Making "Safe": Community-Centered Practices In A Virtual World Dedicated To Children With Autism

The use of online games and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly in children and young adults. Parents have concerns about risks their children might encounter in these online spaces. Parents dynamically manage the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces online through both explicit and implicit means. In this work, we use empirical data gathered from a digital ethnography of a Minecraft server, Autcraft, to explore how parents of children with autism continually create a "safe" virtual world through both implicit and explicit means. In particular, we demonstrate how their actions in these spaces define and produce "safety," shedding light on our theoretical understanding of child safety in online spaces.