Challenges in Designing Games with a Purpose for Abusive Language Annotation (2021)

Abstract: In this paper we discuss several challenges related to the development of a 3D game, whose goal is to raise awareness on cyberbullying while collecting linguistic annotation on offensive language. The game is meant to be used by teenagers, thus raising a number of issues that need to be tackled during development. For example, the game aesthetics should be appealing for players belonging to this age group, but at the same time all possible solutions should be implemented to meet privacy requirements. Also, the task of linguistic annotation should be possibly hidden, adopting so-called orthogonal game mechanics, without affecting the quality of collected data. While some of these challenges are being tackled in the game development, some others are discussed in this paper but still lack an ultimate solution.

## introduction cyberbullying has been recognised as a ubiquitous public health issue, with severe negative consequences for teenagers. studies show that victims are more likely to suffer from psychosocial difficulties, affective disorders and lower school performance @xcite , with consequences that are just as serious as for traditional bullying. indeed, both bullying and cyberbullying are universal problems which affect all countries to a greater or lesser extent, regardless of the culture and country of origin of victims and aggressors @xcite . cyberbullying attacks are frequent in private chats and channels, while only a small fraction of them is visible in public accounts. this makes the analysis of cyberbullying phenomena difficult, since few data of this kind are accessible, making it hard to study the behaviour of adolescents online, especially if they are underage. the few existing works dealing with nlp and cyberbullying resort to simulations @xcite , create datasets starting from school bulletin boards @xcite or extract data from ask.fm @xcite , where however users are anonymous, making it difficult to focus only on adolescents. novel ways to understand the behaviour of teenagers with respect to verbal abuse online are therefore needed. also, it is important to understand their perspective on different types of hate messages, so to develop systems that recognise cyberbullying by applying adolescents' point of view. indeed, adolescents being part of virtual communities may share communication habits and slang that are different from those of adults, making it difficult for people outside these communities to judge the messages' offensiveness. in order to deal with this lack of resources, we are developing a game called high school superhero @xcite , whose goal is two-fold: on the one hand, it is meant to be used by young people to raise awareness on cyberbullying and on the use of offensive language, by playing the role of bystander in offensive interactions among peers. on the other hand, it is designed to collect annotations on hate speech texts, in particular whether players consider a message offensive or not, and which text span should be replaced or removed to make it not offensive. accomodating these two tasks poses a series of challenges that we discuss in the remainder of this paper. ## related work to date, there have been several attempts to gamify a wide range of linguistic annotation tasks. these include, among others, phrase detectives for anaphora resolution @xcite , the knowledge towers @xcite and puzzle racer @xcite for concept-image linking, infection @xcite , ontogalaxy @xcite and jeuxdemots @xcite for semantic linking, argotario @xcite for fallacious argumentation identification, zombilingo @xcite for dependecy syntax annotation, sentimentator @xcite for sentiment annotation, wordclicker @xcite for part-ofspeech tagging, wordrobe @xcite and ka-boom! (jurgens and navigli, 2014) for sense annotation. researchers stress the fact that games with a purpose (gwaps) should be designed in such a way that they integrate the task without sacrificing their 'gamefulness', otherwise the tasks may be perceived as work @xcite . concerning the use of gamification to raise awareness against cyberbullying, past works showed that increasing empathy is crucial to control cyberbullying @xcite and games can help in this sense as shown in @xcite . they tested conectado, a game where users take the perspective of bullied victims, with school teachers and students aged from 12 to 17. the authors showed that this change of perspective has a positive impact on awareness and empathy, since players can learn more about bullying and what consequences it can have. desmet et al. (2018), on the other hand, stress the importance of promoting positive bystander behavior. in particular, they found that after playing their serious game, participants reported an increase in self-efficacy to end cyberbullying and intention to act as a positive bystander. ## challenge 1: appealing aesthetics the first challenge we identified during the development of high school superhero is the game aesthetics: the game should not have a poor graphics, but rather be comparable with similar games that teenagers may know. it should also foster identification and involvement. ## challenge 2: add orthogonal mechanics according to @xcite , orthogonal game mechanics are those mechanics that "do not serve the purpose". this type of mechanics is functional to a design strategy that @xcite call disjoint design, where "the design and the actual task do