EU-funded project RAYUELA helps combating cybercrime through video game

Children and young people are spending more and more time online, which raises questions whether they are in control of their internet usage. To address this issue, the EU-funded project RAYUELA aimed to empower and educate children and teenagers about the benefits, risks, and threats of the internet, through interactive play.

RAYUELA has created a video game with 6 cyber-adventures that address important issues such as online grooming, cyberbullying, fake news, and phishing. The game is available in 13 languages and has been tested by around 2,000 minors, receiving positive feedback. The videogame was designed not only to protect victims, but also to prevent the young people from becoming criminals in the cyber world.

This year, RAYUELA was used in Portuguese schools through a cooperation with the Portuguese Criminal Police (Polícia Judiciária) as an interactive prevention tool to engage with young people.

The project conducted interviews with key actors: experts in criminal domains, the children's victims, and offenders. After that it created focus groups that allowed the design of the stories to be included in the videogame. Once the dynamics in the stories had been determined, the cyber-adventures were designed to reflect the most common problems young people face when using the internet.

The videogame was designed to be applied in a classroom, so teachers can register in the online platform, record the sessions where they applied the game and retrieve feedback to Polícia Judiciária about the implementation of the prevention tool.

Since the videogame is in the process of being applied at national level during the academic year of 2024-2025, the project has introduced a training and informative sessions with the educators.

The videogame was designed to allow players to make their own choices throughout the cyber-adventures. All answers provided by the players are accepted and allow them to progress on the videogame, but decisions made will directly influence how the story line evolves. RAYUELA intends that the videogame is applied at the classroom under the supervision of an adult. In that way there will always be the chance for discussion between teachers and students. These discussions can lead to the children and youth reporting incidents to the adult supervisor, which can later lead to an appropriate intervention. The project aims to share its experience with other countries and inspire them to make similar videogame in local context.

RAYUELA is an EU funded project under Horizon 2020 with budget of €4,974,290. Projects consortium consisted of 17 entities from various EU countries. The team included law enforcement officers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, jurists, ethicists, philosophers, computer scientists, and engineers. The project ran from October 2020 to September 2023 and was coordinated by Comillas Pontifical University in Spain.

Find out more:

RAYUELA website