A Lag in the Gaming Industry
In the second year of the COVID-19 global pandemic, numerous studies on children’s screen time revealed an unprecedented increase in time spent in various online environments. Similar to how a rise in mental health, human rights, and security issues stems from increased social media usage, a link between online gaming and increased, predatory and cyberbullying behavior towards children has also notably skyrocketed. GameSafe is a startup company born from the recognition that no measure existed to protect children in PC gaming chat rooms from dangerous and compromising situations when parents cannot monitor them in person. As the first of its kind on the market, GameSafe envisioned an innovative SaaS product to monitor PC gaming for threatening language and help parents, through a mobile app, keep their children safe while they are gaming.
Crafting in the Armory
Gamesafe is a company focused on using technology to help parents protect their children from online bullies in PC Game chat rooms. Gamesafe partnered with Allata to build their mobile app that would integrate multiple technologies to monitor chat sessions. Allata’s solution architects began by crafting a design closely with the founder to build out the proof of concept that would involve machine learning AI technology and cloud-based environment architecture. Allata’s team utilized Lucid to lay out an AWS design framework for the multiple features of the mobile app and desired interconnecting functions and data flow.
Allata’s data engineers and machine learning experts worked with GameSafe founder David Everitt to create a cloud-first architecture. The team leveraged AWS Cloud Infrastructure and technologies (e.g., AWS Kinesis, S3, EC2, and Lambda) to overcome text and character recognition challenges, capture and extract text from online gaming chat conversations, collect a sample of keywords and phrases that could lead to dangerous behavior, and store and organize the tremendous amount of data required for the PC gaming application. Allata’s developers employed AWS SageMaker and partnered with GameSafe developers to complete the machine learning coding to learn predatory, bullying, and threatening language in gaming chat rooms and connect within seconds to the mobile application to trigger warning notifications to parents. The final architected development piece of the mobile app allows parents to disable devices, gaming applications or take further action, such as working with law enforcement.
Leveling Up Protection
In just over six months, Allata has helped GameSafe release a working Beta version of the app currently testing on android mobile devices and four U.S. multiplayer PC games. Allata’s team provided insights for future versions, including methodologies and cost savings. GameSafe has launched public fundraising to continue design and development improvements. They will soon be launching the application on Apple platforms and have plans to increase coverage on other top U.S. multiplayer games.
“The mission and goals of our organization truly became the mission and goals of Allata’s leaders and team of experts.”
- David Everitt, Founder, GameSafe