not correspond to each other directly". for example, a game where one must aim in order to select a label or an item to be labeled is said to employ orthogonal game mechanics, because aiming requires additional skills that do not strictly pertain to the annotation task. a game with a purpose for linguistic annotation that implements this type of mechanics is ontogalaxy @xcite , where players control a spaceship and, given a concept and a type of semantic relationship, they have to shoot the enemy spaceships accordingly. the goal is to select the spaceships whose label is in relation with the given concept (by ignoring them) and to discard the spaceships whose label is not in relation with the given concept (by shooting them). an example of game with non-orthogonal game mechanics, instead, is wordclicker @xcite , where the mechanics directly overlap with those of a clicker game, which is a widespread and quite addictive type of game. while orthogonal game mechanics may not always the best option, because they require players to have additional skills beside being able to perform the annotation task, they can be useful sometimes to engage players and make the interaction more attractive and interesting, allowing for increased resemblance with mainstream games. one of the challenges with the development of our game is to introduce a certain degree of orthogonality, thus hiding the task mechanics, while at the same time preserving the overall annotation quality. task 1 of high-school superhero does not make use of orthogonal game mechanics, because abusive words are selected by clicking them, as in a non-gamified interface. task 2, on the other hand, is orthogonal since words are selected by being rubbed with an eraser or a sponge, and one must pay attention not to exceed the boundaries of the abusive words. although some quality control techniques are used, such as assessing the proportion of the word that has been erased, task 2 requires the additional ability of erasing with a certain degree of accuracy. specifically, in the present implementation of orthogonal mechanics, the rate of erased words can be affected by the depletion of resources, while the annotation accuracy can be affected by the sponge size and shape. comparing the two strategies will be useful to understand whether or-thogonal mechanics (potentially more engaging) represent a good alternative to non-orthogonal mechanics in terms of annotation rate and reliability. ## challenge 3: respect users' privacy and other ethical considerations since this game aims to collect annotations that can be potentially updated across multiple sessions, and since we want annotations to be linked to specific demographic information, a login system and demographic questionnaires are employed. indeed, the game will be used in the framework of an international collaboration with schools, and the link to play high school superhero will be shared only with the schools involved in cyberbullying awareness initiatives. we did not want complex authentication systems to clutter the game interface, so a google login system is used where only the email address is read. the address is then converted into a sha256 string and used as a user id, while the address is deleted. in this way, we can control how many players have interacted with the game and check basic demographics, without making use or storing any sensitive information. this is particularly relevant in our context, since we involve underage subjects. providing a completely free access without any kind of login would allow for a fully anonymous use of the game, but we would run the risk to have players producing low-quality data, or losing the possibility to target a specific age group. other issues related to having teenagers play our game concern their exposure to offensive language. in order to be aware of cyberbullying and be ready to respond to this phenomenon appropriately it is necessary that players interact with offensive texts. however, this may affect their well-being and have an impact on particularly vulnerable subjects. in order to have access to students, we will have to ask for the approval from the ethical committee in our university. furthermore, we introduced the possibility, when using a local installation of the game, to manually upload the list of texts that will be displayed during the game, so that educators can pre-screen the texts removing extremely hateful messages. this approach is not ideal, since manual filtering is time-consuming and may not work well on a large scale. alternative approaches will be explored to pre-select texts using nlp or remove messages based on lists of taboo words. ## conclusions and future work in this paper we have discussed a number of challenges we are addressing in the development of high school superhero, an online game for teenagers whose goal is two-fold: on the one hand, it can be used to raise awareness on cyberbullying and the use of offensive language among peers. on the other hand, it can serve for collecting instances of offensive and non-offensive language. in the future, we plan to evaluate the game with students in classes along different dimensions, focusing especially on motivation by employing questionnaires based on self-determination theory. we are particularly interested in assessing differences in motivation because it is a key aspect for gwap dissemination and data collection and can vary a lot across different tasks and different applications.