Nonprofit group Experience Camps, have created a successful virtual experience through the Roblox platform to help educate young people on grief, which has has been played over 100,000 times.
The organisation - which specialises in running camps within the real world to help grieving children cope with and overcome the emotional impact of the death of a parent, sibling or close friend - worked with metaverse developers Dubit to create Grief Quest, a virtual world to bring their mission into gaming. Roblox, available on consoles, PC and smartphones, allows players to build their own games and worlds within the virtual world.
Senior marketing manager at Experience Camps, Jesse Moss said. “As a society, we’re really not good at talking about grief. Our hope is that this space gives kids and teens impactful ways to show up for grieving people in their life. By housing the experience on Roblox, we’re able to not only reach kids where they are, but also use play for social emotional learning. We know that players will leave with an increased ability to be more grief-smart.”
Learning in a virtual space
Although there’s been a lot of discussion about learning in a virtual space, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic and how that impacted learning, there hasn’t been as much mainstream discussion of the platforms being used. Roblox is a perfect example of a virtual space that is accessible to children and adults via virtually any platform.
Chief of Staff at Dubit, Stephanie Witley also spoke about the power of bring an experience like this into Roblox. “We’re immensely proud to have contributed to this safe and nurturing environment within which children can express and learn about grief. Virtual spaces empower us to explore through play - sometimes with more freedom than we can in the ‘real’ world. The work Experience Camps does is invaluable and we’re honored to play a small part in it.”
A recent example of this kind of accessible gaming education was the game Full ADHD which was the recipient of a Reuters Pharma Award for its role in educating players on coping with an understanding ADHD. Grief Quest offers a similar educational aspect for grief counselling. Experiences such as this leverage the accessibility of mobile devices to bring their services and change for good to as many users as need it.
