"If I were in Space": Understanding and Adapting to Social Isolation through Designing Collaborative Narratives

2025-07-20

AI Summary

This study addresses mental health challenges—including anxiety and loneliness—arising from social isolation. We propose a design intervention grounded in collaborative narrative as an exploratory probe, implemented via a social virtual reality (VR) platform. Eighteen individuals experiencing real-world isolation co-designed a metaphorical fictional space journey, engaging in role-playing, collaborative story generation, and bespoke virtual environment customization to surface personal adaptation strategies. Diverging from conventional solution-oriented interventions, our approach treats playful narrative as an interpretive probe to uncover emergent, self-organized psychological adaptation mechanisms under isolation. Qualitative analysis reveals that narrative participation itself functions as a regulatory process, activating creative coping strategies. Our contributions are twofold: (1) establishing collaborative narrative as a novel methodological pathway for studying social isolation, and (2) empirically demonstrating its positive facilitative effect on psychological adaptation.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Psychology-informed user models and recommender systems

Abstract

Social isolation can lead to pervasive health issues like anxiety and loneliness. Previous work focused on physical interventions like exercise and teleconferencing, but overlooked the narrative potential of adaptive strategies. To address this, we designed a collaborative online storytelling experience in social VR, enabling participants in isolation to design an imaginary space journey as a metaphor for quarantine, in order to learn about their isolation adaptation strategies in the process. Eighteen individuals participated during real quarantine undertaken a virtual role-play experience, designing their own spaceship rooms and engaging in collaborative activities that revealed creative adaptative strategies. Qualitative analyses of participant designs, transcripts, and interactions revealed how they coped with isolation, and how the engagement unexpectedly influenced their adaptation process. This study shows how designing playful narrative experiences, rather than solution-driven approaches, can serve as probes to surface how people navigate social isolation.

Problem

• Explores social isolation's impact on mental health
• Develops VR narrative to study isolation adaptation
• Uses collaborative storytelling to reveal coping strategies

Innovation

• Collaborative online storytelling in social VR
• Imaginary space journey as quarantine metaphor
• Playful narrative experiences reveal coping strategies