Co-Design of a Virtual Reality Multiplayer Adventure Game for Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Mixed Methods Study.
A teen-built VR adventure game delivered at home lifted social skills and stayed fun.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Teens with autism helped build their own VR game. They picked quests, colors, and chat features.
The team then ran a small remote trial. Kids played the multiplayer adventure at home while staff tracked social skills.
What they found
Players liked the game and kept coming back. Parents saw better greetings, sharing, and turn-taking after only a few sessions.
Remote delivery worked. No one dropped out because of tech trouble.
How this fits with other research
Lde Leeuw et al. (2024) also let families co-design a social tool, but used a flat Social Story app. VR adds real-time peer practice.
Minne et al. (2012) used live sociodramatic play for little kids. The VR game gives the same role-play vibe to older teens without leaving home.
Yuill et al. (2007) rebuilt a playground to spark peer talk. The new study swaps wood chips for headsets and still boosts interaction.
Why it matters
You can ship social-skills practice through a headset. Co-design keeps kids engaged and cuts your prep time. Try a short VR group quest next session. Let the learners pick the theme. Watch if they greet more after three plays.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
<h4>Background</h4>Virtual reality (VR) adventure games can offer ideal technological solutions for training social skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), leveraging their support for multisensory and multiplayer interactions over distance, which may lower barriers to training access and increase user motivation. However, the design of VR-based game environments for social skills training is still understudied and deserves the deployment of an inclusive design approach to ensure its acceptability by target users.<h4>Objective</h4>We aimed to present the inclusive design process that we had followed to develop the Zentastic VR adventure game to foster social skills training in adolescents with ASD and to investigate its feasibility as a training environment for adolescents.<h4>Methods</h4>The VR game supports multiplayer training sessions involving small groups of adolescents and their therapists, who act as facilitators. Adolescents with ASD and their therapists were involved in the design and in an explorative acceptability study of an initial prototype of the gaming environment, as well as in a later feasibility multisession evaluation of the VR game final release.<h4>Results</h4>The feasibility study demonstrated good acceptability of the VR game by adolescents and an enhancement of their social skills from baseline to posttraining.<h4>Conclusions</h4>The findings provide preliminary evidence of the benefits that VR-based games can bring to the training of adolescents with ASD and, potentially, other neurodevelopmental disorders.
, 2023 · doi:10.2196/51719