Games to help kids deal with bullies.

Jimmy breaks your pencil and threatens to beat you up. Kathy calls you names in the Internet chat rooms you visit. And Vanessa pretends to like you but laughs at you in front of her friends. These are the kinds of conflicts that many schoolchildren confront every day but have little idea how

Help for young victims of bullying may soon be at hand. A team of psychologists and computer scientists has created a virtual-reality school where children can simulate a bullying situation and learn ways to resolve the problem painlessly. Called Vitec, the program is geared toward helping students between ages 8 and 12.

About one-third of children experience bullying, according to the researchers, led by psychologist Dieter Wolke of the Jacobs Foundation in Zurich. Bullying is more than simply a conflict between two children, consisting of repeated victimization through physical or verbal aggression, often carried out in front of an audience of peers. Some forms of bullying are not easy to detect, such as systematic exclusion ("you can't play with us") or rumor spreading ("she's a slut"), but are as painful to the victim as physical abuse.

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Using the Vitec program, the child controls synthetic 3D characters engaged in a virtual drama. The action is not scripted, so the child using the program can alter the narrative of the story by specifying an action for the characters to take--such as standing up to the bully or complaining to a teacher.

The simulations give the child a better idea of why bullies, victims, and bystanders act the way they do, because the different actions that the player takes have different results. The bully wins in some situations, which helps children learn ways to alter the outcome through their own actions.

"If children can play out different alternatives of how to deal with bullying safely in a virtual school, this is likely to benefit them in real life," says Wolke. "We will never be able to totally root out bullying, but we hope we can make the lives of many pupils much better."

Source: Alspac (Aura Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) PR and Communications, 24 Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TQ, United Kingdom. Web site www.alspac.bristol.ac.uk