Enhancing Child Safety in MMOGs

This paper presents a method for improving child safety in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). The focus is to monitor and detect relationships forming with a child in online games, and to alert if the relationship indicates that an offline meeting with the child has been arranged or has the potential to occur. The research problem involves determining contextual meaning of messages in MMOGs which is addressed by use of a ranking system. The paper extends previous work (Penna L, Clark A, Mohay G (2010) A framework for improved adolescent and child safety in MMOs. In: Memon N, Alhajj R (eds) 2010 international conference on advances in social network analysis and mining (ASONAM 2010), IEEE Computer Society, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, pp 33–40; Penna L, Clark A, Mohay G (2005) Challenges of automating the detection of paedophile activity on the internet. In: Proceedings of Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensic Engineering (SADFE’2005), Taiwan, pp 206–222) by providing a systematic and comprehensive evaluation using World of Warcraft as a case study MMOG and a prototype of the design.