tools and restrictions (eg ability to export transcripts of written chats/actions vs movement towards voice chat that doesn’t generate transcripts, ability to conduct in-world surveys and interviews and their merits/issues) as well as what mix we should engender between data collected from real and virtual contexts?

There’s a lot to think through now that the real project action is about to begin.

We’re in!

A breakthrough this week after a frustrating period of waiting - we are finally able to get our young people into Teen Second Life. TSL is the makers of Second Life’s ‘teen only’ virtual world, where we have bought an island.

As a result of Second Life’s age verification processes not working for non-US folks, we’ve needed to engage a developer who specialises in providing custom login processes. He has now finished his work, and we’re now officially ready to start working with our young people, and gathering research data.

The ‘low-lying fruit’ quandry

One thing we’ve discovered thus far is that working with the more disadvantaged young people is rewarding but can be all-consuming. It’s in fact much easier to go to a school to find a ready-made cohort of multiple participants rather than work to attract an ‘opt-in’ cohort of disadvantaged young people, who may or may not keep turning up. It’s an interesting dilemma that we’ve heard others talk about - we’re here to work with young people of all backgrounds, but sometimes it’s the higher achievers still at school who are more likely to engage with programs like ours.

After discussing with VicHealth, we’ll most probably continue working with both school groups and youth agencies  - ie a mix of participant types. One thing we’ve  found that there are shades of grey in all of this too: a school in a low socio-economic area may have better computer facilities and more motivated kids than in a leading ‘high achiever’ school, where teachers are interested in our project as a way of addressing chronic truancy problems. It’s probably best to keep our minds open and keep trying out new avenues and see where they take us.

Setting up Teen Second Life - some issues

Setting up to work with Teen Second Life has its issues. Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, have developed Teen Second Life as a way to quarantine under-18s from any inappropriate content or people they may encounter in the main world. But this has caused its own issues, namely:

• only under 18s are allowed into Teen Second Life. Any over 18s working with young people need to complete a background check through an external company (it costs around $85 per person). Finding out how this happens is quite difficult - the Second Life website isn’t big on clear and simple information, and the ‘concierges’ (online help folk) can take a while to answer email queries. We have also found that the communication between the security company and Linden Labs isn’t perfect, and for a while we didn’t know what to do - we couldn’t get into the Teen Second Life island we’d bought and our emails weren’t being answered. (After one more strident email we did hear back - Linden Labs hadn’t known that we had completed our security checks some weeks before and we therefore hadn’t been authorised to be able to access the Teen Second Life world.) To buy and maintain an island in Teen Second Life for costs around A$2,500, which is a lot when you can’t use what you’ve paid for! It did eventually get sorted out but took a lot of chasing up.
• We found that the registration process for teens in TSL was problematic. It works through Linden Labs confirming identities through mobile phone contact…but it doesn’t work for non-US mobiles. Instead, Linden Labs apologised, said they’re working on it, and told us to work with an approved Second Life developer to develop a custom solution - which will cost us an extra $US500.
• A more general issue is related to working with groups that span the under and over 18 age groups. The Teen Second Life environment is totally separate to the main Second Life grid, which means that you can’t move from one to the other and it’s very hard to take stuff you’ve built in one environment to the other world. So in effect you end up with two separate environments which can create an artificial division in the project.

So there you have it - the downsides of working in Teen SL. Why, then, you may ask, are we continuing to work with Second Life? For a number of reasons:

• it’s a very popular environment and already has some cache with young people
• it’s easy to create Avatars, houses, cars, environments etc in the world - and so far the young people we’ve worked with seem to find this empowering
• it’s an environment designed for both augmentation of identity and social communication of a kind, so is an interesting, growing and still somewhat edgy space, despite its obvious limitations and issues
• it’s easy to record and export transcripts of chat and activity, which helps us in our research

Avatar at Western secondary college (and our first blog post!)

Welcome to the ongoing adventure that is the development of the Avatar project! Feel free to comment on any posts you read - we’d love to hear from you.

Currently we’re working with a secondary college in the West of Melbourne as a test case in the rollout of the Teen Second Life based Avatar project. In doing so we’ve struck some issues that we will detail over the coming months. It’s never a dull moment when working with engaging young folks through new and sometimes untried technologies…

Our  classes run during students’ lunch time - from 12.55 to 1.35. We’re located in a well appointed media studio where the school already runs media projects. Five young people rolled up to our most recent class plus teachers - there have been around 15 involved in all to date; it’s kind of a rotating cast, with some new folk arriving weekly. At our latest class, these students all had a go at making Avatars (virtual characters) in Teen Second Life.

Currently we’re sometimes a little stymied in our efforts by a couple of technical and timing factors. Firstly, we’re finding that the lunch hour is not long enough for participants to really ‘get into’ the program. A possible solution we’re investigating is to organise with teachers to run the program from the last class of the day and over into after-school time, or from a class into lunch time. The former has duty of care issues associated with it, however, that we would need to work through, such as working out how students would get safely home.

We have also had some issues with slow Internet connections. Second Life really needs a decent reliable web connection to work well. What we’ve done to mitigate this is to sign up for Three Mobile Broadband accounts - we take the wireless modems with us, stick them into our laptops and away we go. Currently we have wo laptops - we may need to get more so everyone gets a fair go.

 

Welcome to ‘Posts from the field’

This journal-style blog will follow the efforts of an intrepid crew of health promotion project partners.  Stefan and Justin are managing an innovative ‘youth-tech’ project called Avatar.  They are exploring what might be achieved to promote the social inclusion of otherwise disconntected young people through a youth-created virtual world.  

Internet-based virtual worlds are often seen as potentially threatening to young people’s mental health and wellbeing.  This project seeks to explore what might be the positive benefits of this new realm of social interaction.