With rising population mobility, whether for economic, social or cultural factors, we are increasingly placed in situations where many cultural, ethnic and religious groups must live and work together. However, there is frequently disharmony and conflict, with negative effects ranging from social exclusion to assault. Whilst all members of society need to develop skills and abilities that ensure social cohesion and well-being, it is well recognized that young people particularly benefit from focused social and emotional learning experiences [3]. Providing teenagers with strategies to cope with violence and ostracism could result in fewer children being academically, economically and socially damaged, avoiding truancy, a decline in school performance, physical and mental health problems and suicide.

To enable teenagers to develop integration strategies there is a clear need to support their social and emotional learning, providing them with both knowledge and experience to support their future actions. Although it can be difficult to provide teenagers with experiential learning required for such complex social situations, recent developments in games and virtual environments now offer an ideal approach for supporting such learning, in a safe and secure manner either at home or in the classroom [2]. However, whilst virtual environments offer clear potential, quite how the virtual environment is designed and the learning provided provokes significant ethical issues.   This paper focuses on a European project, eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with Emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction). eCIRCUS is developing a new approach in the use of Information Technology to support social and emotional learning within Personal and Social Education [1]. This will be achieved through virtual role-play with synthetic characters in a 3D environment that establishes credible and empathic relations with the learners.   Interaction is based on the use of modern theories of narrative and role-play from psychology and implementing them in affectively-driven autonomous graphically embodied agents. In the eCIRCUS project, we are developing ORIENT (Overcoming Refugee Integration using Empathic Novel Technology), an application aimed at 13-14 year olds focusing on the development of intercultural empathy as a basis for effective integration strategies. This application is focused on host nation teenagers and how they can help integration occur, rather than on providing incomers with strategies to enable them to integrate.

ORIENT aims to provide teenagers with the strategies to move from “Us” and “Them” to “We.” The basic framework underlying our design of ORIENT are the “three whats:” What? So what? and Now what? Our aim is to create a virtual learning environment that:

1. provides teenagers with an awareness of integration challenges and problems
2. enables them to understand and analyse the situation and the environment
3. provides them with appropriate behaviours and actions to improve the situation and to facilitate integration to occur.

eCIRCUS has involved teenagers from the beginning of the project. From discussions with UK 13-14 year olds, their understanding and awareness of issues for refugees, economic migrants and immigrants is very limited. They also have relatively unsophisticated views on understanding “otherness,” and even girls, who are typically more socially sophisticated than boys at this age have very few strategies for supporting integration. From discussions with stakeholders (e.g. teachers, educationalists, refugee and ethnic minority agencies) this lack of awareness, knowledge and experience reinforces segregation and prevents integration. In designing ORIENT’s virtual cultures a major issue was how realistic does a virtual learning environment need to be to support integration strategy development. After competitive analysis of other games and virtual environments and discussions with users and stakeholders, we determined that ORIENT should be set in a novel, quasi-real environment with humanistic characters. The novelty, that is not resembling any actual or historical setting, will reduce user assumptions relating to culture. However, through using humanistic characters in a quasi-realistic setting the user will be able to understand and possibly empathise with the characters’ actions.

A second issue relates to the teenagers’ understanding of ORIENT’s purpose. Creating an environment where the purpose is explicitly to learn integration strategies is unlikely to have much success with this age group. Many teenagers raised the issue of personal, social and emotional education having a patronizing approach, with very obvious responses taught and limited flexibility offered. Thus, we have decided to mask ORIENT’s purpose, creating instead a games world where the aim is to prevent an environmental disaster rather than to explicitly learn about integration. In our prototypical version of ORIENT we will provide three cultures, with the user being in the position of “Other” in all three and with the user needing to gain integration into each culture to enable them to avoid the environmental catastrophe.

With the computational architecture, virtual environment and basic plot of the application determined, our main ethical issues have related to how we represent different cultures, the concept of otherness and integration strategies. The primary consideration has been how to represent diversity between our three cultures, yet to ensure that this difference does not result in cultures that are inferior to or less valuable than others. Related to this has been the treatment and expectations of the genders in the created cultures. Although many contemporary, historical and fictitious cultures have considerable differences in the treatment of men and women, typically with women having less rights, wealth and power, we have rejected any distinction based on gender. We feel that this is an important issue and that it is essential that teenagers are not provided with inappropriate gender roles and status.

Diversity could be revealed through the use of character skin colour or physical appearance. Using semi-realistic characters representing a range of ethnic groups, initial screenings with teenagers identified that they label the characters with existing ethnicities and make certain assumptions related to what the characters will be like, based on fairly broadbrush, tabloid-based understanding of contemporary cultures. The use of impossible skin colouring, such as blue, yellow and green, whilst initially appearing to be too obvious and simplistic has found favour with the intended age group. Notably, teenagers continue to label the characters with contemporary cultures where clothing styles that are strongly associated with particular religious and ethnic groups are used, irrespective of skin colouring. Typically, teenagers were not very positive about characters and cultures that represent contemporary society, unless the culture and character depicted had a high similarity with their own. This has highlighted the need to create unreal cultures that only exist in the virtual world. However, reducing reality brings with it the problem of ensuring that the characters behaviour is understandable, believable and relevant to the teenager interacting with ORIENT.

From analysis with teenagers we have found that their focus is very often on detail, with cliques and groups often defined by clothes, accessories and devices (e.g. mobile phones). At present, we are developing the explicit representation of such items, attempting to ensure that each culture, when viewed holistically in terms of appearance, interaction, dialogue and character behaviour is ranked equally positively. Teenagers are being asked to rate our designs in terms of their interest in living in such a culture.   We are also seeking to use technology to create difference, through the use of innovative input devices, with each culture using an alternative communication mechanism. The communication format also enables us to differentiate dialogue, with certain formalisms being incorporated into the speech of the characters. Learning to communicate using a new approach allows us to provide teenagers with the sense of otherness and of being outside of a culture, both in terms of the device used and the linguistic approach required for interaction.

Currently, we are developing our prototypical characters, sets and scenarios that will underpin the cultural differences of ORIENT. In our attempts to find an ethical approach to representing cultural difference for teenagers, our main intention is to provide subtle and implicit difference through behaviour, dialogue and action rather than explicitly through skin colour, physical appearance or gender. Through continuous evaluation and refinement, ORIENT should provide innovative, yet believable cultures that permit teenagers to explore otherness and integration.

[1] Hall, L., Woods, S., Aylett, R., and Paiva, A., “Using Theory of Mind methods to investigate empathic engagement with synthetic characters,” International

Journal of Humanoid Robotics, vol. 3, pp. 351-370, 2006.  

[2] Pohjola, M., “Autonomous Identities: Immersion as a Tool for Exploring,

Empowering and Emancipating Identities,” in Beyond Role and Play - Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, M. Montola and J. Stenros, Eds.  

Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2004, pp. 81-96.

[3] Zins, J. E., Bloodworth, M. R., Weissberg, R. P., and Walberg, H. J., “The Scientific Base Linking Social and Emotional Learning to School Success,” in

Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning: What Does the Research Say?, J. Zins, R. Weissberg, M. Wang, and H. J. Walberg, Eds. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004.