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Situational crime prevention and child online safety: a comparative analysis of metaverse-ready games
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DOI：10.1093/cybsec/tyag016.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Online gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft have become central to children’s digital lives. Concerns over child safety have intensified as these environments are increasingly exploited by offenders to facilitate grooming, exploitation, and other forms of child abuse. Preventing and responding to such harms is complicated by platform affordances such as anonymity, cross-border communication, and limited oversight. In response, gaming companies have introduced internal safety policies and tools aimed at reducing risk. Yet, systematic research examining how these measures operate and align with established prevention frameworks remains limited. This study applies a situational crime prevention (SCP) lens to analyse and compare the safety policies and mechanisms across Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. Through a document analysis of platform guidelines and policies, we identify and categorize key safety features, examining how they map onto SCP techniques such as increasing effort, raising risk, reducing rewards, and removing excuses. The findings reveal both convergence and divergence in how platforms operationalize child protection online, where console-level controls and features supplement in-game measures. However, the analysis also indicates significant gaps where safeguards are unevenly applied or rely heavily on user or parental engagement rather than proactive, system-level design. This study demonstrates the utility of SCP as an analytical tool for auditing online safety interventions. We conclude that while platforms implicitly use SCP principles, a more intentional and proactive integration of this crime science framework is recommended for developing consistent and evidence-based safety architectures as gaming evolves towards immersive and metaverse-ready spaces.
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3.2
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52
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0
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