Currently submitted to: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: May 9, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: May 11, 2026 - Jul 6, 2026
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Beyond Reactive Discipline: A Three-Phase Mechanism Model and Design Principles for IIVE-Based School Bullying Intervention
ABSTRACT
School bullying affects roughly one in three students worldwide and produces well-documented academic and psychiatric harm in victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Conventional school responses (zero-tolerance policy, teacher-mediated reporting, individual counseling) are reactive by design and ill-equipped for cyberbullying or for under-resourced settings. Intelligent interactive virtual environments (IIVEs), built as 3D educational games, take a different approach: students enter repeatable bullying scenarios in which rule-driven feedback trains the cognitive and behavioral responses that classroom instruction cannot. This viewpoint develops a theoretical account of how IIVEs work and derives design principles from it. Drawing on Cognitive-Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS), social and emotional learning (SEL), situated learning theory, and self-regulated learning (SRL), we propose a Three-Phase Mechanism Model: empathy and awareness cultivation, cognitive-behavioral skill rehearsal, and generalization with sustained self-regulation. Five design principles follow from the mechanism: scenario authenticity and ecological validity, multi-role perspective-taking, adaptive cognitive-behavioral feedback, SEL integration, and safety-by-design. We illustrate each principle through published IIVE-based anti-bullying games and consider what equitable deployment requires in rural and under-resourced settings, where the gap between conventional intervention and student need is widest. The result is mechanism-grounded design guidance for educators, school mental health practitioners, and developers of digital adolescent interventions.
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